Flower ranger: Meet the self-taught orchid whisperer of Wayanad
VU Sabu is on a mission to conserve vulnerable orchids of the Western Ghats. He's a good example, conservationists say, of how one person can make a difference.
It’s often hard to know what to do, as the natural world shows signs of struggle around us; where to begin, or how to do the most good and least damage.
Then, sometimes, a single spark can cause an idea to bloom.
VU Sabu saw his first wild orchid 10 years ago, growing on a jackfruit tree near his home. Once he’d noticed it, he began to see others all around him, some of them holding up their long-stemmed monosymmetrical blooms (the two halves of these flowers are mirror images, giving them their prized symmetrical beauty).
Sabu began to wonder: How many varieties are there exactly? As he would learn, orchids make up the largest family of flowering plants in the world, Orchidaceae, accounting for about 30,000 species worldwide.
They are an ecological bellwether, so sensitive that their continued presence in a microhabitat is seen as an indication of its overall health.
There were many, many varieties in the Western Ghats not far from his family farm in Wayanad, he discovered. Some of these were found nowhere else on earth.
Sabu, an operations manager at a medical college, consulted with local forest officers. He spoke to his father, VC Unnunny, 62, a seasoned farmer. He became a little obsessed, he admits, laughing.
It is an obsession that has held, and has yielded a repository of 250 species, that he keeps in three polyhouses (like greenhouses but made of polyethylene, not glass) spread out across 400 sq metres. In these enclosures and nearby, on trees and in shaded corners, Sabu now has a total of 4,000 orchid plants.
He has data on each one. His notes begin the first time he sees a new plant (he goes scouting every weekend). He jots down its location and physical appearance.
Each such entry begins with the question: Where does it grow? Which may seem odd, but orchids can grow on anything: the ground, high up in tree canopy, on rocks, in streams, in dead and decaying plant matter.
Sabu, 39, notes down how many individual plants of the variety he can spot in the vicinity. Then he returns, over and over, for about a year, updating his entries until they form a record of a specific plant’s life cycle, and the conditions under which it thrives.
If there are enough of the plants in a public area, he then carefully uproots one and takes it home, to add to his informal archive of orchids. “I study them for about a year because that is the only way to know if I can recreate the conditions they need in order to survive,” he says.
At home, he continues the documentation, noting details of his process, from the substrate he grows the orchid on to conditions that may cause leaves to yellow, conditions that cause plants to flower, and how long each flowering season lasts. “Maintaining this data helped me create standard operating procedures for different species of orchid too,” Sabu says.
Root cause
“What Sabu is doing is called ex-situ conservation, which takes place outside an organism’s habitat,” says Prasanna NS, a botanist and TN Khoshoo Postdoctoral Fellow at the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE), in Bengaluru. “This is very important work because we just don’t know enough about Indian orchids, from their distribution range to their pollination and propagation cycles. There is also a general lack of data and understanding about their conservation status — in terms of which ones are endangered and to what extent.”
When it comes time to restoring ecosystems, Sabu’s kind of observation and documentation becomes critical information on how to grow them, Prasanna adds.
What we do know is that there are more than 1,250 orchid species in India, of which 388 are endemic to India. Of these 388 species, 128 are endemic to the Western Ghats. There, of course, they face the same threat that the entire Western Ghats ecosystem faces: deforestation, mining, infrastructure projects, encroaching human habitats, and the climate crisis.
We have already lost so much, in terms of our orchids, Prasanna says. “As recently as the ’70s and ’80s, orchid-hunting was like a gold rush. There were orchid hunters coming to India from around the world, to collect very rare and endangered species, to propagate and sell.”
Sabu sells some of his orchids too, but the first plant he breeds off his original sapling goes back to the forest, to more or less the same spot, to replace the one he took, he says.
“Returning them to the wild is an important step in my mission. My rule is to never deprive the forest, but to leave it exactly as I found it.”
Back home, he and his wife Jincy Paulose, 38, a physiologist, spend mornings and evenings de-weeding. Sabu makes his notes and observations; plays music to some of his plants, and talks to others.
That first wild orchid turned out to be the foxtail (Rhynchostylis retusa), and he has grown foxtails ever since. They are beautiful, relatively hardy, sell well, and the root contains anti-inflammatory properties and has been used in home remedies for centuries.
His work has attracted some attention in the region, meanwhile, winning him local horticulture awards, including one from a local government school (GVHSS Ambalavayal), where he also occasionally addresses students on themes of conservation, doing one’s bit, and orchids.
“Conserving orchids has become my life’s mission,” says the father of two. “I hope it has the kind of impact that will last a few generations.”
