Orchids of South Africa: A Field Guide, by Steve Johnson, Benny Bytebier and Herbert Stärker

Orchids of South Africa: A Field Guide, by Steve Johnson, Benny Bytebier and Herbert Stärker. Penguin Random House South Africa. Cape Town, South Africa 2015. ISBN 9781775841395 / ISBN 978-1-77584-139-5

Informative, colourful and easy to use, Orchids of South Africa (with Lesotho and Swaziland), written and photographed by Steve Johnson, Benny Bytebier and Herbert Stärker, is the product of rare and invaluable dedication, and is an essential guide for orchid enthusiasts everywhere.

Steve Johnson  

It has been more than 30 years since the last publication of a field guide covering the entire South African orchid flora. Wild Orchids of Southern Africa, published in 1982, soon went out of print and is now a collector's item. Orchids of Southern Africa, a reference work published in 1999, remains indispensable to those who have a copy, but only a few hundred copies remain as the publisher lost most of the stock in an accident soon after the book was launched. Field Guide to the Orchids of Northern South Africa and Swaziland, published in 2008, filled some of this gap for the north of the country, whereas The Cape Orchids: A Regional Monograph of the Orchids of the Cape Floristic Region, published in 2012, did the same for the Cape region (though with a combined weight of 7kg, the two volumes of the latter hardly constitute a suitable field guide!). One of the major challenges for producing a field guide to South African orchids is that several species are highly elusive, some appearing only every 20-30 years after a fire, and thus difficult to capture in photographic images. This was reflected in the fact that many of the species included in the original Wild Orchids of Southern Africa were not represented by photographs or, if they were, only by very poor ones that did not allow for definitive identification. The situation changed in 2006 when Austrian photographer Herbert Stärker began to make regular visits to South Africa as part of a focused mission to produce high-quality photographic images of orchids in the region. We became acquainted with Herbert through his extraordinary photographic contributions (along with those of Bill Liltved) to The Cape Orchids volumes. Thus when Herbert suggested the use of his images for a comprehensive field guide to South African orchids, we readily agreed that the time was right for such a project. Herbert and his wife Helga had also acquired a tremendous amount of new knowledge regarding the distribution, habitat and flowering times of South African orchids during the many years they had spent photographing species in the field. The reference work Orchids of Southern Africa (1999) by Peter Linder and Hubert Kurzweil covered the same territory, as well as Botswana, and listed 466 species. It is a testimony to the constant rate of discovery of new species that the present field guide, which covers only South Africa, Lesotho and Swaziland, lists 473 species. New orchid species continue to be discovered and described in South Africa at an average of about one species per year. We have no doubt that the tally of orchid species recorded for South Africa alone will eventually surpass 500, although, sadly, the actual number of species in the wild will inevitably decline as a result of human-induced extinction. [...]

Steve Johnson holds the South African Research Chair in Evolutionary Biology and is a professor at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. He is a leading international expert in the field of plant pollination biology, and a co-author of The Cape Orchids.
        
Benny Bytebier is the curator of the Bews Herbarium and a lecturer at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. His research focuses on the systematics, biogeography and evolutionary history of African orchids.

Herbert Stärker is a leading photographer of South African orchids. He has been photographing orchids for over 30 years, and was an important contributor to The Cape Orchids.

This is an excerpt from Orchids of South Africa: A Field Guide, by Steve Johnson, Benny Bytebier and Herbert Stärker.

Title: Orchids of South Africa
Subtitle: A Field Guide
Authors: Steve Johnson, Benny Bytebier, Herbert Stärker
Genre: Mammal Guide
Publisher: Penguin Random House South Africa
Cape Town, South Africa 2015
ISBN 9781775841395 / ISBN 978-1-77584-139-5
Softcover, 17 x 24 cm, 528 pages, 2500 photographs