Welcome to Emergence Magazine's podcast. I'm Emanuel Vaughn Lee, executive editor of Emergence

magazine, located on the unseated ancestral lands of the Coast Mewalk people of present-day

Marin County. Each week, we feature a new interview, narrated essay, or story, exploring the threads connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality.

Heather Swan is a poet, writer, and beekeeper.

She is the author of Where Honeybees Thrive, Stories from the Field.

In this story, Heather's fascination with pollinators brings her to the Colombian countryside.

As this nation recovers from half a century of civil war, she encounters one family working to heal the wounded landscape

by planting thousands of naked orchids across a restored mountainside.

To him who keeps an orchus' heart, the swamps are pink with June, Emily Dickinson.

Hidden in the verdant mountain forests of Columbia, among trees threaded with the flights of

tanagers, iridescent hummingbirds, and a vast array of butterflies and bees

are some of the most seductive, aromatic flowers in the world.

Cadillia orchids

Cadillias are known for their alluring scents and voluptuous, colorful blossoms

and are sought by orchid lovers around the world. At an international exhibition in 1936,

Colombians presented a Catlea Triane,

named after the Colombian naturalist, Jose Geronimo, Triana,

as a symbol of their country, and it has remained the national flower ever since.

The country is home to over 4,000 types of orchids, which have flourished there for centuries,

but today, in part because of their popularity and in part because of environmental destruction,

at least 50% of these native orchids are endangered.

I confess I had some fears when I landed in the mountain city of Bogota on a misty October night. It was the fall of 2019, and I had traveled to the Sandian city to meet a family of self-proclaimed orchid addicts.

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