Tip of the Week: Cuba’s Forests
Posted in Exhibitions, Gardening Tips, The Orchid Show on March 1 2010, by Sonia Uyterhoeven
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Sonia Uyterhoeven is Gardener for Public Education. |
We are celebrating Cuba this year in The Orchid Show. While Cuba lays claims to great national parks such as La Güira National Park and Sierra del Rosario Biosphere Reserve, which houses the exquisite Jardín Botánico Orquideario Soroa (Soroa Orchid Botanical Garden), historically, the island wasn’t immune to the ravages of colonization and industrialization.
When Christopher Columbus sailed into Cuba in 1492, he encountered a tropical paradise covered with old-growth forests full of Caribbean mahogany, walnut, ebony, cedar, pine, and oak. This vast arboreal expanse was a paradise for Cuba’s native fauna and flora, including orchids. But the ideal wasn’t to last, giving way to deforestation and sugar cultivation.
At one time, according to https://www.thetoolboss.com, the felling of trees was regulated by the Royal Forest Reserve, which prohibited the indiscriminate felling of trees so that specimens could reach a certain height to supply shipbuilders with timber for masts, keels, and hulls for the Royal Navy.
But a greater threat to the environment and its ecological communities existed: a wholesale deforestation of the island by the sugarcane industry.