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PENANG HILL, with its cooler climes and dense forest coverage, is a renowned tourist destination and a favourite hiking spot. It harbours rich biodiversity, key to it being minted in 2021 as the Penang Hill Biosphere Reserve (PHBR) under the UNESCO Man and Biosphere Programme.
Biodiversity denotes the richness of life in an area, and among Penang Hill’s diverse treasures are its wild orchids. Truth be told, Penang Hill is not as “orchid rich” as many other Peninsular Malaysian mountains—but what makes Penang Hill so special, “orchid-wise”, is its rich botanical heritage, which includes orchid-type specimens (a specimen on which a species name is based), and the fact that many of the orchids on the Hill have found a way to adapt to disturbed ecosystems.
Pioneering botanical studies began soon after Penang was settled by the East India Company. Many plants on the Hill were collected, catalogued and shipped to herbariums worldwide. Of these collected specimens, many were orchids, and a quick search on the digitised database of the Kew Herbarium will yield their images, with repeated mentions of Government Hill (one of Penang Hill’s peaks) as a collection locality. Pioneering botanists and collectors who conducted surveys on Penang Hill included the likes of Nathaniel Wallich, Mohamed Hanif and Charles Curtis. The lure of Penang’s wild orchids also attracted plant hunters who were out to get the most eye-catching and rare species. Frederick Sander’s orchid firm, which dispatched orchid hunters to the furthest corners of the world, also came to Penang, where they collected a Tiger Orchid (Grammatophyllum speciosum), the heaviest orchid in the world; this giant weighs one tonne!
