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ดร.กุนนาร์ ไซเดนฟาเดน(Dr. Gunnar Seidenfaden)
ถือว่าเป็นพหูสูตร อีกบุคคลหนึ่ง(ท่านเป็นนักการทูตด้วย)
เสียดายที่เป็นภาษาอังกฤษ แต่อ่านเอาความก็อาศัย Verb to dao กันได้ครับ
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ขอบคุณ นสพ.Bangkok Post ครับ
A natural gentleman
An expert on the many species of orchids in Southeast Asia and a lover of Thailand, Dr Gunnar Seidenfaden, former Danish ambassador, has rightfully earned himself a special place in the hearts of the Thai people
Geoffrey Walton
Thais have enjoyed close and friendly relations with the Danes for centuries. And among the Danes who has helped forge these close ties is Dr Gunnar Seidenfaden, a world-renowned botanist and conservationist of Thai native orchids. As Denmark's first ambassador based in Thailand, he oversaw the construction of the Danish Embassy on Soi Attakarnprasit.
Dr Seidenfaden is certainly one of those exceptional foreigners who has found a special place in the heart of the Thais, to the extent that he was their guest of honour at the Fourth Asian Pacific Orchid Conference in Chiang Mai back in 1992.
"I first came to Thailand in 1934 as a young botany graduate to visit a relative living here at the time," he recalled. "As a student, I didn't have much money of course, so I couldn't have managed it without that generous hospitality. Back then, the railway line to Chiang Mai was still fairly new, and there wasn't :-) a proper road system.
"There was an unsurfaced road as far as Chiang Rai, and after that a network of cart-tracks, so naturally there was no bus service around the countryside, either. But you could always get a lift on the trucks of the Chinese rice merchants and general traders, and that's how I travelled around.
"The south was even more fun because in those days there was a coastal shipping line, a subsidiary of the East Asiatic Company, so all the officers were Danish. I had some marvellous trips to Chanthaburi and down to Malaysia (Malaya as it was then) with plenty of opportunity for brief forays into the coastal forest and on some of the islands.
"I was able to make a splendid collection of orchids from all over the country during my stay. Sadly, because the ship's captain simply couldn't spare me the huge amount of fresh water needed, quite a lot of them died on the voyage home to Denmark. It was far more difficult to collect and transport orchids before aeroplanes came into general service. Anyway, a good many of them survived, and I entrusted them to the Copenhagen University Botanical Garden when I finally got home, and some of those plants I gathered all those years ago are still flourishing there now.
"On my return from the trip, I continued my studies, though I switched from botany to philosophy, politics and economics, and by the time I'd got my doctorate, the Second World War had begun, so I entered the Danish Foreign Service. That's how I came to return to Bangkok as the Danish Ambassador in 1954. Our nation is small so I represented Denmark in a number of regional countries, but I was based in Bangkok.
"During the five years we were here, I was off into the forests whenever I had a chance, and in fact throughout my career in the diplomatic service, I always spent my vacations there."
Dr Seidenfaden got to know a young Royal Thai Forestry Department official, Tem Smitinand, who shared his passion for orchids, and together they began the enormous task of discovering, identifying, and classifying the Kingdom's 1,100 or so orchid species. Botanical surveys of this nature were well under way in other Asian countries during the 19th and early 20th century, carried out by colonial officials such as Sir Stamford Raffles, to name but one of many.
But since Thailand had astutely retained its independence throughout this period under the rule of two great modernising monarchs (Rama IV and V, King Mongkut and his heir King Chulalongkorn), very little botanical research of this scope had been undertaken in Thailand.
From 1959 to 1965, Dr Seidenfaden and Dr Tem collaborated in producing a work in six volumes, The Orchids of Thailand, which was published in Bangkok.
"Thailand has such a large variety of species because you have the tropical types on the peninsula, and both Himalayan and South China types in the North.Thailand probably has the greatest variety of species in the region," Dr Seidenfaden explains, "though, of course, we can't be sure the work has been completed in, say, Burma and Laos, for obvious reasons."
Having resigned as Denmark's Deputy Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs before retirement age, he has since been able to devote all his time and energy to his passion for orchids.
"When we did those earlier books, we knew a lot less than we do now. We didn't have the modern facilities, either, and, inevitably, as more have been discovered internationally, there have been many modifications."
So, over the last three decades, he has supplanted the earlier work with a new series that runs to 14 volumes, called Thai Orchid Genera and published in Copenhagen.
Dr Seidenfaden, who is now in his mid-nineties, is still involved in the 14th volume of the series, in which he is summarising, revising, and updating all the work done so far, and even expanding on it with a section on plant geography and orchid distribution.
Two more of his books, The Orchids of Indo-China, and The Orchids of Peninsular Malaysia and Singapore, were published in 1993. Talking of the latter, the botanist spoke highly of his collaborator, J.J. Wood, of the Royal Botanical Garden at Kew in London: "A very capable young scientist."
"In the colonial period, there was so much national chauvinism that research was limited by political boundaries, a ridiculous thing for botanists as plants know nothing of such frontiers," he said. "But nowadays there's a great deal of fruitful international cooperation."
At his home outside Copenhagen, he has the flowers of over 10,000 lesser known wild orchid species preserved in alcohol, each bloom in its own small bottle. As the foremost expert on orchid taxonomy for Southeast Asia, he receives such specimens from many researchers throughout the region, and from botanical gardens around the world.
"When somebody sends me one, I just pop downstairs into the cellar, and I can usually identify it in minutes, or be sure it's something new.
Something of the younger Gunnar Seidenfaden showedwhen he spoke of his more recent experiences.
"Before I came here on vacation in the late '70s, I was able to arrange funding for a group of young Thai marine biologists to do some research. So the Department of Fisheries put a boat at our disposal and we sailed around the islands in the Andaman Sea. Each morning, the crew would row us botanists ashore to a new island, many of them uninhabited, and then the youngsters would cruise away to do their research, returning to pick us up from the beach with our haul in the evening.
"When I was younger myself, I climbed all over the mountains everywhere in Thailand. The orchid types at higher elevations are very different from those in the lowlands because of the cooler, more moist climate. Back then, when I first got to know my future collaborator Tem Smitinand, he was actually the official "climbing boy" of our group, very skilful at finding a way up the most difficult and highest trees to cull our specimens.
"In those days, we had to hire porters to carry the flowers back to the base camp and out of the forests, and it used to take a long time before the newly collected plants reached the botanical gardens. It was hard work all round. But, you know, when I came here about 10 years ago on one of my visits [that is, when he was in his mid-seventies], the Forestry Department put a helicopter at our disposal.
"There was luxury for you! We would fly off early every morning, choose a mountain peak that looked interesting, and get the pilot to land us on it. At 4 pm, he'd come back to get us and our big plastic bags full of specimens. The plants would be air-freighted to Copenhagen within 24 hours! It was wonderful."
One of the topics of the Orchid Conference in '92 was, inevitably, conservation.
"I've been talking to the botanists and government officials and I've been urging them to start a crash programme in cultivating native species, besides the hybrids that are already so popular. The only way to take the pressure off the orchid populations in the forests, now of interest to collectors, is to make them available so cheaply that it's no longer worth hiring villagers to collect them in the wild."
The Thais fondly describe the good doctor's manner as ben gan eng; he is thoroughly natural with everyone he meets, and puts them at their ease at once.
Despite a lifetime of public service to his own country, and private devotion to the cause of botanical science in Southeast Asia, especially in the Kingdom of Thailand, and even given the honours and accolades he has received in recognition of his many achievements as scientist, author, photographer, and botanical illustrator, he remains completely unaffected.
In brief, he is one of Nature's own true gentleman.
Copyright The Post Publishing Public Co., Ltd. 2001
http://www.ecologyasia.com/news-archives/2001/feb-01/bangkokpost_120201_Outlook06.htm
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