In 1854 he emigrated to Mexico, where he founded a nursery and and issued a catalogue of the Mexican conifers he had for sale. In 1861 he introduced the cultivation of the Rame (Boehmeria tenacissima) as a textile plant. When he was forty-four years old he lost his left arm in an accident with a machine he had invented to extract fibers from plants. He then started his life of a plant collector working for Henry Sander of St. Albans in England.
Roezl traveled Central America and the west coast of North America; he sent home 10,000 orchids from Panama and Colombia in 1869. The rare Telepogon orchids that he collected at 11,000 feet died as soon as they were brought down to warmer levels, but he sent 3,000 Odontoglossums to Europe. He combed the Sierra Madre for orchids, 3,500 of which reached London in fine condition. He went across the Isthmus of Panama to Guayra and Caracas and sent eight tons of orchids and ten tons of other plants back to London.
In Mexico, in the vicinity of the volcano of Colina, the Indians learned that Roezl would pay for orchids and they brought him 100,000 plants. (If parts of Mexico are desert and devoid of vegetation, is it because Roezl was there?)
In 1871, Roezl brought back to England dried specimens of Dracula chimaera which he had collected in Columbia. When the German Professor Reichenbach introduced Dracula chimaera to Victorian horticulture, he described the flowers as a marvel that had lurked for thousands of years unseen in solitude.
Live plants proved a challenge during transportation. Its is frightening to think how many draculas and other fragile orchids succumbed. Even though there is evidence that the plants seem to have been recognised as delicate and treated with more care, the vast majority still perished during the long journey from their homeland. Of 27,000 plants dispatched by Roezl in a consignment from New Granada (in present day Columbia), just two plants survived the long and disastrous journey to England.
In 1874 Roezl returned to Europe and spent the rest of his life living off his modest fortune at Smichow near Prague. References:
The Garden Journal of the Royal Horticultural Society , Vol. 122,
Feb. 1997)
The Plant Hunters by B. J. Healey, Charles Scribners sons, 1975
The Golden Age of Plant Hunters by Kenneth Lemmon, Phoenix House,
1968
The Plant Hunters by Alice M. Coats, McGraw-Hill, 1970
Ruth Ann Moger, Orchid Society of Nova Scotia
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