The Nature Pages

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	The Cloud Garden A True Story of Adventure, Survival, and Extreme Horticulture by Tom Hart Dyke and Paul Winder  The Lyons Press, 2004 Order a copy
	"We crossed the river and were ordered to kneel on the floor opposite each other. Paul's face was sheet white. Then I saw a series of rectangular beds of overgrown plants and vegetation. They looked like graves. In all, there were about a dozen. That confirmed it: we were going to be shot."
	And so begins British botanist Tom Hart Dyke's account of a Central American orchid-collecting expedition gone terribly awry. For nine months Dyke and an intrepid explorer, Paul Winder, were held hostage by revolutionaries and survived through a combination of gutsy endurance, ingenuity, and rare good fortune.		"It was ironic that before being captured I'd seen three orchids in flower, a pathetic amount, but now I was a prisoner I was finding them everywhere. I suppose that's the trick: if you want to find the best stuff, get taken hostage. "
	"I always felt jealous of the early pioneers and explorers: they had an uncharted world to investigate," explains Winder, a young investment banker whose accounts of the adventure alternate with Dyke's. "I wanted to get off the beaten track, too. Nowadays it is far more difficult."
	Dyke and Winder met for the first time in northern Mexico shortly before setting off through the infamous Darien Gap cloud forest along the Panama-Colombia border, a lawless place that even armies avoid, and it's little wonder that they were captured. How they survived and what they discovered about themselves and the cloud forest during the ordeal makes the tale a persistent page-turner.