last
updated:
January 6, 2010
New! Calendar
of Events
Volunteers check here for times to volunteer, customers check here for
when you can shop!*
Vanda tricolor
Photo by Eric Hunt
last updated: January 6, 2010
WELCOME
TO
OrchidMania
Winter Open Greenhouse Sale January 30, 31, 2010 - At the Greenhouse in San Francisco
We are an entirely volunteer organization of orchid enthusiasts concerned about HIV/AIDS in the global community. We use orchids as a vehicle to raise awareness of and support for AIDS-related education and care giving efforts:
OrchidMania’s primary mission is to provide financial and moral support to grassroots AIDS prevention and relief organizations. Moreover, it is our goal to encourage interest and enthusiasm for orchid cultivation, conservation and appreciation, and to provide a comfortable and positive vehicle for people of all kinds to give their time and talents to AIDS relief.
In addition to raising money for HIV prevention and AIDS relief for small groups around the world, OrchidMania maintains a permanent collection of rare and endangered orchid species. If you have a rare plant that is large enough to divide, and you would like to help ensure the survival of that species, you can help assist our orchid preservation efforts and get tax credit for donating a piece of your plant to OrchidMania. Plus your name will be attached to that plant in our collection for perpetuity!
In
the pages on this website you will learn about orchids, threats to the
wild spaces where orchids live, and how you can help to protect them,
as well as how to grow them.
Most of all, we hope you'll learn about OrchidMania's efforts to synthesize our passion for these amazing plants with our earnest desire to help those afflicted by AIDS and its associated conditions, and -- whenever and whereever possible -- to help arrest the spread of this global pandemic.
You can help: OrchidMania accepts donation of plants, cash, time and labor, or materials relevant to the cultivation of orchids and greenhouse maintenance. Yes, your donations of materials and plants are tax deductible.
Come volunteer in our greenhouse, meet lots of really sweet people, and learn how to grow orchids! If you are new to orchids in general, you might want to start with our Frequently Asked Questions or choose among the topic buttons along the side of your browser screen.
This is why OrchidMania's volunteers work so hard to raise money for the HIV prevention and AIDS victim relief efforts of grassroots organizations around the world:
Usage note: This website is designed to teach you about OrchidMania, the hobby and science of cultivating orchids, and the need to conserve wild orchid habitats around the world. Accordingly, this site is graphics intensive and is designed for broadband access. If you are accessing this site on anything slower than a broadband connection, you may want to consider disabling image loading to help speed your access to pages. You can navigate throughout this site using the menu buttons at the edges of pages or in their footers. If you get stuck in someone else's frame capture of this site, the "Back" button in the footer should help you break out.
You will enjoy this site best (i.e. the photographs will look better) if your monitor is properly calibrated. If images seem too dark (most common for PC users) or too light and faded (more common for Mac users), it may be due to the variances in the native configurations of your system and monitor. Visit this site (external link) for information about CRT monitor displays and instructions to help you calibrate your monitor.
Lastly, the unpleasant but requisite legal disclaimer. Please read it -- it took me 10 minutes to write the darn thing and it would make me feel good.
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Copyright
© 1989-2008 OrchidMania, Inc. All rights
reserved.
Send questions or
comments to OrchidMania.
Photos by Joseph Dougherty and
Eric Hunt
Please
read our FAQ pages before writing
with orchid culture questions.
Legal schmeagle (a.k.a. disclaimer and hold harmless clause):
This site is provided (as lamely written as it is) as a form of entertainment and none of the contents are warranted or guaranteed in any way. While we do our best to ensure the accuracy and dependability of all information published herein, the user (that's you) expressly acknowledges that this Web site is:
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a) provided free of charge
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b) run entirely by volunteers
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c) not warranted in any manner
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d) mostly written by an insomniac medical student at 2am (i.e. during his daily half hour of "free time") and thus prone to be peppered with gross -- as in "large and easily visualized," not "disgusting" -- errors
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e) pretty cool and worth bookmarking, possibly even worth a donation as a show of support
OrchidMania, its officers, its donors, its vendors, its volunteers, its pets, its furniture, its plants, and all the gravel under the potting benches cannot be held in any way responsible for any outcome the user may experience due to reliance on information provided in this Web site. If the user becomes incurably addicted to orchids, that is entirely the fault of the Martian spacecraft that abducted you when you were 11 years old (don't you remember?) and all blame should be assigned to the Iraqi government, which is clearly responsible for all the world's ills (that's what Bush says, so it must be true, right? You're darn tootin').
The user (again, that's you) agrees to hold harmless all the aforementioned parties (except for the Martians, feel free to sue them) in every conceivable way for the user's actions as a result of reading, viewing, or in any other way accessing the information in this Web site (heck, if you want to take it in intravenously, we won't stop you). Additionally, you agree to hold us harmless if your spouse or partner prints out the pages of this Web site and then smacks you over the head with them, causing substantial cervical spine damage, as a result of your orchid spending spree at one of our fantastic donors (whom you should visit often and support by pouring your paycheck, despite the threats of your spouse or partner, into plant purchases -- orchids are worth the risk, dammit).
Additionally, the user acknowledges that we are a nonprofit organization... in other words, we're always broke and we're totally without any assets whatsoever that might make a lawsuit worth your time. Plus, its just your own damn fault that you forgot to take the plant out of the fertilizer bath on a night when the temperature dropped to 33 degrees and it rotted to a giant ball of ooze -- go buy another one, for Pete's sake, and quit your belly-achin'.
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