Welcome to the
Cape Orchid Society Archives
Sysser Waspe
Sysser joined the Cape Orchid Society soon after moving to Cape Town in the early 1990's. With characteristic enthusiasm, she dived into the Orchid World and soon started becoming involved. She joined the Judging School as a means of increasing her knowledge at an accelerated rate, and amongst other work, wrote an interesting project named Pollination in Orchids - a textbook in advertising.
As someone who had become involved in computers quite early in the course of the information revolution, further orchid projects were computer based. As there was no complete list of SAOC awards available, just the pieces printed in the SA Orchid Journal, she saw the possibility of setting a list up on her computer, and then publishing it in printed form. This she did, and in March 1996, the list came out under the auspices of the Cape Judging Region, at a cost of R15.00 - this full amount as a donation to the CJR.
Her involvement on the WWW, particularly within the Orchid Safari group, lead to her involvement as a moderator for a session involving Orchid pollination, and the results of this can be viewed on the site: http://www.geocities.com/~marylois/arch105.html.
As a gift of her time and considerable talent, she started the Website archived here at the end of April 2000, and proceded to augment and update it until April 2003, when she passed it on to the late Trevor Frost. One must assume that Trevor was seriously unwell by this point, for during the 30 months that he was Webmaster, he never altered or added a single binary digit on the site. By the end of 2004, Sysser decided to leave the COS, so that she could concentrate on her career in English-Danish Translation.
In September 2005, following Trevor's death, I took over the site, as I could not bear to see all this work just lying there unattended, and have continued updating it since. The newly created COS Website has shown little interest in the work that Sysser did.
The aim of this archive is to preserve Sysser's work. It is about 3 M in extent, obviously took much time to produce and was done at quite some personal expense. Sysser's pages are serious studies, but at the same time they are characterised by a certain opulence and richness of style, and illustrate great care taken in their generation. They are certainly an asset.
greig russell.
