Sandra’s Miscellany

Random facts about the book and the research

• Vanilla comes from two species of orchids. The plants’ pseudobulbs are cut, boiled, kept heated, and sweated until the tiny seeds inside the pseudobulb are shrunk by 400%. The process takes months.
• Most of the orchid names in the book are fictional.
• The Amazon rain forest creates its own ecosystem. If it continues to lose trees to clearcutting and burning, it will cease to generate its own weather and die off.
• It took four months to write the first draft of the novel, and one month to rewrite per the editor revision letter.
• The Yanomamo are the most studied people group in the Amazon Basin.
• In February 2005, an American nun who’d worked among the poor for almost 40 years was murdered because of her attempts to defend the native people’s land rights against illegal loggers. She’s not the first and likely won’t be the last.
• One of the medicines used to treat lymphoma and Hodgkin’s disease originated in the medicinal use of the rosy periwinkle.
• A quarter of all prescription drugs sold in the United States have plant chemicals as active ingredients.
• Curare, in non-lethal doses, was once used to treat polio, lockjaw, and epilepsy. The drug loosens stiff muscles. Lethal doses cause the victim to suffocate via lung malfunction.

Check out the bibliography on my main site.