Seven Flowers

by Jennifer Potter

  Interest in florists’ flowers remained high nonetheless, especially in tulips, which British growers had begun to cultivate from seed instead of relying on stock imported from Holland and France. Southern growers at first held sway, charging prices for new varieties that went beyond the pockets of working-class growers further north; by 1820 their tulips had practically beaten the Dutch tulip into second place, or so it was claimed. But from about 1840, growers in the north and the Midlands began producing seedlings of note, and by 1880, this ‘gorgeous flower’, once held in high esteem in Britain and throughout continental Europe, was ‘now little grown south of the Trent or north of the Tweed’.

  Florists’ naturally competitive instincts provided the spur to such developments. Following the lead set by the Horticultural Society of London (today the Royal Horticultural Society), provincial horticultural societies sprang up around the country, organizing competitive shows for head gardeners, florists and cottagers, and presenting the winners with silver spoons accompanied by much patronizing comment. With competition came the codification of rules by which standards could be judged, much as the sultan’s chief florist had dictated the rules for tulips at the time of Ahmed III, and much as earlier authorities such as Philip Miller had attempted informally.

  First to define the standard for tulips and other florists’ flowers, in 1832, was the vituperative George Glenny, founder of the Horticultural Journal, who claimed credit for declaring the perfect shape for a tulip flower to be a one-third portion of a hollow ball, complaining afterwards that ‘having done so, I had at first half a dozen mongrels yelping at my heels, against my decision; and as soon as the public would have it so, they turned round, and described the same thing, with unimportant deviations, as their own’. Ignoring the self-coloured ‘breeder’ tulips, Glenny’s rules dealt with the all-important matters of form, purity and markings for the three main kinds of show tulips: roses (crimson, pink or scarlet on a white ground); bybloemens (purple, lilac or black on a white ground); and bizarres (any coloured marking on a yellow ground). How the colours broke was crucial. Feathered flowers were to have a close, even feathering around the petal, forming an unbroken edge when expanded, while flowers with a central flame only were to have no colours breaking through to the petal’s edge. The ground in all flowers, whether white or yellow, was to be clear and distinct, and the least stain, even at the bottom of a petal, would render a tulip ‘comparatively valueless’. This last rule placed Glenny firmly in the camp of southern growers, who hated the smudged bottoms allowed by judges from the north.

  For all the judges’ disagreements, the old-fashioned tulip was the perfect florists’ flower. Naturally inclined towards variegated markings, florists adored the marbled effects seen to perfection in flower paintings from the Dutch Golden Age, and the wayward variegations of flaming and feathering that were still not properly understood. As seedlings take several years to flower, and as they do not come true from seed, producing a tulip with perfectly feathered markings demanded the skills and perseverance of an alchemist. It was a form of tulip fever all over again, a lottery in which everyone hoped to emerge the winner.

  The old florists’ tulips enjoyed their greatest success from the mid-1800s until about 1870 when their fortunes began to ebb, displaced in the public’s affection by the new styles of wilder gardening championed by figures such as William Robinson. Author of The English Flower Garden and the hugely influential The Wild Garden, Robinson nonetheless found space in his garden for late-flowering tulips descended from T. gesneriana, which he called a ‘very handsome plant in the wild state’, and he drew attention to ‘some really beautiful plants’ among the wild tulips, including T. clusiana, which he described as ‘delicate in tone, humble in stature, and modestly pretty in appearance’.

  But the alchemical tricks used to encourage tulips to break were scorned, and florists’ tulips ‘fell into neglect and obloquy’. One who mourned their passing was Sir Sacheverell Sitwell, from the Derbyshire Sitwells of Renishaw Hall, who, despite his love of the beautiful wild species ‘so deservedly popular’ in the 1930s, wanted gardeners to plant a bed of old English tulips. The only problem was expense: at about a shilling a bulb, he calculated in 1939, this might cost some £8–10, or anything up to £1,760 in today’s money. As ever with the tulip, money has the final word. Perhaps we should not be too surprised that the tulip has left little trace in western literature, beyond a rather flat poem by Théophile Gautier, and better ones by more recent poets, such as Sylvia Plath’s upsetting tulips that watch her on her hospital bed, snagging the ambient air and eating her oxygen, and James Fenton’s yellow tulips that remind him of love’s ambush in a summery wood.

  TODAY, THE TULIP trade is again big business. Worldwide, the flower bulb industry is estimated to have an annual turnover of more than $1 billion, with tulips and lilies the most popular bulbs. Since Turkish tulips first arrived on Dutch soil, the Netherlands has transformed itself into the world’s leading bulb producer, topping the list of tulip-producing countries with its estimated 87 per cent share of global production by area. This translates annually into more than four million Dutch tulip bulbs, of which just over half are used for cut-flower production at home and abroad. Tulips are grown commercially in fourteen other countries, headed by Japan, France, the US and Poland. Turkey does not appear in global production lists, although it is named as one of three countries with emerging programmes for flower bulbs, alongside Brazil and Chile.

  Now that the breaking virus is understood, commercial growers have laboured to breed uncertainty out of their stock, hence the uniformity of tulip fields at flowering time when almost one-third of the Dutch acreage is taken up by just eighteen cultivars. You can still find heart-stoppingly beautiful wild varieties, but the elongated Istanbul tulips of Lâle Devri linger only in the memory. As for the flared and feathered tulips that possessed the burgers of Haarlem, Amsterdam and Alkmaar, to see them at their best you may need to seek out the modern-day equivalents to the old florists’ societies, dedicated to the breeding and showing of the old varieties.

  Britain has one such tulip society left: the Wakefield and North of England Tulip Society, founded in 1836. In May 2012 I attended its annual show, held in an anonymous community hall on the outskirts of Wakefield, bright with patriotic bunting. Here, for an afternoon, I could imagine myself among the curious tulip fanciers of old, peering myopically at exquisite single blooms thrust into beer bottles and marshalled into long neat rows on a trestle table running the length of the room: plain-coloured breeders, and flamed and feathered old English tulips, judged according to their esoteric categories of bizarres, bybloemens and roses, in a buzz of restrained rivalry and understated congratulation. Lovers of old-fashioned tulips flock to this event from all over Britain and from as far afield as Holland and Sweden, to show and to admire. Their tulips are as beautiful and as strange as anything the Dutch masters could produce and, had this been an auction, I know I would have parted with my money – doubtless more than was wise.

  7

  Orchid

  The air was thick, wet, steamy and larded with the cloying smell of tropical orchids in bloom . . . The plants filled the place, a forest of them, with nasty meaty leaves and stalks like the newly washed fingers of dead men. They smelled as overpowering as boiling alcohol under a blanket.

  RAYMOND CHANDLER, The Big Sleep

  21. Title page to John Lindley’s Sertum Orchidaceum, 1838 (Image provided by Peter H. Raven Library, Missouri Botanical Garden, http://www.missouribotanicalgarden.org/)

  I KNEW TROPICAL ORCHIDS before I had properly encountered our native British ones. When I was eight, my family moved to Malaya as it then was, to a satellite new town outside the capital, Kuala Lumpur, where we grew orchids in the garden, almost certainly varieties of the Scorpion orchid from the Arachnis family. They looked suspiciously like giant spiders so I gave them a wide berth, preferring the intoxicating fragrance of frangipani, the flame-red flowers of hibiscus
and the graceful casuarina trees that hid the bulldozed wasteland beyond the fence.

  My feelings towards orchids remain ambivalent. On my first visit to a London orchid show I found their infinite variety bewildering. They were just so impossibly different, sourced from all corners of the globe, many sporting bizarre appendages uniquely evolved to secure the plant’s continued survival. (Orchids were, unsurprisingly, Charles Darwin’s favourite flowers.) My companions had arrived early at the show, keen to purchase a Peruvian Slipper orchid that had been smuggled into Florida, costing its ‘discoverer’ two years’ probation and a $1,000 fine, but which was now legally on sale. The plastic bag they showed me contained a few strappy leaves and roots like pasty earthworms, for which they had paid £100. I felt mystified, increasingly bemused by the obsessiveness I witnessed in those around me: one man collected only Bulbophyllum, a diverse but relatively unprepossessing genus, of which he owned more than 450 species and forms. Here was tulip mania’s mad singularity of purpose transferred to a protean flower that encompasses the exquisitely delicate and the downright ugly, among them varieties sprouting monstrous lips and unidentifiable dangly bits (‘What can they all be for?’ asked John Lindley of the spirals dangling from a bizarre Mexican import, Cycnoches maculatum), and I felt vaguely defeated by a passion I did not share.

  I persevered, however, taught myself the most popular orchid families and by my second orchid show was at least able to recognize some of them as acquaintances if not friends. Others disturb me still with their rude contrivances while the cloned supermarket orchids leave me cold. You want to prod them to check they are real, and knowing that some can flower for weeks is not necessarily in their favour.

  But the more I studied the orchid, the more intrigued I became by its evident duality. You can see this most clearly in the wildly different perceptions of orchids in eastern and western cultures. Since the time of Confucius at least, the orchid in China has been a plant of great refinement and virtue, revered for growing modestly in inaccessible places where its beauty is largely unseen. The West, by contrast, has a much earthier view of the orchid, equating it primarily with sex, and not especially wholesome sex either. Even their names betray this duality: ‘lan’, the Chinese word for orchid, referred originally to fragrant flowers used to ward off evil spirits, while the West settled on ‘orchis’, the Greek word for testicles, which the tubers of terrestrial orchids are said to resemble.

  Might the power of the orchid reside in the tension created by these wildly conflicting views of the world’s strangest flower?

  TODAY, THE ORCHID family (Orchidaceae) is one of the largest plant families on earth with the greatest diversity of flora. The Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew estimate there are some 25,000 species in 850 genera, compared with the rose’s paltry 150 species in a single main genus, Rosa; hybrid orchids add at least 155,000 more recognized varieties, as of March 2012, increasing at the rate of 250–350 per month. While some species have disappeared due to over-collecting or the destruction of their habitats, between 200–500 new species are identified each year. In November 2011, for instance, the Dutch orchid specialist Ed de Vogel discovered the world’s only truly night-flowering orchid, Bulbophyllum nocturnum, in a forest zone earmarked for logging on an island off Papua New Guinea. The photograph accompanying press reports shows three greenish-yellow sepals arranged around the flower’s miniscule petals from which dangle long, greyish-green appendages that bear an uncanny resemblance to the fruiting bodies of certain slime moulds also found in the region. Botanists speculate that the orchid is pollinated by night-feeding midges tricked into thinking they are landing on food: ingenious, certainly, but hardly pretty.

  Their current wide distribution suggests that orchids existed on earth before the continents began to split away from the original land mass of Pangaea, at least 100 million years ago. From their original home – almost certainly tropical – they drifted away with the tectonic plates: Dendrobium orchids (one of the largest genera) spreading throughout China, India, South-East Asia, Malaysia, Australia and New Zealand; Vanilla orchids (the family’s main economically useful plant) ending up in tropical America, Africa and Malaysia; the Slipper orchids, Cypripedium, travelling to North America, Europe, Russia, China and Japan but not crossing south of the equator; the related Paphiopedilum extending through the tropical and subtropical regions of southern China, India, South-East Asia and down into Indonesia; and their Phragmipedium relatives crossing through Central America into Panama and the Andes into South America. Some – possibly younger – genera remain more localized, such as the ever-popular Cattleya orchids, found only in South and Central America; today, wild orchids inhabit all continents except Antarctica, from Alaska down to Tierra del Fuego.

  In their growth habits, orchids are either terrestrial, producing under ground tubers, or epiphytic, growing on the trunks and branches of trees and drawing water and nutrients from the air through aerial roots; they may also be lithophytic (growing on rocks), saprophytic (living off dead organic matter), or entirely subterranean, such as the rare and threatened Rhizanthella orchid, endemic to Western Australia, considered such a curiosity when it was first discovered in 1928 that wax models were exhibited at scientific meetings and museums throughout the state. In size, orchids range from a couple of millimetres in diameter to a ton in mass; and they grow either vertically as a single stem (monopodial) or laterally with pseudobulbs and multiple shoots along a horizontal rhizome (sympodial). Uniting all the multiplicity of orchid types and forms is the structure of their flowers: an outer whorl of three sepals, similar in substance and colour to the petals, and an inner whorl of two lateral petals plus a third, greatly modified petal, which forms the lip or labellum that gives many varieties their distinctive pout.

  ORCHIDS HAVE THE longest history of cultivation in China, which boasts by some counts upwards of 1,000 species spread over more than 150 different genera. Classic Chinese varieties include the cool-growing Cymbidium orchids such as C. ensifolium, C. goeringii and C. floribundum, which grow throughout the Yangtze River Valley. The flowers of Chinese orchids are generally small and yellowish-green, often marked with purple streaks or spots, and delicately perfumed ‘with the scent of kings’. In fact, the Chinese word for orchid, ‘lan’, which derives from the verb ‘lan’ meaning to check or ward off, referred originally to several fragrant plants worn by Chinese youths to keep evil spirits at bay. Only when scholars became familiar with Cymbidium orchids (chih-lan) as houseplants did they codify the word in writing, linking it to a particular flower but missing the flower’s linguistic associations.

  Chinese reverence for the orchid dates back at least to the writings of the great scholar and philosopher Confucius (551–479 BCE), when political and military power had migrated southwards into what is now Zhejiang province and the adjacent areas, where Cymbidium and other orchids grew wild on the steep rocky slopes and among the bamboo woods. Confucius compared the superior man (chün-tzu) to the wild orchid; for just as the orchid spreads its fragrance when it blooms unseen and unappreciated in the deepest valley, so the superior man continues to strive for self-discipline and virtue even when living unrecognized in poverty or distress. Being with virtuous people, said Confucius, is like entering a hall of orchids, chih-lan. ‘In the course of time one becomes accustomed to the superior ways of life and gets used to fragrance.’

  Basking in Confucius’s approval, the orchid found its way into poetry as a metaphor for virtue and loyalty, admired above all other flowers by Ch’ü Yüan (339–278 BCE), one of the authors of the Songs of the South. It stood in contrast to the aggressive and persistent weed, hsiao-ai (artemisia): ‘Rather be repressed like an orchid and broken like jade, than be the flower of an artemisia’ was a saying of China’s first imperial dynasty. Blossoming in out-of-the-way places, the orchid came also to represent womanly elegance, joyous elation and restrained nobility; finding a lovely courtesan living in a secret place was like ‘finding a delicate orchid in a secluded va
lley’. The orchid’s modesty and restraint also appealed to Buddhist sensibilities, as in this poem written in the eleventh century by Su Shih, a major poet of the Song era:

  In the quiet valley I can see no orchids growing –

  By accident, a gentle breeze betrays their presence.

  It is a liberating fragrance, pure and unsullied –

  One sniff of it is enough to give enlightenment.

  Huang T’ing-chien, another Song poet and the exact contemporary of Su Shih, considered the orchid’s fragrance pre-eminent, worthy of the title ‘national fragrance’. ‘It thrives in the forest,’ he declared, its perfume undiminished by the absence of an audience, ‘and it survives the snow and frost without undergoing any change in its nature.’

  Despite the high esteem accorded to the orchid, it appeared relatively late in Chinese art; only the lotus was seen with any frequency from the time of the First Emperor onwards. Paintings of the Tang dynasty (618–906) famously captured landscapes with glimpses of distant trees, shrubs, bamboos and leaves, but flowers were largely absent. A culture of gardens and flowers assumed importance only in the Song dynasty (960–1279), when flower-and-bird paintings were especially popular; but few Song paintings of orchids survive. An outstanding exception is Ma Lin’s Orchid of the thirteenth century, meticulously rendered in subtle shades of lavender, white and malachite green, which transcends realism to hint at the flower’s implicit qualities of movement and stillness, blossoming and dying, fragrance and emptiness. After the Song dynasty fell, orchids assumed a subversive role in monochrome paintings by the minor artist Cheng Ssu-hsiao, whose solitary orchids float above an empty background, refusing to root themselves in soil stolen by the Mongol invaders.