Seven Flowers

by Jennifer Potter

  Ink-and-wash orchids were admirably adapted to express the Spirit or Breath of the Tao (Ch’i), and were favoured especially by the literati and women artists ‘in whose work the shên (divine) quality seemed to float across the painting’. Helping to develop the painters’ spiritual resources were much later manuals such as The Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting, whose first complete edition of 1701 included orchids among the ‘Four Gentlemen of Flowers’; these relate to the Confucian virtues of the superior man and to the four seasons: Orchid (spring), Bamboo (summer), Chrysanthemum (autumn) and Plum (winter).

  According to the manual’s authors, the secret of painting orchids lies in the circulation of the spirit (ch’i yün). The painter’s hand should move like lightning, drawing four leaves crossed by a fifth and placing flowers naturally in a variety of positions. ‘Stems and leaves should have movement like the tail of a soaring phoenix; the calyx should be light as a dragonfly.’ The flowers’ fragrance, too, could be conveyed by a quick flick of the wrist. ‘Through brush and ink it is possible to transmit their essence.’

  22. Orchid in the traditional style by the noted Chinese flower painter, Chen Banding (d. 1970).

  Just as eastern gardeners appreciated an orchid’s leaves as much as its flowers, so Chinese painters learned first to draw orchid leaves, which should be ‘painted in a few strokes, and they should have a floating grace in rhythm with the wind, (moving like a goddess) in rainbow-hued skirt with a moon-shaped jade ornament swinging from her belt. No breath of ordinary air touches them.’ Having mastered the leaves, the novice progressed to the flowers. Here, the critical skill was learning how to dot the stamen at the orchid’s heart, likened to ‘drawing in the eyes of a beautiful woman. As the rippling fields of orchids of the River Hsiang give life to the whole countryside, so dotting the heart of the flower adds the finishing touch. The whole essence of the flower is contained in that small touch.’

  Chinese gardeners applied the same sensibility and dedication to growing their favourite orchids. The oldest extant treatise on orchids – by Chao Shih-kêng in 1233 – described twenty-two orchids in two basic types: purple-flowered and white-flowered. As well as Cymbidium species, these are thought to include Aerides, Calanthe, Habenaria and Phajus varieties. In less than fifteen years another treatise appeared, by Wang Kuei-hsüeh, with thirty-seven varieties. Cultivating orchids was then very popular among the leisured classes, and largely followed the beliefs and practices of the Taoist religion. A manuscript from about this time – repeatedly copied by Chinese orchid enthusiasts for the next seven hundred years – evolved a monthly programme of orchid care, developed from the Taoist practice of casting horoscopes and expressed in diagrams that reflected seasonal weather changes, the straight lines representing the Yang principle (male: sunlight and warmth) and the broken lines the Yin (female: shade and coolness).

  The Chinese taste for orchids arrived in Japan a thousand years or more ago, introduced by returning Japanese monks and by Chinese monks who had settled in Japan. Although orchids never quite reached the same level of popularity as in China, particular varieties appealed to different sectors of Japan’s markedly feudal society – to the intelligentsia and those touched by Chinese culture; to rich merchants who craved unusual or showy leaves; and to the shogun class of military overlords and their territorial barons or daimyos.

  In the mid-nineteenth century, for instance, the nobility favoured varieties of Neofinetia falcata with speckled or striped leaves, following the lead of the shogun Tokugawa Ienari, who ordered his daimyos to collect exceptional varieties and held gatherings to admire their markings. Pots were covered with gold and silver nets, and admirers held paper masks over their lips to avoid breathing over the orchids. On their biennial journeys to the capital, daimyos were reputed to take orchids with them in their palanquins, to savour their exquisite fragrance. Some two hundred Neofinetia varieties were then in cultivation, perhaps twice as many as now.

  Today, the Japanese differentiate between western orchids (Yo-Ran, principally varieties improved from flowering tropical orchids) and oriental orchids (Toyo-Ran, principally derived from Cymbidium species native to the temperate regions of eastern Asia, and also the genera Dendrobium, Goodyera and Neofinetia). Two epiphytic Dendrobium orchids are native to Japan, among them D. moniliforme, known to the German naturalist and physician Engelbert Kaempfer, who visited the Japanese island of Deshima towards the end of the seventeenth century, when Japan was largely closed to foreigners (see Chapter 2). And orchids continue to play a supporting role in Japanese flower arranging, viewed as suitably elegant although not among the traditional stars of plum, peach, cherry, azalea, peony, wisteria, iris, morning glory, lotus, chrysanthemum and maple.

  AFTER THE GRACE and reverence with which orchids are greeted in China and Japan, the western view of the orchid comes as a rude surprise. Ever since the ancient Greeks, westerners have looked at the orchid and thought of sex, a connection traditionally ascribed to Theophrastus, who included an ‘orchis’ in the final book of his seminal Enquiry into Plants, which examined the medicinal properties of herbs. This book’s authorship is now disputed; while it may contain an original core by the man whom westerners revere as the father of botany, it lacks the detailed plant descriptions and classification for which Theophrastus is justly famous. Whoever wrote it, the author was interested not in the orchid as a plant but in how it affects sexual inter course – an idea considered so shocking early in the twentieth century that the standard translation by Sir Arthur Hort, a former fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, omits the offending passage altogether.

  What the missing text says, in effect, is that some plants have the power to increase both fertility and infertility. In the case of the orchid, the larger tuberous root was said to make a person more effective in intercourse when given in the milk of a mountain-reared goat, while the smaller root would hinder and prevent intercourse. It is an idea that recurs endlessly in herbals of the ancient world right through to the seventeenth century, usually drawing on minor variations found in the De Materia Medica of Dioscorides, which appeared in the first century: that if the orchid’s greater root is eaten by men, they will beget men children, and if the lesser root is eaten by women, they will conceive girls. ‘It is further storied,’ wrote John Goodyer in his 1655 translation of Dioscorides, ‘that ye women in Thessalia do give to drink with goates milk ye tenderer roote to provoke Venerie, & the dry root for ye suppressing, dissolving of Venerie’, thus putting Thessalian women firmly in control of sexual relations.

  Theophrastus and Dioscorides both called the plant an ‘orchis’ after the Greek word for testicles, which the tubers of terrestrial orchids were said to resemble. Fool’s Stones, Fox Stones, Dogstones, Goat’s Stones, Sweet Cullions and Hares-bollocks were among the common names for wild orchids in sixteenth-century England – ‘stones’, ‘cullions’ and ‘bollocks’ meaning much the same thing. Sex featured in later Latin names, too. Linnaeus named the Slipper orchids Cypripedium, after Cyprus – an island sacred to the goddess of love – and ‘pedilon’, the Greek word for slipper. More than a century later, the German botanist Ernst Hugo Heinrich Pfitzer retained the Venus/Aphrodite connection when he named the related genus Paphiopedilum after Paphos, Aphrodite’s mythical birthplace on the island.

  Dioscorides identified four varieties of orchid, including one he called Saturion or Satyrium, which bore leaves in threes similar to docks or lilies, but smaller and reddish:

  It has a naked stalk, a foot long, a white flower similar to a lily, a bulbous root as big as an apple – red, but white within, similar to an egg, sweet to the taste and pleasant in the mouth. One ought to drink it in black hard wine for fever spasms, and use it if he wishes to lay with a woman. For they say that this also is an aphrodisiac.

  In categorizing orchid tubers as aphrodisiacs, Dioscorides is mindful of the ancient Doctrine of Signatures, which attributed the power of plants to their physical form, but he did not restrict his or
chid ‘cures’ to sexual ailments. Of an orchid similar to the Bee orchid, for instance, he noted that its roots could dissipate dropsy, clean ulcers and repress herpes, and that if smeared on the skin it would soothe inflamed parts and repair fistulas. Sprinkled on dry it could stop a tissue-eating disease, while drunk in wine it could heal the intestines.

  China’s very different perception of the orchid naturally produced a different reading. Of Dendrobium species found growing on rocks, for instance, the sages reasoned that the plant must possess unusual strength to draw nourishment from such hard material, and that a medicine derived from such a plant would strengthen the weak. In China’s earliest pharmacopoeia, the Shên Nung Pên Ts’ao Ching or Divine Husbandman’s Materia Medica, roughly contemporary with Dioscorides although drawing on an earlier oral tradition, the Dendrobium orchid was credited with the power to heal internal injuries and induce the power of Yin. It was also said that imbibing the drug persistently in small quantities would stimulate the appetite and lead to a long life.

  But sex continued to dominate western perceptions of the orchid, in botanical and medical descriptions and in its iconographic meanings. The wild orchid nestling against the unicorn’s belly in the magnificent ‘Unicorn Tapestries’ of the southern Netherlands is clearly intended as a symbol of fertility and procreation. Created in the high Middle Ages, the tapestries show the hunt and capture of the unicorn, an allegory of Christ’s death and resurrection, which by 1500 had become secularized as the lover’s capture by his lady. The orchid appears in the final tapestry, the ‘Unicorn in Captivity’, which shows the unicorn-lover chained and fenced but happy in his confinement against a backdrop teeming with symbols of fertility and wedded bliss: bursting pomegranates, orchids, English bluebells, bistort, carnations, stock-gillyflowers, columbines, St Mary’s thistle, even a little frog, renowned for its noisy mating.

  Slowly, however, as the science of botany developed, interest shifted from the orchid’s claimed influence over human sexuality to how the flower reproduced itself – a mystery for most plants until late in the seventeenth century, but particularly baffling for orchids, whose seeds are microscopic, and most orchids, notably the terrestrials, need specific fungi to survive beyond germination. The German proto-botanist and Lutheran minister Hieronymus Bock (a surname Latinized as Tragus) speculated that orchids produced not seed but a fine dust, believing that they arose naturally in fields and meadows where the semen of birds and beasts had fallen to the ground. The German Jesuit Athanasius Kircher concurred that orchids appeared where livestock had been brought together for mating, much as Virgil’s bees and wasps had sprung forth from the carcasses of bulls and horses.

  All the while, the number of known orchids was growing at a bewildering rate. The royal apothecary John Parkinson listed seventy-seven native or European varieties in his herbal of 1640, Theatrum Botanicum, which he tried to bring into ‘some methodicall order’ by grouping them into separate ranks, but placing the Lady’s slipper orchid elsewhere. A century later, the gardener Philip Miller identified twenty orchids that deserved a place in every good garden for the ‘extreme Oddness and Beauty of their Flowers’, despite difficulties in transplanting them from the wild. Each bore a colourful common name, such as the ‘Lizard Flower, or Great Goat-stones’, the ‘Common Humble Bee Satyrion, or Bee-flower’, and the ‘Handed Orchis, with a greenish Flower by some call’d The Frog Orchis’. These last names came from the flower’s astonishingly varied third petal or lip, ‘sometimes representing a naked Man, sometimes a Butter-fly, a Drone, a Pigeon, an Ape, a Lizard, a Parrot, a Fly, and other Things’.

  As the eighteenth century progressed, the mechanics of sexual reproduction in plants became better understood; the great Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus even tried to introduce a classification system for plants based entirely on sexual characteristics (it proved in adequate, unlike his enduring system of binomial plant names). Having already written a monograph on orchids, Linnaeus condensed their number to sixty-two species in eight separate genera, which he assigned to the Gynandria class in which a flower’s male sex organs are attached to and standing on the female. Orchids were still considered a dangerous subject for polite society, however. When Charles Darwin’s grand father Erasmus attempted to introduce Linnaean botany to an audience of young ladies in his heavy-footed poem The Loves of the Plants, he included the sullen opium poppy (see Chapter 4) but stayed silent on the more obviously sexualized orchid.

  It was Charles Darwin himself who cracked the sexual puzzle of the orchid, using his study of the plant to prove his theory that plants favour fertilization by the pollen of another flower, rather than self-fertilization, and that the ‘contrivances’ by which orchids achieve this are ‘as varied and almost as perfect as any of the most beautiful adaptations in the animal kingdom’. For twenty years he had watched native orchids growing in abundance around his Kentish home, commandeering family and friends to help in his observations and amassing vast amounts of data about the insects attracted to orchids, their role in transferring pollen from one flower to another, and those ingenious ‘contrivances’ developed by temperate and tropical orchids to achieve their goal of cross-pollination. One such example was the ‘shooting mechanism’ of Catasetum orchids, by which pollen is flung at the pollinator; another, the mimicry by which some orchids attract their pollinators. In a letter of October 1861 to Sir Joseph Hooker, then assistant director at Kew and himself an orchid aficionado, Darwin declared, ‘I never was more interested in any subject in my life than this of Orchids.’

  For Darwin, the orchid provided ample proof that living things were not created as an ‘ideal type’, fixed for all eternity according to the Omnipotent Creator’s original plan, but rather that the ‘now wonderfully changed structure of the flower is due to a long course of slow modification’. The whole purpose of the flower, in Darwin’s view, was to produce seed, which orchids accomplished in ‘vast profusion’ – so many, in fact, that seeds from the great-grandchildren of just one plant of the Spotted orchid would ‘clothe with one uniform green carpet the entire surface of the land throughout the globe’.

  If Darwin celebrated the orchid’s ingenuity in ensuring its own survival, another giant of nineteenth-century England was positively appalled by the flower: the art critic and social thinker John Ruskin, who exchanged visits with Darwin in the 1860s. No scientist himself, Ruskin judged Darwin ‘delightful’ but rejected his theory of natural selection and maintained that a seed’s purpose was to produce the flower, not the other way round. For Ruskin, a flower’s beauty, like everything in nature, was designed expressly for man’s instruction. Far from sharing Darwin’s fascination with orchids, he judged certain species ‘definitely degraded, and, in aspect, malicious’.

  One can only assume that the orchid’s blatant sexuality lay at the root of Ruskin’s dislike (his marriage to Effie Gray was, after all, annulled on the grounds that it was never consummated). In his one work devoted exclusively to flowers – the increasingly deranged Proserpina, Studies of Wayside Flowers – he banished all reference to orchids and Orchidaceae, renaming the family ‘Ophrydae’ from the Greek word ‘ophrys’ or eyebrow. In place of testicles Ruskin saw ‘the brow of an animal frowning’ and ‘the overshadowing casque of a helmet’; and in defiance of the rules of botany, he sought to reclassify his Ophryds into just three divisions: a group he called ‘Contorta’, found in English meadows and alpine pastures; a second group, ‘Satyrium’, for blooms of ‘Satyric ugliness’ that habitually dressed ‘in livid and unpleasant colours’, twisting their stalks and their prominent lower petal round and round, ‘as a foul jester would put out his tongue’; and a third group of epiphytes he called ‘Aeria’ or airplants. In Ruskin’s botany, plants with feminine names ending in ‘a’ could be either pretty or good (or both), but the neuter ‘um’ ending of plants such as Satyrium would ‘always indicate some power either of active or suggestive evil . . . or a relation, more or less definite, to death’.

 
Poor Ruskin; rejecting the sexuality of flowers, he chose instead to see them as expressions of divine beauty – a beauty that he allowed to illuminate the deathly poppy but not these devilish orchids, which had no place in his world. As he wrote in 1875 to Kew’s librarian and keeper of the herbarium, ‘My feeling about the orchids is complicated with many moral and spiritual questions wholly overwhelming to me . . . I have notions which I dare not print for fear of the world’s thinking me mad.’

  Expunging the word ‘orchid’ from the botanical dictionary could not, however, mask orchids’ extraordinary success at exciting desire in the pollinators they want to attract, and Ruskin’s views were simply wrong. A good third of orchid species are thought to deceive their pollinators with false offers of sex or food. The garden writer Michael Pollan went to Sardinia in search of a certain type of Bee orchid, which mimics the appearance, scent and even the ‘feel’ of a female bee, but then ensures pollination by frustrating the bee’s desires. ‘The flower, in other words, traffics in something very much like metaphor. This stands for that. Not bad for a vegetable.’

  DARWIN AND RUSKIN were writing about orchids in the second half of the nineteenth century, when ‘orchidelirium’ had been raging fiercely in Britain and the West for several decades. Like tulip mania, the passion for orchids was fanned by scarcity and the desire to possess a plant of rare beauty. Added to this, orchids were notoriously difficult to grow; indeed, until their individual requirements were properly understood, exotic orchids were little more than curiosities, admired, perhaps, but beyond the capabilities of ordinary gardeners.