It was all in vain. Few of Hooker’s specimens reached England alive, although a gentleman’s gardener who accompanied them to acquaint himself with the locality was surely more successful:
he sent one man’s load to England on commission, and though it arrived in a very poor state, it sold for 300l., the individual plants fetching prices varying from 3l. to 10l. Had all arrived alive, they would have cleared 1000l. An active collector, with the facilities I possessed, might easily clear from 2000l. to 3000l., in one season, by the sale of Khasia orchids.
THAT ‘GARDENER’ WAS surely Thomas Lobb, who sent home plants from the Khasi Hills to Veitch’s Killerton nursery – Chelsea had not yet opened – in the same year. One flowered in December 1850 and was exhibited at a meeting of the Horticultural Society of London where it was greeted with marked favour. ‘The large flowers of soft light blue, tessellated with azure blue, are of great beauty,’ wrote James Herbert Veitch of their prime specimen. So popular did this – and many other exotic orchids – prove to Victorian collectors that it became an endangered species, and was until recently given maximum protection under legislation drawn up by CITES, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora.
Exotics are not the only orchids at risk. Paxton reported, in 1837, that one of Britain’s loveliest natives, the Lady’s slipper orchid, Cypripedium calceolus, had fallen prey to the ‘rapacity of the curious’, who dug it up for their own gardens or for profit, and was fast disappearing from its northern haunts. He had heard of a Yorkshire gardener who boasted of taking all he could find, leaving just holes in the ground, and who showed no fear when threatened ‘with an act of Parliament made expressly to hang him’. This orchid survives – but only just. In 2010, one of the last remaining Lady’s slipper orchids in England was put under armed police guard after plant thieves had attacked and mutilated it twice in six years, despite its protected status. This particular plant is now thought to be of European stock and Kew has thankfully raised progeny from an English strain, but its continued survival remains precarious.
The Veitch nurseries could at least claim to have increased the total number of orchid varieties by creating 100 more orchid hybrids than the species orchids they took from the wild. By the turn of the last century they had bred 340 hybrids, a process first achieved successfully by their Exeter foreman John Dominy, who crossed two Calanthe species to produce Calanthe × dominyi, which first flowered in October 1856. Fearing that many supposed ‘species’ from the wild might prove to be natural hybrids, John Lindley – who named it in Dominy’s honour – is said to have remarked, ‘You will drive the botanists mad!’ A hybrid Cattleya followed, and an inter-generic cross in 1861. In all, Dominy’s fifteen years of labour produced twenty-four successful hybrids – a trifling result but ‘the foundation of all future work’; his successor John Seden added several hundred more before his retirement in 1905.
From the 1870s, Veitch’s nurseries had a rival for sheer bravado and scale in the nursery of German-born Frederick Sander, who benefited from a crucial early encounter with the Bohemian explorer and orchid collector, Benedict Roezel. After making a good marriage, Sander used his wife’s money to take over an old-established agricultural seed business in St Albans. Soon the consignments of orchids and other plants he received regularly from Roezel proved so profitable that he was able to concentrate on orchids, and by the early 1880s he had vastly expanded his operations. He would later launch orchid businesses in Summit, New Jersey and Bruges in Belgium.
Sander’s example shows just how far orchids could take you: not only were many of Europe’s crowned heads his patrons, but he is credited with having brought the orchid within reach of ordinary people. But he must also take responsibility for stripping some locations bare of their precious orchids, sending out upwards of twenty collectors to jungles around the world where they laid waste whole areas to reach the epiphytic orchids growing on the upper branches of trees. This destruction was plainly recorded by one of Sander’s collectors, Carl Johannsen, writing to Sander in January 1896 from the Colombian city of Medellin. Johannsen promised to despatch in the morning thirty boxes of orchids,
all collected from the spot where these grow mixed, and I shall clear them out. They are now nearly extinguished in this spot, and this will surely be the last season. I have finished all along the Rio Dagua, where there are no plants left; the last days I remained in that spot the people brought in two or three plants a day and some came back without a single plant.
Sander’s more impressive legacy was his monumental work, Reichenbachia, named after the great German orchidologist Heinrich Gustav Reichenbach, who became the world’s leading orchid expert after John Lindley’s death in 1865. Published in two series of two volumes each from 1888 to 1894, and variously dedicated to Queen Victoria and the empresses or queens of Germany and Prussia, Russia and the Belgians, Sander’s Reichenbachia set out to depict orchids life-sized (both species and hybrids), with text in English, French and German. As massive as Bateman’s work on Guatemalan orchids, it is actually a bit of a brute but filled with fascinating detail about where the orchids were found or raised, the excitement they caused and how to grow them.
Naturally, it was Frederick Sander who by royal command supplied the great orchid bouquet of 1887 to celebrate Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee, displayed at Buckingham Palace in a vase presented to Mr Sander by the empress of Germany. To call it a ‘bouquet’ is an understatement: it stood nearly four feet tall and five in diameter, its body formed by masses of Cattleya mossiae interspersed with plumes of Odontoglossum, Oncidium, Vanda – ‘in short, all species of this lovely flower’. Picked out in the scarlet flowers of Epidendrum vitellinum majus were the letters VRI, and surmounting the whole was a golden crown of Oncidium and Dendrobium topped with a golden cross. News of its splendour spread around the globe, one local paper from New South Wales duly noting that many of the orchids came from the Queen’s dominions.
Despite their gradual ‘democratization’, orchids remained a potent symbol of (largely male) power and prestige well into the twentieth century, as typified by the British politician Joseph Chamberlain with his trademark monocle and orchid buttonhole. The flower’s admirers included wealthy amateurs such as Sir Jeremiah Colman of Gatton Park, who extolled his Gatton hybrids in a privately printed book in which he slyly declared his anti-democratic principles, believing that ‘Noble parents are essential before noble offspring can be produced’. The orchid house at Kew presented a fitting target for the suffragettes, who attacked it in February 1913, although the damage was less severe than at first feared and most of the stock was expected to survive. The object was to shock people into taking notice of the suffragette cause. As Mrs Pankhurst told the weekly meeting of the Women’s Social and Political Union:
We are not destroying Orchid Houses, breaking windows, cutting telegraph wires, injuring golf greens, in order to win the approval of the people who were attacked. If the general public were pleased with what we are doing, that would be a proof that our warfare is ineffective. We don’t intend that you should be pleased.
Worldwide, interest in the orchid was spreading and, as the century progressed, America took the lead in fostering interest in orchids. After Lindley and Reichenbach, Professor Oakes Ames of Harvard University became the world’s leading orchid scholar, especially renowned for his work on the orchids of the Philippines. The American Orchid Society, founded in 1921, sponsored the first World Orchid Conference in 1954, bringing together amateur enthusiasts, scientists and commercial interests from the main orchid-producing regions. Now co-sponsored by Britain’s Royal Horticultural Society (RHS), the conference is held every three years in far-distant locations. London retains its place at the heart of the orchid world through research under taken by the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew and the RHS’s role in maintaining the international register of orchid hybrids.
In common with the tulip and other flowers in this book, industrial
production techniques have turned orchids into big business, with an estimated turnover worldwide of some £5.6 billion, and transformed the way orchids are grown: many are now mass-produced in sterile media, untouched by human hand, to achieve the ubiquitous supermarket orchid sold at bargain-basement prices. Global action means, too, that orchids now enjoy more legal protection than most other flowers under CITES. Established in 1972 to monitor and control the inter national trade in threatened species, CITES is concerned with the movement of animals and plants, including herbarium specimens, across national borders; it requires import and export licences for plants listed in three appendices, which establish varying degrees of control. A number of listed Orchidaceae – among them Cypripedium calceolus, all Paphiopedilum and Phragmipedium species, and all European orchids – are subject to the strictest controls, which permit trade only for artificially propagated plants, subject to licences. All remaining Orchidaceae appear in the second group; this requires an export permit for plants collected directly from the wild, but allows trade in artificially propagated plants subject to licensing.
GIVEN SUCH A turbulent history, the orchid has played a surprisingly modest role in western literature, its presence in early writings largely medical rather than literary, although those are surely Britain’s native Early purple orchids, Orchis mascula, thrust by Shakespeare into Ophelia’s hands when she drowns herself in the brook, wreathed in fantastic garlands
Of crowflowers, nettles, daisies and long purples,
That liberal shepherds give a grosser name
But our cold maids do dead men’s fingers call them.
We know some of those ‘grosser names’ from Shakespeare’s contemporary John Gerard, and can learn politer ones from the Northamptonshire poet John Clare, who named an astonishing 370 plants in his poetry and prose, and was especially fond of orchids. He called Shakespeare’s Early purples ‘gaping, speckled cuckoo flowers’ and the ‘pouched-lipped cuckoo bud’, marvelling at the way they could be seen at noon in May ‘just creeping from their hoods, / With the sweet season, like their bard, beguil’d’. The American writer and naturalist Henry David Thoreau was similarly enamoured of native orchids and their ‘fair and delicate, nymph-like’ flowers – a very un-western view – considering the Great purple fringed orchid a ‘delicate belle of the swamp . . . A beauty reared in the shade of a convent, who has never strayed beyond the convent bell.’
A very different sort of orchid appeared in Joris-Karl Huysmans’s defiantly decadent novel of 1884, Against Nature (À Rebours), in which the anti-hero Des Esseintes gratified his morbid sensibilities with grotesque hothouse blooms, ‘vegetative follies’ that looked more artificial than real and naturally included orchids. His Cypripediums come straight out of Ruskin: ‘They resembled a clog, or a small oval bowl, with a human tongue curled back above it, its tendon stretched tight just as one sees tongues drawn in the illustrations to works dealing with diseases of the throat and mouth.’ Two little wings, gumdrop red, completed this ‘weird assemblage’, and ‘a shiny pouch, its lining oozing with a viscous glue’. Among his exotic purchases was a Cattleya from New Granada in a muted shade of lilac, which emitted a smell of varnished deal, like a toy chest, ‘evoking the horrors of presents on New Year’s Day’. Horticulturists who bred monstrous flowers like these were the only true artists, Des Esseintes concluded, nonetheless succumbing to a horrifying vision of a syphilitic Woman-Flower, a blood-red bromeliad blossoming between her thighs, ‘opening wide its sword-shaped petals above the bloody interior’.
Another European writer who equated the Cattleya orchid with sex was Marcel Proust, who introduced the flower into the private language between Charles Swann and the courtesan Odette de Crécy in the first of his seven-volume epic, À la Recherche du Temps Perdu (he would later liken a solitary homosexual to an orchid or sterile jellyfish cast onto the beach). ‘To make Cattleya’ [faire catleya] was shorthand between Swann and Odette for making love, ever since an episode in her carriage when her horse shied at an obstacle and Swann sought permission to restore the Cattleyas to her bodice (she was wearing more orchids in her hair, and carried them in a bouquet). That night he possessed her for the first time, and his habitual timidity led him to repeat the pretext ever afterwards.
The orchid’s essential weirdness was perfectly captured by H. G. Wells in his cautionary tale ‘The Flowering of the Strange Orchid’, which poked gentle fun at the late Victorian craze for collecting hothouse orchids. It tells the story of the bachelor Winter-Wedderburn, who attends the London auction of tropical orchids collected by a young man who died in the attempt, his blood apparently sucked dry by jungle leeches. Among Wedderburn’s purchases is an unidentified shrivelled rhizome found under the young man’s body, which he plants in his hothouse, its aerial rootlets appearing to the housekeeper ‘like little white fingers poking out of the brown’. Overcome by the orchid’s sickeningly sweet scent when it finally flowers, Wedderburn is mercifully rescued by his housekeeper, who finds him lying face upwards under the strange orchid, its rootlets attached like a tangle of grey ropes to his neck. Heroically snapping off their tentacles, she smashes the glass with a flowerpot and drags his body outside. ‘The next morning the strange orchid still lay there, black now and putrescent.’ Wedderburn’s other orchids are similarly moribund, but the man himself becomes bright and garrulous, exulting in the glory of his strange adventure.
British and American crime and detective fiction would also project orchids as a curious, often unhealthy passion: lovingly tended by Rex Stout’s corpulent detective, Nero Wolfe; added to the title of James Hadley Chase’s nasty low-life thriller, No Orchids for Miss Blandish, although the flower itself is never mentioned by name; and memorably introduced by Raymond Chandler at the start of The Big Sleep when Chandler’s private eye Philip Marlowe calls at General Sternwood’s mansion in West Hollywood. The butler shows him into the conservatory, its wet steamy air ‘larded with the cloying smell of tropical orchids in bloom’.
‘Do you like orchids?’ asked the General.
‘Not particularly,’ Marlowe replied.
The General half closed his eyes. ‘They are nasty things. Their flesh is too much like the flesh of men. And their perfume has the rotten sweetness of a prostitute.’
After horrors like these, it is refreshing to turn to writers who draw their orchids from remembered experience. In his ‘greenhouse poems’, the Michigan-born poet Theodore Roethke recalls his childhood explorations of the vast greenhouses owned by his nurseryman father and uncle, where the orchids swayed close to his face, mouths open like adders, delicate as the tongues of young birds.
I think, too, of the tropical orchids in Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys, which tells the back-story of the Jamaican heiress Antoinette Cosway, the mad Mrs Rochester in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. Like the ones from my own childhood, Antoinette’s orchids are simply part of the given, growing in the beautiful but neglected garden of the family’s Colibri Estate, where they flourish out of reach.
One was snaky looking, another like an octopus with long thin brown tentacles bare of leaves hanging from a twisted root. Twice a year the octopus orchid flowered – then not an inch of tentacle showed. It was a bell-shaped mass of white, mauve, deep purples, wonderful to see. The scent was very sweet and strong. I never went near it.
ORCHIDS STILL HAVE the power to lure plant collectors and enthusiasts into dangerous territory, where some tread a fine line between the legal and illegal pursuit of their passion – witness the popularity of books such as Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief, based on the arrest of John Laroche and three Semiole men for stealing rare orchids from a Florida swamp, the Fakahatchee Strand State Preserve; and Eric Hansen’s Orchid Fever, which embroiled the author in heated discussions with Kew. Intent on studying orchids in the wild rather than collecting them, the young British enthusiast Tom Hart Dyke travelled to the jungles of Central America; in Panama, while walking the Darién Gap with fellow backpacker Paul Winder, the
pair were captured by Marxist guerrillas and spent nine months in captivity, all for the love of this most unyielding of flowers.
There are those who claim that no flower has been quite so coveted, or so plundered, as the orchid. It even captured the heart of the curmudgeonly alpine specialist Reginald Farrer, who considered himself an ‘innocent and happy gardener’ until the ominous day he set eyes on a beautiful golden-yellow Indian Slipper orchid, Paphiopedilum insigne f. sanderae. His pained bewilderment speaks for all those orchid enthusiasts – and flower enthusiasts generally – who find themselves gripped by a passion they are powerless to resist.
In that instant I understood Romeo and Juliet better than I ever had before. But my doom was sealed; as cruel engines draw in, first one’s coat-tail, and then by degrees the whole body, so the Orchids have now enveloped me densely in their web. I am engulfed in Orchids and their dreadful bills; nor do I see the slightest chance of ever tasting solvency or peace again.
Seven Flowers Page 24