‘I have, this season, seen an insect “tacking” swiftly once or twice over a flower before entering. I concluded it was tracking the orchid by its scent,’ she wrote. It would be decades before technology could investigate the molecular nature of the orchid’s spectral, tactile and pheromonal attraction, revealing an unimagined level of sophistication and specificity.
‘We now know that the glistening magenta bumps on the labellum of the tongue orchids reflect UV exactly like the wings of the female L. excelsa wasps,’ summarised Susan Double in 2016, reviewing the latest research in the field. The modern versions of Edith’s work require technology she could hardly have imagined: not just spectrometry, but electroantennal detection and gas chromatography. ‘In some species the orchids have reproduced an identical single compound present in the pheromone of its specific pollinator . . . Each species of orchid which practices sexual mimicry replicates exactly the correct pheromone of its insect pollinator, whether bee, wasp, fly or ant.’
The most important aspect of Edith’s contribution to this debate is that the finding ‘is no longer singular’. The behaviour observed by Pouyanne and Godfery was so rare that even Darwin, with his vast network of informants and collaborators, had not heard of it. But in Australia, Edith found the behaviour to be much more common. Like Darwin, she reached out to a network of collaborators to secure further information – to colleagues in New South Wales and Western Australia. If her theory was correct, this behaviour might explain many of the strange adaptations in orchid flowers. She soon found that the same wasp species also visits the more widely distributed large tongue orchid, Cryptostylis subulata. She had her suspicions about the Western Australian slipper orchid, Cryptostylis ovata, and the bonnet orchid, Cryptostylis erecta. The mystery of the wasp and the orchid was rapidly moving away from being a mere speculative anomaly to a reputable, replicable phenomenon.
Pollination remained one of Edith’s favourite topics mostly, but not exclusively, in orchids. She published over 30 papers on pollination, with a good deal more under the guise of ‘floral marriage’ for a general audience.
‘The more closely one studies the orchids, the more convinced one becomes that a life-time would not exhaust the wonders of the various mechanisms by which their pollination is effected.’
Something of the subtle thrill of orchidology is conveyed by Edith’s description of a ‘sensation’ from Rushworth in the early 1920s when ‘certain members of the brownbeard family had been found without their beards’. Brownbeards, or bearded orchids as they are more commonly known today, are characterised by their densely fringed labella, of the Calochilus genus – meaning beautiful lip. They come in a range of delicately varied forms: swampbeards, strapbeards, redbeards, purplebeards and copperbeards, the latter being described by Edith as ‘a handsome orchid, with a steely-blue sheen on its rich copper-colored beard’.
But these new specimens were entirely different from their hirsute cousins. Rather than being clad in their characteristically shaggy purple-brown beards, these bearded orchids were entirely smooth. One or two such anomalies in the infamously variable orchid world might well be regarded as ‘freaks’ or mutants but a few weeks later, another naked beard orchid was found in Bayswater, causing ‘quite a flutter . . . in orchid circles’.
‘The children of the Rushworth enthusiast who discovered the strangers have always called their brownbeards by the delightfully apt name of “Father Christmas,” and they promptly bestowed upon the newcomer the appropriate name of “Mrs Christmas”.’
Purplebeard orchids (Calochilus robertsonii) 1923, from Rogers’ collection
The children’s name was indeed apt. Bearded orchids do often look just like little hairy men, tucked beneath a cap formed by the dorsal sepal and earning them the nickname of ‘bushrangers’. On several species, two conspicuous dots perched on either side of the long thin anther cap complete the image of eyes glaring over a nose above their shaggy beards. By contrast, the naked beard orchid’s smooth, friendly ‘face’ resembles a simple line drawing, encircled by a green and red striped bonnet. Only the tiniest wisp of imagination transforms it into Mrs Christmas.
This anomaly was not seen again for a few years, but in 1925 – an outstanding season for orchids in Victoria – a flurry of new records were again reported from Rushworth. The new orchid was duly christened by Rogers with the specific name of imberbis – without beards – and Calochilus imberbis, the naked beard orchid, entered the scientific register.
In 1928 Arthur Lea sent a copy of Edith’s paper to Professor E. B. Poulton. Lea included his own comments on her work, as well as several letters from Edith containing further information. Professor Poulton found the work particularly interesting and decided to republish her paper in the Transactions of the Royal Entomological Society of London.
‘I have extracted from these letters and others written to me a number of paragraphs which have been incorporated in Mrs. Coleman’s paper or added as supplementary notes,’ Poulton declared. ‘I regret that there has been no opportunity to consult with the authoress on the arrangements, but hope that it will meet with her approval.’
In 1929, Edith’s work appeared in another international journal, the Journal of Botany. This one appeared ‘with note by Col. M. J. Godfery’. The note confirmed that Edith’s work supported and extended his own and Pouyanne’s work on Old World orchid species. But even Godfery’s word was not enough. In the London Orchid Review, Godfery reassured his potentially sceptical readers that he had ‘an independent and unbiased witness’ to Edith’s work. The ‘well-known author on Australian Orchids who, moreover, was “only gently tolerant” of Mrs. Coleman’s ideas’. Dr Richard S. Rogers visited Edith at Healesville in 1929 to confirm the phenomenon himself.
‘We are in complete agreement with regard to the facts,’ reported Rogers to Godfery, ‘and I fail to see what other interpretation can be placed on them.’
To Edith, Rogers was more fulsome in his praise.
‘You have treated a difficult and rather delicate subject with a discretion and judgement that will leave little room for outside criticism,’ he wrote.
The papers in the international journals were published under Edith’s name. There was no question about the value of her work, nor the recognition that scientists have subsequently given it. But the editorial commentaries of Poulton and Godfery put parentheses around these papers – as if they were not confident that the work could withstand scrutiny in its own right, that it needed the imprimatur of authority.
Edith was an unknown housewife from a place that would, for many years yet, be seen as an intellectual colony of England. The commentaries by the English experts on Edith’s work in the international journals were faintly patronising, albeit in the nicest possible way. Was it because she was a woman? A colonial? Or an amateur? Pouyanne, the Algerian judge, was subject to this patronage by Godfery, who repackaged his work for an English audience, and by Correvon, who helped him publish in French. Pouyanne, too, was a colonial and an amateur. Although Pouyanne, unlike Edith, showed less interest in publishing himself.
In 1928, Edith was unknown to the world of orchidology. She had not been ‘trained’ by anyone, she had no mentor or supervisor to vouch for her. She had no institutional affiliation. She had simply appeared, out of nowhere. The experts didn’t know what to make of her, didn’t know if her work was reliable. It needed verification and scrutiny. They checked with people they knew locally – with Rogers and Lea. The work seemed good. So they backed it – but carefully. Such is the cautious, critical progress of science. It is not just what you know that matters in science, but also who you know.
Edith worked swiftly to fill both of those gaps.
‘If you have known these spider orchids in your childhood,’ Edith said, ‘without doubt they have written their names indelibly on a corner of your memory, and the mere thought of them will carry you back to that sunny hillside where you first saw them and loved them.’
When I wa
s small, about four or five years old, we lived on the forsaken outskirts of a small country town, overlooking the undeveloped scrub of ‘Stinky Creek’. Not many people lived here – a handful of young families building dirt-cheap homes scattered among older Aboriginal residents in silvered corro shacks down dusty tracks. I would often slip under the gap-toothed fence to play next door at Auntie Kath’s with her dogs, the wearily patient ‘Mum’ and the last of her many litters, the boisterous ‘Pup’.
It was Auntie Kath who took me looking for flowers one spring, across the sandy road into the scrub. I trailed happily behind, puzzled that we would look for flowers in the middle of the bush. ‘Flowers’ and ‘bush’ did not fit together in my rigidly literal preschool mind. The only flowers I had seen at Auntie Kath’s clustered in neat plastic bunches on checked tablecloths.
‘Here it is,’ she said, stopping in a clearing.
I remember dark and purple, spiky and magnificent. I remember thinking it looked like the evil queen in Sleeping Beauty and I was transfixed. My concepts of ‘beauty’ and ‘nature’ were instantly transformed.
It was the entomologist Tarlton Rayment who first used the term ‘pseudocopulation’ to describe the behaviour that Edith had observed. Pseudocopulation in biology generally refers to any behaviour that looks like copulation (or internal fertilisation) but where the fertilisation occurs externally. Male frogs use amplexus to fertilise eggs as they are released by the females. Many insects, particularly spiders, use spermatophores, bundles of sperm which are transferred directly into the reproductive tract of the females, or are sometimes given as a nuptial gift of food. Pseudocopulation may also refer to homosexual mounting behaviour in some species. But the use of the term in relation to orchids and wasps is slightly different. Here the behaviour is intra-specific. An unrelated third party is the one copulating, and yet it is the orchid that is fertilised.
‘I am invited to see for myself the phenomenon of insects effecting a pseudo-copulation with the flowers,’ Rayment wrote in A Cluster of Bees. ‘But there is no doubt about their actions.’
The acknowledgement sections of Edith’s papers read like a rollcall of biological expertise: Tillyard, Lea, Rayment, Rogers, Kershaw and Nicholls. If Edith’s published papers are the proof of her work, it is her lost letters that are the hidden buttressing beneath. She is reaching out to experts in her field, sending them her papers, asking them for advice and assistance, making the connections that are essential in science. She is not just soliciting information, she is also letting them know who she is, establishing a presence, sending them her credentials.
I have always been impressed by the quality of her research and the breadth of her knowledge, but I’m only just beginning to appreciate the significance of her ability to network.
William Morton Wheeler was curator of invertebrate zoology at the American Museum of Natural History, famous for his work on ants. He was an obvious choice to review Rayment’s book on Australian native bees for the Quarterly Review of Biology. Wheeler was enchanted by Rayment’s descriptions of Australian plants ‘so unforgettably and weirdly beautiful’. It was Rayment’s account of Edith’s work that particularly caught Morton Wheeler’s attention.
He was sitting on the museum steps when he saw the orchidologist Oakes Ames approaching and couldn’t resist a passing gibe.
‘He jokingly referred to the questionable morals of my orchids and asked me if I was aware of the extent of their sexual depravity,’ Ames recalled. ‘I tossed his good natured slurs aside, and assured him that I knew all about the behaviour he criticised and that I would go down stairs to my orchid herbarium and write a paper he would enjoy.’
Ames rushed downstairs to his files, where he retrieved and re-read his ‘treasured sendings’ from Edith and Godfery.
‘I was surprised. I suppose, being overwhelmed with work on the identification of orchids, I had taken as a part of the day’s work references to intimate studies by others on the phenomenon of pollination. But I was surprised, nevertheless. And none of my colleagues in our Division of Biology had a glimmering of what one might imply by the term: pseudocopulation.’
Oakes Ames picked up Rayment’s terminology and used it in his seminal review on ‘Pollination of Orchids through pseudocopulation’, which he immediately sent to Edith. Her grandson John still has this reprint, with some of the affectionate letters from both Oakes Ames and his artist wife Blanche – some glued to pages, others still in tiny stamped envelopes – the text itself carefully annotated with little crosses in the margins of key passages.
‘I wrote this paper to emphasize what should have been known,’ Ames said, later adding, ‘I tossed that paper off at fever heat, only to find that it struck twelve in unexpected places.’
The paper excited much attention in the orchid community, being widely reviewed, cited and reprinted in many places and bringing Edith’s, Godfery’s and Pouyanne’s pioneering work to international attention.
An illustration of Edith’s pseudocopulation work by Blanche Ames
‘The closing paragraph has tickled many an erudite fancy,’ noted Ames. It is a tongue-in-cheek conclusion, worth repeating.
‘It may be that those who would reject the evolutionary approach to an understanding of life and who prefer to regard the world as the product of Special Creation will lean a little more lightly on human weakness when they discover moral turpitude among the insects. And it may be that entomologists, who see for insect societies parallels in human institutions, will become Freudian in their outlook when discussing the sexual vagaries revealed by symbiotic phenomena and introduce such terms as Lissopimplan behaviour or Ophrydean complex. Perhaps even the poet will have to reconsider whether “Only man is vile”.’
Edith is often credited with the discovery of pseudocopulation, and equally often discredited with a mere parallel discovery, pre-empted by those accounts of Pouyanne and Godfery. But this is not really how science works. Precedence is interesting, but it is the accumulation of knowledge – replication, verification, extension and clarification, not mere ‘discovery’ – that truly drives science. Edith replicated and extended Pouyanne’s work. She provided the empirical evidence: images and diagrams, data and dates. One oddly behaving insect in Algeria is an anomaly, but a pattern of behaviour consistent across multiple pairs of species, across continents, is a phenomenon worthy of investigation, of explanation, of a sub-discipline. It was Edith’s work that established the phenomenon of ‘pseudocopulation’ as a field of research that continues today all over the world.
On 2 October 1932, Rogers presented the Presidential Address to the Science Congress.
‘Perhaps I lingered longer over your discovery than on the other papers,’ he confessed to Edith later, ‘as it brought so prominently before the world one of the strangest and most weird devices in the history of pollination and has added a mass of confirmatory evidence, which must dissipate unbelief in the incredulous, unless their minds are incapable of assimilating scientific truths.’
The ‘gently tolerant’ expert had become one of Edith’s many admirers. In his letters he never failed to express that admiration.
‘I am delighted with your paper. It is very satisfactory to have these matters settled beyond possibility of doubt. You have now cleared up quite a number of pollination problems, and for this all orchidologists will thank you most heartily. For investigations of this kind, one might think leisure is necessary, but this you cannot have for you have many calls on your time.’
In September 1933, Rogers wrote that all of Edith’s papers displayed ‘good work and conscientious observation.’ He suggested that a book on the topic might suit the more ‘serious-minded’ of the public and would ‘prove a worthy supplement to Darwin’s classic study on the same subject’.
This was not the first comparison to Darwin that had been made.
‘Thanks for the reprint of another extraordinarily fascinating paper,’ wrote Rupp. ‘Your name ought to be Darwin.’
&n
bsp; ‘It is one of the most important scientific articles we have had,’ enthused Herbert B. Williamson, from the Herbarium at the University of Melbourne.
Even Godfery was convinced of Edith’s work.
‘I am pleased that you like my book, because you know so much about orchids and their habits and therefore your opinion is of special value.’
And finally, from Oakes Ames of Harvard.
‘Nothing I have done in reviewing the literature of pseudocopulation would take even a breath of wind out of your sails. So far as I am concerned you are to windward of me, and my little orchido-logical boat is becalmed by your magnificent biological canvas. I say this in all sincerity, because you have made a substantial contribution to the world’s store of knowledge.’
I have a sudden doubt about this windfall of eulogistic praise. Many of the letters come from Kate Baker’s manuscript biography. I don’t think she is quoting directly from the original letters.
There is a document in John Thomson’s archives, written in Edith’s hand, that neatly transcribes and annotates all of the quotes from letters that Baker uses in her biography. It seems that it was Edith herself who selected the material that Baker might use.
‘Mrs Coleman has, too, delightful letters from the late Lord Rothschild,’ relates Baker, ‘and from Lord Dunsany, from which she would not let me quote.’
Edith, it seems, curated her legacy carefully. I feel vaguely outmanoeuvred, but am left with nothing but admiration for the swift persuasive skill of her stratagem.
Edith’s writing exhibits none of the prevarication that characterised some of her colleagues’ writing on sexual matters.
The Wasp and the Orchid Page 15