Harlequins and Mimics: The Orchid Troupe
FOR TWENTY HAPPY YEARS I was the custodian of a small beech wood in the Chiltern Hills. It had a fabulous collection of ground plants with subtle and elusive charms: the February-flowering spurge laurel, the year’s first hint of honey; the fretwork and white linen of wood anemones in April; the moment in late May when the wash of fading bluebells turned to the colour of wood smoke. We had three species of fugitive orchid, including violet helleborine, the last bloom of the year, whose purple-tinged stems and leaves were almost invisible in the shade of the deepest thickets. But it was the ferns, the woodland floor’s plumage, its green peacock tails, that I loved most. There were nine species in the wood’s sixteen acres, a beguiling intrusion of Celtic scrolls and soft accents into a region that had always seemed to me the epitome of middle-England flintiness. Shield ferns haunted the wood’s medieval banks, softening the boundaries. Scaly male ferns fanned the bluebells with fronds of lime green on deep-orange ribs. And for all the wood’s antiquity, they shifted about in it almost capriciously. A colony of the softly serrated lady fern somehow found its way to the deepest darkest hollow, defying all theories about its reluctance to move to new sites. The whole wood, 600 feet up and with its own microclimate, was a Wardian fern case on a landscape scale.
After a long illness I left the Chilterns in 2002 and moved to south Norfolk – a flat land, wet on the ground but dry in the air and stripped of most of its old woods. A bell jar full of ferns from my retreat amongst the beeches would have been the best possible memento of the life and landscape I’d left behind. But I’ve never had the collecting instinct, especially for living things, and the only botanical trophy that made its way east with me was a painting of an orchid. It wasn’t one of our wood’s hermits, and not even a British species. But with hindsight it was a good transitional object, free of cloying nostalgia and linking the places I’d migrated between. East Anglian wetlands and the chalk downs and beech woods of the Chilterns don’t have much in common as landscapes. But they are both infertile, marginal lairs, classic orchid terrains, and these glamorous flowers, whose lives are so redolent of metamorphosis and of cryptic, subterranean partnerships, had been familiars since I was in my twenties. So were they for the Victorians – though perhaps at a more acquisitive level. But I bought the picture, so have no grounds for self-righteousness.
It was a print (number 32 of 40, and life sized, or so I imagined) of Paphiopedilum sanderianum, by the Scottish painter Dame Elizabeth Blackadder. I’d always loved Blackadder’s flowers. They’re fastidious without being fussy, not rooted in any kind of landscape or even the soil but weightless, airy, as if they have been artfully scattered about the canvas by a breeze. When I saw this print in a gallery, I bought it as much because it was by her as for its orchidaceous subject.
But Sander’s Paphiopedilum might have evolved especially to indulge her gift for vegetable levitation. She had pictured two flowers, one entirely free floating, the other emerging from a tuft of leaves which vanished under the left edge of the frame. The flowers had the look of Samurai warriors in ceremonial armour, with tall, tapering, striated helmets at the top, and tunic-like pouches, the colour of beaten copper, below. And from a pair of projections just below the ‘head’ flowed two extraordinary streamers – spiralling, tiger-striped pigtails. On my print they measured ten inches in length. I knew nothing about the real plant, beyond assuming that, in common with most tropical orchids, it was a kind of epiphyte.
In that first year in East Anglia I felt, as I wrote in a memoir of the experience, like a forest epiphyte myself. I was lodging in the Waveney Valley, in a sixteenth-century farmhouse of the kind usually called ‘half-timbered’, in which there seemed to be more oak inside than out. My room had oak floorboards and an oak desk. Oak beams, faded to the colour of old bone, ribbed the walls and the corners of the ceiling. Because there was nowhere else to put it, I hung my orchid from one of the vertical beams. And one night, when I’d turned the lights low, the room’s hard edges – book spine against lime plaster, flex against floor-board – began to soften, and the Paphiopedilum suddenly seemed to be growing out of the beam, just as I imagined it did in its native habitat.
I sat in this indoor forest glade most evenings, trying to make sense of the new landscape I’d fetched up in, and found that, without especially meaning to, I was reading increasingly about orchids, local orchids – real, fabulous, idiosyncratic, protean. Orchids lost, found, lost again. The fens and wet meadows that edged the Waveney Valley seemed to be an Elysium for them. A Lammas-land pasture stippled with the delicate stained glass of green-veined orchids lay a couple of miles to the north. A variety of bee orchid (var. chlorantha) with greenish-white petals as diaphanous as onion skins was almost appellation contrôlée here, as locally accented as an artisan cheese. And in a fen just a few hundred yards across the fields from the house, in 1936, the legendary orchid prospector J. E. Lousley (a banker in his day job) had discovered a subspecies of early marsh orchid with ‘straw-coloured’ blooms, known as ochroleuca. It sounded as luscious as clotted cream. Roydon Fen was one of only three sites in Britain, and the flower, so my books said, had not been seen anywhere since 1970. It was presumed extinct – or maybe just gone to ground. It went to ground somewhere in my head, too, part of a map of lost treasure.
If this wasn’t enough, a few hundred yards away in another direction was Blooms Nursery, where, in a pavilion resembling Kubla Khan’s pleasure dome, all manner of exotic orchids of bewildering shapes and hues, and as perfectly finished as bone-china ornaments, were sold as house plants and last-minute Valentine’s Day gifts. These were orchids as commodities, mass produced by hybridisation and cloning. They rarely lived beyond their first flowering. I seemed to be triangulated by orchids, not just by the literal geography of these three places – bedroom wall, valley fen and plant supermarket – but by three kinds of orchid experience. The ethereal image in Elizabeth Blackadder’s watercolour seemed to be a dream or distillation of the wilderness, which refracted in one direction to the living, if humbler, orchids of an English meadow, and in another to the merchandised products of the garden centre, also alive in a literal sense, but somehow fossilised, plant tissue reduced to cosmetic token. Each, in its own way, demonstrated the extraordinary power orchids have come to hold over the imagination: a captivation which stretches back at least three centuries, and can’t be explained just by the compelling appearances of their flowers.
I eventually learned more about P. sanderianum, where it grew and what it looks like in real life, but I can’t say this cast much light on what lies behind the orchid family’s mesmeric powers. Close to, the copper tunic resembles a small pitcher, or a ballet shoe, and puts the plant in the large group of slipper orchids which includes, as a distant cousin, the European lady’s slipper, Cypripedium calceolus. The pendulous streamers are, in fact, petals, which can grow up to three feet long and act as a lure for pollinating insects. It was first discovered in a rainforest in Sarawak, Borneo, by the German plant collector J. Förstemann in 1885, growing not, as I’d imagined, as a conventional epiphyte, trapezing from a roothold high up in the canopy, but anchored in the ground, often to a tree root in steep and bony limestone outcrops. It was named in honour of the Victorian orchid entrepreneur Frederick Sander, whose ambition to bring orchids within the reach of ordinary people was achieved by stripping whole areas across the globe clear of their plants. Unsurprisingly, it was never seen in its original site again, and was thought to be extinct in the wild. Sander’s slipper became the ‘holy grail of the orchid world’, and when it was rediscovered in 1978 by the collector Ivan Nielsen, growing near Fire Mountain in a remote region of Sarawak, it sent ripples through the entire orchid world. Professional botanists, commercial growers, obsessive collectors and frankly criminal looters all wanted to get their hands on it, as booty for research, artificial propagation, or high-end trading. Many tried to track down the site, and a few succeeded. By 1989, when trading in wild specimens was made illegal, a cultivated Sander’s slipper could fetch up to $3,000.
What is intriguing in this tangle of aesthetic enthralment and unscrupulous trophy hunting is the disproportion between the obsessional nature of orchid fancying and the character of the plants. Species such as, say, the Amazonian water lily or the Titan arum, have appearances, histories and life cycles just as glamorous as orchids’, but haven’t generated the same addictive fascination. In his picaresque enquiry into modern collecting, Orchid Fever: A Horticultural Tale of Love, Lust and Lunacy, Eric Hansen describes a world as manic as the seventeenth-century Dutch tulip cult. His stories of smuggling, grand theft and gunfights in the glasshouses smack of the dark frenzy of drug trafficking. Thailand alone exports more than $250 million worth of plants every year, many of them from the wild, and not all of them procured legally. The retail trade in commercially grown orchids in the USA exceeds $150 million, and there are half a million dedicated collectors there. Worldwide, the turnover of the orchid industry is valued at more than $9.5 billion, and the estimated tally of 150,000 artificially bred varieties is increasing by more than 200 a month.
Yet the comparison with what has come to be called ‘Tulip Fever’ doesn’t quite work. Tulips in seventeenth-century Holland were no more than a fashionable currency. Increasingly bizarre and often ephemeral varieties were bred to raise the market ceiling but the identity and character of the plants was irrelevant. They might just as well have been rare dahlias, or filigree bonsai. But there seems to be some quality or mana attached uniquely to orchids that underlies their universal appeal. An aura (a generic aura: they make up a huge and disparate family of some 25,000 species) of voluptuousness, exoticism, perhaps even decadence; a hint of ambiguity in the seductive beauty, to humans, of flowers designed to lure rampant insects. There is a mundane allusion to sex even in the family name, from the original Greek orkhis, meaning testicle, alluding to the shapes of the underground roots. (Orchids were ‘ballockworts’ in Middle English.)
It was during the nineteenth century that the mysterious glamour of the flowers began to take hold. Amongst the more reverent supplicants was Henry Thoreau, who described the US East Coast purple fringed orchid as ‘a delicate belle of the swamp … A beauty reared in the shade of a convent, who has never strayed beyond the convent bell.’ Others relished what they saw as an essentially decadent motif running through the family. The anti-hero of the fin-de-siècle aesthete Joris-Karl Huysman’s famous novel Against Nature has a morbid taste for Cypripedium orchids: ‘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.’ Marcel Proust, in À la recherche du temps perdu, uses cattleya orchids as signifiers in the private language of Charles Swann and Odette de Crécy: ‘To make Cattleya 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 Cattleya to her bodice’ (she was wearing more orchids in her hair, and carried them in a bouquet). H. G. Wells wrote a brisk but gory horror story called ‘The Flowering of the Strange Orchid’. A London bachelor called Winter-Wedderburn buys an unnamed rhizome at an orchid show, which he plants in his greenhouse. Later his housekeeper discovers him almost expired, overcome by the sickening miasma of its scent, and with its rapidly extending aerial rootlets anchored in his neck. They reminded her, she reflected later, of ‘little white fingers poking out of the brown’. Well into the twentieth century orchids play sinister and often double-entendre roles in crime fiction. At the start of Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep Philip Marlowe meets General Sternwood in the conservatory of his Hollywood mansion, where the air is ‘larded with the cloying smell of tropical orchids in bloom’. The General passes on his own views about the plants he nonetheless keeps close to him: ‘They are nasty things. Their flesh is too much like the flesh of men. And their perfume has the rotten sweetness of a prostitute.’
The orchid’s perennially voluptuous image. Cattleya Orchid and Three Hummingbirds by Martin Johnson Heade, 1871.
These metaphors are cumulative. Out of the chemistry of association and provenance, orchids become more than themselves, even the most humdrum basking in the reflected glamour of the family mantra – orchid: the bloom of the exotic romance and the privileged hothouse. Give a dead-nettle, with its symmetrical arrangement of pink labiate flowers, the tag of orchid and it might attract the same reverence. But the provenance of an image, or a reputation, has to start somewhere, and one important ingredient of orchids’ appeal is that so many of them – or bits of them – resemble something else, especially elements of human anatomy: diseased tongues, naked limbs, exploratory fingers. The basic template of the orchid flower itself is vaguely animal-like, often hominid: a manikin with a small head (the column) surrounded by petals which, above, often form a hood or headdress, and laterally, represent arms. Below is a lip (the labellum) which can be broad, as in a skirt, or forked, like a pair of legs. Hybrid forms, crossing the boundaries not just between species but whole classes of being, have always touched the human imagination, as in the mythology of chimera like the vegetable lamb.
Even amongst the limited roster of European orchids, the power of these suggestive resemblances shows up in their popular names. The gardener Philip Miller noted this in 1740, remarking how the flowers sometimes represent ‘a naked Man, sometimes a Butter-fly, a Drone, a Pigeon, an Ape, a Lizard, a Parrot, a Fly, and other Things’. There are also bee, spider, bug, woodcock, tongue and lady orchids. There is a military or soldier orchid, named, according to the Elizabethan botanist John Gerard, because it has ‘little floures resembling a little man having a helmet on his head, his hands and legges cut off’. And a ghost orchid in ectoplasmic pink, which appears in the darkest woods as irregularly as a poltergeist (and occasionally blooms under the ground). The lady orchid’s flowers support splendid pink-spotted crinolines. Those of the man orchid are undeniably anthropomorphic, but are spindly, jaundiced and topped by a hood resembling the bulbous green craniums of the Venusian Treens in the Dan Dare comic strip. The hybrid between the man and the rangy-limbed monkey orchid (Miller’s ‘Ape’), which crops up rarely in southern Europe, has been tagged the ‘missing link orchid’ by some waggish orchidophiles. Similarly, the common English name of the Mediterranean Orchis italica – Italian man orchid – is sometimes derisorily parsed by British botanists as ‘Italian-man orchid’, because of the shortness of the little pink appendage between its legs; their Italian counterparts responding by stressing that, proportionately, it is almost as long as the thigh.
All this name gaming and pattern recognition has a touch of the Mexican craze of looking for the face of the Madonna in burnt tortillas. You see what you believe in. But not in the case of the lizard orchid of continental Europe, whose flowers are persuasively reptilian to any viewer. They have long forked tails with a sanderianum twist, flexed olive legs and pale green heads. They stink of goat. The most Gothic – but not at all inaccurate – description is by the Belgian symbolist poet Maurice Maeterlinck in 1906:
It is symmetrically adorned with vicious three-cornered flowers of a greenish white stippled with pale violet. The lowest petal, decorated at its source with bronzed caruncles, with Merovingian moustaches, and with ominous lilac buboes, extends endlessly, crazily, improbably, in the shape of a twirled ribbon, of the colour of a drowned person whose corpse has been in a river for a month.
The lizard orchid has nothing whatever to do with lizards, and most such names can be put down as similes, based on fanciful and light-hearted resemblances. It is only to us humans that the frog orchid suggests an amphibian, and the vague likeness has no biological function at all. But there is one group of orchids whose similarities to other organisms are more than coincidental, and which bring biological mimicry and literary metaphor into testing confrontation. There are some twenty true species in the European genus Ophrys (and many in related tropical families) all of which have a superficial resemblance to wasps or bees – the sepals or outer lateral petals extended like wings, the inner petals shrunk to resemble antennae, the body oval and brown. The bee orchid is the best known, but I have to say that even here the resemblance is very crude, and the flowers are less like living insects than toys, stitched together from starched paper and velvet. Some early botanists imagined these likenesses were intended to frighten insects away, so that they would not damage the flowers. But it’s now known that this thespian posing is, on the contrary, an attracting device. Its purpose is to persuade passing male insects that the flowers are females of the same species, so that they jump on their backs and engage in what is called, with the stiffest of scientific po faces, ‘pseudocopulation’. During this process the insect’s head is close to the orchid’s sexual parts (real, not pseudo), and with luck picks up pollen-bearing growths (pollinia) which it later deposits on the stigma of the next orchid flower it embraces. I’ve never been wholly convinced by the popular explanation for this unconventional coupling, with its implicit assumption that a visually acute insect, which would never mistake even a closely related species as a potential mate, would hump a flower on the sole basis of a vague physical resemblance. Insects use many more senses and cues in navigating their world than we do, and I’ve always suspected other signals, most probably pheromonic scents, must be the primary cues in attracting the males. This is the consensus of modern scientific opinion, and it is now known that the male insect mates with the female pupa in the wild, not the fully hatched insect. This is a more amorphous creature than the mature adult, and may be what the orchid body is mistaken for, once it has been located by scent.
Pseudocopulation is a fact, and has been observed many times. The most graphic account is one of the earliest. Colonel M. J. Godfery published his classic British Orchidaceae in 1933. It is a book of extraordinary detail and loving attention – of many kinds. His wife Hilda painted the immaculate illustrations, and she is the only dedicatee of a book (she died before its publication) I have seen commemorated with an ‘In Memoriam’ photograph. She is posed like a Green Woman against the Godferys’ copious shrubbery.
The pair were on a hillside near Chambéry in the French Alps in May 1928 when they witnessed at close quarters the first stages in the pollination of the fly orchid, Ophrys insectifera:
It [the pollinating insect] is hard to see when quiescent on the flower, the closed wings agreeing with the contour of the lip, the gap between the thorax and abdomen seen through the wings giving much the same impression as the leaden oblong marking on the middle of the labellum, and the antennae resembling thread-like petals. It alights on the lip head uppermost, and rests there with quivering wings and waving antennae, doubtless a preliminary phase of courtship, sometimes for three minutes. Its actions made it quite clear that the wasp regarded the lip as a female of its own species.
A century and a half earlier John Langhorne had penned some coy quatrains about this conjoining that are a choice example of inadvertent orchid erotica:
See on that flow’rets velvet breast
How close the busy vagrant lies!
His thin-wrought plume, his downy breast,
The ambrosial gold that swells his thighs!
Godfery’s account is riveting and convincingly precise. But his words still seem to me to overplay the importance of purely visual mimicry, and aren’t immune to metaphor. I talked the problem through with my old friend and botanical mentor Bob Gibbons. He was resolute in defence of the visual deceit. Why else would Ophrys flowers – all of them – have even the vaguest resemblance to insects? But he wondered if perhaps the feel of the flowers’ bodies acted as an additional aphrodisiac to the hormonally charged males. It was an agreeable thought: furry bees clasped to velvet midriffs, ‘restlessly vibrating’, and I had the notion of abandoning my usual siding with Keats’s passive flowers – ‘budding patiently … taking hints’ – and trying to see the transactions from the point of view of the randy and hurrying bee. Fly orchids – the most convincing mimics in the Ophrys genus and the subject of Godfery’s historic observations – felt like the best bet. I persuaded Bob to post me a couple of spikes from the Corbières in France (where they’re common enough for guilt-free picking) so that I could get to intimate grips with them myself.
There was another, more personal reason for choosing fly orchids. Now thoroughly alert to all hints and echoes of mimicry, I remembered that when I’d lived in the Chilterns, I’d been unconsciously insect-like in my ritual spring searches for them, which happened in the heart of my home patch and tested my hunter-gatherer’s instinct. They were the most challenging species to find, growing in grass at the edge of chalky beech woods and in the light shade of hazel scrub. Since they were rarely more than a foot in height, and the blooms not much bigger than wasps, they were almost impossible to see amongst the early summer vegetation. I used to stalk them, crouched down like a beetle, scrabbling under hazel boughs, hoping to notice an incongruous dark shape at an odd height in the grass. I had my own pet colony, in a hazel coppice last cut by Italian PoWs in the 1940s. I liked to believe I was the only person who knew of it, and had no qualms about doing a little annual gardening, pulling out clumps of the aggressive dog’s mercury that was always threatening to overwhelm the precariously fragile stems. It never made them easier to find the following year, which perhaps made the hunt more deeply satisfying and helped fix it in my memory as embodying the essence of that particular moment of the spring. The vegetation seemed to be an undifferentiated curtain of verticals, the sun always coming from behind me, the faint dusts of bluebells and cow parsley still in the air. What gave the fly orchids away, as often as not, was the thin band of shiny blue that stretches like a belt across the middle of the body. The flowers are dark and narrow, the inner petals curled up into stumpy horns, the lip with slight swellings down each edge, which might or might not resemble folded wings. Later I saw photos of the pollinator, a digger wasp, Argogorytes mystaceus. It is wasp-waisted, striped with yellow, and bears only a passing resemblance to a fly orchid bloom. But maybe the female pupa, not yet fully striped, is more suggestively arousing. One photograph I saw showed three male wasps on top of each other on a single bloom, in the most orderly of floral gang-bangs.
The spikes arrive from France by express delivery, packed in a bizarre assortment of damp leaves rife with Bob’s botanical in-jokes. The flowers are rather faded versions of the vivid garnet and sapphire blooms I remember from Chiltern springs. Several days in the post and several years of romantic fantasising have made a difference. I cut the two freshest from the stem, and indulge in some pseudo-foreplay. I sniff them, lick them and rub them against my lips. They have no scent whatsoever but I can feel a texture on the body that reminds me of the pimply surface of a tongue. What I do next is in full knowledge that I’m not really qualified to interpret what I see, and that my perceptions bear no relation to an insect’s. But I slide them under my stereo microscope anyway.
At 10x the body of the flower is still just about legible. I can begin to make out a covering of fine hairs. Whatever surface they are growing from looks papular and spongy. But I’m drawn to the dark inverted triangle at the top, which looks as pubic as anything in a Palaeolithic fertility figure. Against my will I’m already sexualising the flower, caught up in the Orchidaceae’s famously titillating aura. At 100x the blooms are transformed into spangled landscapes. The individual hairs are clearly visible now, and are tipped with iridescence, as if they carried tiny globules of dew. The whole surface of the plant has the glister of organza. And when I shift to the dark patch, which now fills my whole field of view, I spot – and can scarcely believe what I see – two glowing crescents on either edge. They’re made up of individual spots of blue, like tiny LED lights. They are the eyes of a malevolent insect from a computer game. I wonder if the light from the microscope lamp is producing these effects, but they are still there when I turn it off. A few minutes later, with the lamp back on, I notice an extraordinary aroma rising from the blooms – musky, sweaty, meaty. Is this the allomone – the chemical which mimics the female wasp’s sexual pheromone – made perceptible to the human nose by the heat of the lamp? It’s no great surprise when, scanning up to the flower’s centre of operations, I spot a minute fly (not the pollinating wasp species) drowned and entombed in the nectary, lured there by the overpowering scents of sex and sweetness.
That afternoon with the microscope was, for me, a journey into orchid inner space. But I doubt that what I saw – the LED eyes excepted – would have been news to any orchid specialist, and it confirmed the modern version of Ophrys species’ pollination. The male pollinator is attracted initially, and at potentially long distances, by the pheromone-like chemicals emitted by the orchid flower. At close range, by now intoxicated by its own hormones, it mistakes the insectoid flower for a female. Once it has mounted and clasped the bloom, the feel of the artificial fur will be a comforting confirmation, and the wasp’s head, pressing into it, will with luck pick up the pollinia.
But wariness about mistaking metaphorical resemblances for real mimicry is still sensible. In 2011 what is believed to be the only night-flowering orchid was discovered in the rainforests of Papua New Guinea. Bulbophyllum nocturnum has at the centre of its flower a more perfectly mimicked wasp than any Ophrys species. But that’s not its lure. Dangling round the body are a cluster of dingy-grey tentacles which resemble (and presumably smell like) some of the local slime moulds. They attract night-flying midges which feed on the real slime moulds, and are believed to transfer pollen as they forage hopefully amongst its appendages. (I wonder if this species began as a conventional wasp mimic, developed proto-tentacles as a mutation, and found that these were more effective as pollinator lures than the wasp likeness.)
Underneath their exotic surfaces, all orchid flowers are designed to encourage mobile animals to make physical contact, wriggle in, pick up pollen, and wriggle out again without transferring the pollen to the female stigma of the same plant (cross-pollination generally being better for a population than inbreeding). They are the only group of plants to frequently use sexual attractants rather than nectar alone. The Mexican bucket orchid uses a system of pollination fuelled by one-stage-removed sexual rewards. It exudes a perfume that is irresistible to male euglossine bees – not because it leads them to nectar, but because it mimics the pheromones that the male bees use to attract females during courtship. Struggling to collect this perfumed wax, some of the mob of excited males lose their foothold, and fall into the bucket below – a modification of the lip – which is filled with a colourless liquid. There is only one escape for the sodden bee, via a steep and narrow passageway. En route it must wriggle under two pollen masses hanging from the roof of the tunnel, which, on contact, instantly disengage from the orchid and become attached to the bee. It will be hours or days after the hapless bee and his backpack have emerged before he is attracted by another bucket orchid flower – and will then go through precisely the same ordeal, the insect equivalent of Theseus’s trials in the Minotaur’s maze. Except that this time the stigma – which lie in front of the pollen sacs in the escape tunnel – snatch the pollen backpack, the orchid is fertilised, and the male bee, once dried out and sober, is able to use the aphrodisiac perfume attached to his legs as part of his elaborate display flight. The South American Catasetum denticulatum doesn’t even bother with nectarous come-ons. When a bee lands on the lip, it fires a small, winged, cupid’s dart from overhead, a pollen arrow, which sticks to the bee’s back with a quick-drying glue and remains there until the bee visits another flower.
The extraordinary mechanical contrivances which orchids employ to ensure cross-pollination – rocket launchers, pistons, trap doors, levers, triggers – were another source of their appeal to the industrially minded Victorians. The Madagascan Star of Bethlehem orchid has co-evolved an exclusive oil-drill arrangement with a single species of night-flying moth, which has a twelve-inch-long tongue, enabling it to reach the nectar at the bottom of the flower’s tunnel-like nectaries. While it is sipping, the moth’s forehead comes in contact with the pollen-bearing stamens, whose farina will be transferred to the next flower it visits. When Charles Darwin first saw this flower in 1862, its insect partner wasn’t known, and in a letter to his friend Joseph Hooker he puzzled over what kind of creature could possibly probe it. Later that year he published his classic On the Various Contrivances by which British and Foreign Orchids are Fertilised by Insects, and on the Good Effects of Intercrossing, and predicted that for the orchid to be pollinated, there must be some Madagascan insect, probably a moth, whose tongue was a foot long. A few years later Alfred Russel Wallace found an African hawkmoth with an eight-inch tongue, Xanthopan morganii, and reckoned that an even longer-tongued relative was entirely possible. Darwin was dead by the time it was found in 1903 but in a nice act of homage, the team who made the discovery named the new super-sipper X. morganii praedicta – the predicted one.
What time span of co-evolution can this extraordinary partnership have involved? Were there intermediary stages, short-tongued moths, stumpy nectaries? The benefits to the moth of having a monopoly on this particular food source are obvious (and its telescopic tongue can presumably probe other flowers as well). But what possible advantages can there be for the orchid in making its pollination so exclusive? Why not open house, with multi-species opportunities? The evolutionary answer, of course, is that it simply happened. A moth with a slightly longer than usual tongue found what would otherwise have been an heirless Star of Bethlehem orchid with a slightly deeper than usual nectary. Over millions of years this process was progressively repeated, eventually rewarding moth and orchid with membership of the exclusive Twelve Inch Deep Club.
Darwin was obsessed by the possible dangers of self-pollination. There were personal reasons for this, as he had married his first cousin and fretted throughout his life about the effects this might have on his children. Nonetheless he puzzled about the immense difficulties orchids presented to their cross-pollinators, and admitted that there was much he didn’t understand. When it came to the fly orchid he wrote openly that ‘what induces insects to visit these flowers I can at present only conjecture’. He could cope with the sexual side of the answer, but maybe not with the idea of such deceit in God’s creation. Worse, the laboriously evolved obstacle courses often seemed to work too well, and his careful experiments and observations showed that successful collection of pollinia was far from universal. ‘Something seems to be out of joint in the machinery of its life,’ he concluded – a rare criticism of the efficiency of evolution. (It is touching to see the great man confess confusion like this, but still keep his essential Darwin-ness, like a duck in winter plumage.) On the occasions orchids are successfully pollinated they produce immense quantities of seed, presumably by way of compensation, though Darwin did not excuse them on this count. He thought it ‘a sign of lowness of organisation … a poverty of contrivance’. The bee orchid, inconveniently, seemed to be far more successful by playing the risky game of self-pollination.
Darwin’s orchid book is a reverent and acutely observed account of the mechanisms of plant reproduction, and also an honest admission that his theories about the evolutionary benefits of cross-pollination did not always fit the facts of the plant world. More than forty years later, Maurice Maeterlinck put a confidently vitalist gloss on the same processes. He accepts Darwin’s theory of natural selection but believes that evolution is driven by some innate and purposeful life force. Also, perhaps, by the plants themselves, using an unconscious ‘vegetable intelligence’ (and thus prefiguring twenty-first-century discoveries).
In The Intelligence of Flowers (1907), he gives a fanciful but botanically accurate account of the pollination of the star species of my valley, the early marsh orchid. It begins with the usual entry of the nectar-seeking insect (often a fly), which inadvertently picks up pollen sacs en route:
So there we have the insect capped with two upright horns in the shape of a champagne bottle. Unconscious artisan of difficult work, it next visits a neighbouring flower. If the horns remain stiff, they will simply strike with their pollen packets those other packets whose feet are soaking in the watchful stoup, and nothing will issue from the intermingling of pollens. Here the genius, experience and foresight of the orchid stand out. It has calculated to the last second the time required by the insect to suck the nectar and move to the next flower, and it had figured this out to be on average a thirty-second interval. We have seen that the packets of pollen are borne on two short stems inserted into the sticky pellets; now, at the point of insertion, we find, beneath each stem, a small membranous disc whose sole function is, after thirty seconds, to contract and to fold each of these stems, so that they describe a ninety-degree arc. It is the result of a fresh calculation, on this occasion not in time, but in space. The two horns of pollen that cap the nuptial messenger are now horizontal and pointing in front of the head, so that, when it enters the next flower, they will strike precisely against the two welded stigmas beneath the overhanging stoup.
An image of Marcel Marceau presses irresistibly into my mind when I read this account of an elaborate act of botanical burlesque. It’s intriguing how anthropocentric images and analogies work in Maeterlinck’s description. He begins with a clear statement that the orchid is an ‘unconscious artisan’, but then talks of its ‘genius, experience and foresight’. He is being metaphorical, suggesting that the orchid’s evolved reflexes seem to show these conscious human qualities. But ‘calculated’ is a more contentious word, suggesting an ongoing, intelligent process. If the interval between the arrival of the insect and the contraction of the pollen-stem discs is indeed always thirty seconds, regardless of the speed at which the insect conducts its ‘difficult work’, then the contraction is simply another evolved reflex, ending up with some tardy insects picking up fewer pollinia than they might. But if the orchid is able to alter this time interval to accommodate insect laggards a much more interesting process is going on, which awaits a modern Darwin, or Maeterlinck, for interpretation.
Orchids’ aura of innuendo and sexual complexity continues to ensnare their fanciers. A century after Maeterlinck, Eric Hansen, by now as intoxicated by orchids as the enthusiasts he was documenting, sees candidly erotic similes in a Paphiopedilum hybrid. The glossy, ‘candy-apple-red’ staminode that covers the reproductive organs reminds him of the extended tongue famously used by the Rolling Stones as a logo. (Did he know of Joris-Karl Huysman’s glossal similes?) ‘This shocking red protrusion nestled in the cleavage of two blushing petals then dropped down to lick the tip of an inverted pouch …’ This might seem like the personal fantasy of someone with a unique taste for orchid porn – until you read Hansen’s account of American orchid shows, and of the kind of dialogue which passes between the judges:
‘Nice lip,’ ventured a student judge nervously.
‘I’ve seen bigger,’ said one of the accredited judges.
‘Big, black and beautiful, but the bugs been at it,’ pointed out a third.
‘Good gloss, but fatal flaws,’ chimed in another.
‘Cuppy, cuppy,’ a woman snorted.
No wonder John Ruskin, arbiter of Victorian aesthetic taste, was sufficiently repelled to consider orchids ‘prurient apparitions’. He also saw metaphorical tongues, though they were lascivious not diseased. One group to which he gave the personal tag of ‘Satyriums’ (he may have meant the monkey and military orchids – their Tudor name was ‘Satyrion’) he saw as invariably dressed ‘in livid and unpleasant colours’ and with the habit of twisting their stalks and lower petals ‘as a foul jester would put out his tongue’.
The lust for orchids began during Ruskin’s lifetime, when the arrival of a suitable space – the hothouse, the aristocracy’s vegetable harem – coincided with the flowering of the nineteenth century’s love–hate relationship with sensuality. Orchids were the perfect dramatis personae for the Victorians’ vision of nature as a carnival of fabulous, feral and occasionally dangerous wonders, which could be captured and staged as cultural, even national, property. The more spectacular the growths that were brought back from the tropics – each of them a small distillation of these bounteous wildernesses – the more imperial expansion made sense. Orchids’ sensuousness and cryptic carryings-on were titillating to the era’s repressed desires, and could be made respectable by domestication and display in the enclosures of the Wardian case and the stove. Contemplating the orchids in one contemporary glasshouse, the romantic novelist Charlotte M. Yonge declared: ‘Their forms are beyond everything astonishing … there are hovering birds and very wondrous shapes, so that travellers declare that the lifetime of any artist would be too short to give pictures of all the kinds that inhabit the valleys of Peru alone …’ She was reminded of ‘a picture in a dream. One could imagine it a fairy land, where no care, or grief or weariness could come.’ Who wouldn’t want a piece of that? The Victorians called the craze ‘orchidelirium’.
It is no surprise that, as with strelitzia and the Amazonian water lily, rare orchids were deployed in tributes to royalty. In 1837 James Bateman disproved Yonge’s belief that orchidaceous luxuriance was beyond the embrace of artists by publishing a monumental illustrated book entitled Orchidaceae of Mexico and Guatemala. Bateman was probably the most fanatical of all Victorian orchid collectors, and by the 1840s his home at Biddulph Grange had the most extensive collection in Britain. He described their flowers as ‘the chosen ornaments of royalty’ and conceived the idea of commemorating them in a book of extraordinary size and elegance, which he dedicated to Queen Adelaide (dowager of the late William IV). The book is a magnificent and lavish oddity. The ravishing illustrations were painted by two self-effacing London women (a Miss Drake, of Turnham Green, and Mrs Withers, of Lissom Grove) over a period of about five years. They are possibly the best botanical studies of the Victorian era and capture the lustre and sculptural intricacy of the real plants. But the text runs like a mischievous eddy alongside, nudging the mainstream text with orchid jokes, improbable traveller’s tales, details of native folk dress and cockroaches’ food preferences in the glasshouse. The accompanying comic vignettes, by J. Landells, add to the impression that Bateman is gently satirising the Victorian cult of nature at the same time as celebrating it. One of the pen-and-ink cartoons shows an entire carnival of zoomorphised flowers: Cypripedium insigne flying out into the night as a witch, a pair of Masdevallia dancing a minuet on their leg-like streamers, two Cycnoches sailing about on their backs as if they were swans. Bateman joins in the visual punning in his text: ‘Cycnoches loddigesii, perhaps, bears, on the whole, the closest resemblance to the feathered prototype …’ But C. ventricosum is closest to ‘the swelling bosom’ of a swan and, if the two species were united, ‘we should have a vegetable swan as perfect in all its parts as are the flies and bees with which the orchises of English meadows present us’.
The tone of orchid fancying was not always as entertaining as this. There was snobbery and greed and an often cynical myopia about the fortunes of the plants themselves. Orchidelirium accurately reflected the social values of the people rich enough to indulge in it. The collector Frederick Boyle smugly decided that orchids were ‘expressly designed to comfort the elect of human beings in this age’, and it was the filling of the elect’s customised glasshouses that fuelled the nineteenth-century plunder of a whole botanical family.
Before the 1830s there were comparatively few cultivated orchid species in Britain which had their origins in the tropics. The first to be successfully grown was Bletia purpurea from the Bahamas, which was coaxed into flowering in 1731 in the glasshouse of Sir Charles Wager in Fulham. It died soon after. By 1789 there were fifteen species flowering at Kew. They included the huge and dramatic flowers of the Cattleya genus, named after the driven collector of exotics Sir William Cattley of Barnet. In the 1830s his field collector found what would soon be called C. skinneri deep in the forests of Costa Rica, and brought back a specimen seven feet in diameter, six feet in height, and bearing more than 1,500 flowers, having purchased it, with considerable difficulty, from a local tribe for whom it was a sacred icon. It survived the journey across the Atlantic and, as the largest orchid ever discovered, enthralled the Victorian public when it was exhibited. But the cattleya with the most romantic history is the luscious, frilly, lavender and crimson C. labiata vera, which first flowered in Cattley’s hothouse in 1818. One of his collectors, William Swainson, had sent him a cargo of plants from the Organ Mountains in Brazil. Out of curiosity, Cattley had planted out the packing material from this collection (botanists often indulge in this obverse of the lucky dip), and from it sprang this prodigious bloom. For a while the plant was the pride of exotic collections, but the specimens gradually died out until only one was left, which was destroyed in a fire. By this time no one seemed sure where the original had been collected. The story of its subsequent rediscovery is possibly apocryphal, but not much out of kilter with the pervasive phantasmagoria of the orchid world. Some seventy years after its disappearance, it re-emerged in Paris, as the improbable but unmissable corsage of a woman at an embassy ball. One of the guests from the British Legation was an orchid enthusiast, and was sure he recognised it. An expert confirmed his guess, and a trail was followed back to the exact site near Pernambuco in Brazil where the plant had been gathered.
Snapshot of an orchid collection expedition in Colombia, taken from Albert Millican’s account of his travels in the northern Andes (1891) and captioned ‘Native Dinner-Time’. The orchid rhizomes are piled centre left.
By the middle of the nineteenth century orchidelirium was in full swing. The owners of hothouses sent their agents and gardeners across the tropics, to Guatemala, British Guiana, Mexico, Borneo and the Philippines. Extraordinary prices – sometimes up to 1,000 guineas a root – were paid for the choicer plants. The most rapacious collector, the Czech Benedikt Roezl, despatched orchids by the ton, and his cargoes often contained in excess of a million plants. The damage to the orchids’ native habitats was devastating. Forests were ransacked. Collectors routinely cut down thousands of mature trees to collect the epiphytic orchids living in their canopies, and often deliberately eliminated a species from an area to thwart other collectors and maintain its rarity value. Forged maps were distributed to send rivals on wild goose chases. A photograph from Albert Millican’s The Travels and Adventures of an Orchid Hunter (1891), entitled ‘Native Dinner-Time’, shows a party of a dozen native collectors, grouped in a clear-fell round a fire and surrounded by waist-high piles of epiphytic orchids. The Director of the Zurich Botanical Garden said: ‘This is no longer collecting. It is wanton robbery and I wonder that public opinion is not stronger against it.’ When a specimen of the desirable Dendrobium schneideri was offered for sale at auction in London, it had – to fulfil a promise made to the tribe who’d originally owned it – to be sold inside the human skull in which it grew.
Many of the orchids gathered so recklessly died, either on the voyage home or in the unsuitable hothouses to which they were consigned. The Western belief in the ubiquitous virtues of ‘fertile’ soil, and an ignorance of the complexities of tropical habitats, meant orchids rarely got the growing conditions they needed. In the wild most tropical orchids have evolved to grow without much of what we would regard as humus, living up trees on bark trickle, or in the inch or so of sand that is the ground base of the rainforest. All dead organic matter is rapidly recycled into the seething mass of plant and animal life above the ground. In the early days of collecting orchids were often plunged indiscriminately into hot compost, the European gardener’s idea of a forest floor simulacrum. No distinction was made between orchids which grew in the ground and epiphytes attached to trees and rocks, and it was not until the 1820s that orchids began to be bought back on the woody substrates they grew on. Before he became involved with Nathaniel Ward’s miniature glasshouses, Conrad Loddiges, George’s brother, had repeated failures ferrying orchids home by sea. He might have grasped the secret if he had been more attentive of the success of an Oncidium from Uruguay, which had flowered repeatedly while hung up in his cabin without any earth, living on air and the condensed moisture in the cabin. Even today the growing shoots of some species are snipped off during transportation because it is not understood that some species send out flower shoots below the roots.
Joseph Dalton Hooker, son of Sir William Jackson Hooker, Director of Kew Gardens from 1841, and Regius Professor of Botany at Glasgow University, collected orchids in the Himalayas in 1850. He left a journal, which shows the extent to which even knowledgeable botanists of good pedigree could lose their senses – and their principles – when confronted by these bewitching plants. It’s doubtful he was wilfully rapacious or greedy, just that the Victorian imagination could not comprehend the fact that natural resources were finite, and not the a priori legacy of the colonial powers. In the Khasia hills, Hooker found Vanda coerulea – that rarest of things, a blue-flowered orchid – growing in profusion in woods of dwarf oak. This was an unusual epiphyte, growing exposed to ‘fresh air and the winds of heaven … winter’s cold, summer’s heat, and autumn’s drought [and] waving its panicles of azure flowers in the wind’ – conditions completely at odds with the standard methods of cultivation in Britain, which penned all orchid species in hot, airless enclosures. Nonetheless, Hooker picked ‘360 panicles, each composed of from six to twenty-one broad pale-blue tasselated flowers, three and a half to four inches across’. They were destined for ‘botanical purposes’ in the inhospitable clime of Britain, and made ‘three piles on the floor of the verandah, each a yard high; – what would we not have given to have been able to transport a single panicle to a Chiswick fete!’ Hooker adds a footnote which seems to go some way beyond the cause of ‘botanical purposes’: ‘we have collected seven men’s loads of this superb plant for the Royal Gardens at Kew, but owing to unavoidable accidents and difficulties, few specimens reached England alive. A gentleman, who sent his gardener with us to show the locality, was more successful: he sent one man’s load to England on commission, and though it arrived in a very poor state, it sold for £300 … Had all arrived alive, they would have cleared £1000. An active collector, with the facilities I possessed, might easily clear from £2000 to £3000 in one season, by the sale of Khasia orchids.’
In the summer of 2013, wooed by the unaccustomed sunshine, I held an orchid show of my own. I was curious about the visual cues that were regarded as the most attractive by commercial breeders; which particular qualities, if any, they selected for. So I bought a few pots from the local garden emporium, at £15 a plant: some Phalaenopsis hybrids, from an Australian genus advertised as ‘Moth Orchids’; and a ‘Spider Orchid’ called ‘Cambria’, which I eventually traced to a man-made group of intergeneric hybrids, originally spliced from two unrelated South American families in the early twentieth century. I put them on my desk, and gazed intermittently at them for weeks.
As whole plants they were ungainly, having, in lieu of a rainforest tree, to be propped up by bamboo canes. They had not an iota of scent (at least not to my nose). The Cambria blooms were undeniably colourful – mottled orange-red petals, speckled peach-skin lips with a golden spot at their top. But they had a kind of stiffness, a too-perfect symmetry, as if they’d been machine cut from dyed fabric, not grown from plant tissue. Put bluebells, or chrysanthemums, or even a flower with sculptural echoes of the orchids like a sweet pea, in an indoor pot and they’re animated even when they’re motionless. Your eyes track the slight irregularities in the petals, follow fluencies and uncertainties of colour and the ebb and flow of tissue tone as the temperature or humidity changes. Not so with these factory-farmed orchids. They gazed blankly back at me, as frozen as passport photos. I tried setting the pots outside for a week amid marjoram and lavender bushes sagging with bees. Most insects seemed quite indifferent to them. A few small flies settled on one of the Cambria petals, but I think they were just sunbathing on the warm crimson loungers. Pollinating insects – wasps, bumble bees, butterflies – flew by, but seemed to bounce away as they passed close to the flowers, like magnets of the same polarity. Perhaps they did not even recognise them as flowers. Or perhaps the flowers did have a cryptic scent that repels insects of no use to them. Based on this tiny but I don’t believe unrepresentative sample, it would be hard not to suspect that the grail of orchid merchants is a bloom which transcends all the unruly quirks and caprices of a living plant and achieves the dazzling rigor mortis of coloured plastic.
By contrast our local wild orchids are models of engagement and high mood. They’re fiercely loyal to season and place – but only when it suits them and the creatures they share a home with. Some years they scarcely put in an appearance. In others they’re munched up by ponies or shaded out by early grass growth. That spring of 2013, perhaps because of the stresses of bizarre alternations of weather, they’d put on an exceptional show. Rivers of the shade-shifting purples of southern marsh orchids flowed along dried-out dykes on the commons. Bee orchids appeared en masse on a roundabout on the A11. Marsh helleborines, the cutest of British natives, with flowers as frilly as barn-dance frocks, hoedowned in throngs in the sedge fens.
One day in late June I went to a favourite and orchid-rich haunt in the Little Ouse floodplain. Market Weston Fen displays itself like a spontaneous wild version of the ‘garden rooms’ template. You walk over a pasture towards a narrow gap in a row of willows and gradually, as you approach the reed-fringed bridge, the fen opens out in front of you. The right-hand section is usually the richest, with half a dozen orchid species scattered amongst a mosaic of boggy pools, ringed with sphagnum moss and red rattle and the mildly insectivorous butterwort. But this time what struck me was some curious tuftings in the left-hand sedge bed. They looked like scoops of ice cream perched on top of the fen – vanilla ice cream, to be precise. Close-to they were clearly marsh orchids of some kind, maybe twenty-five of them, magnificently lush and tall with flowers whose suffused tones were hard to pin down – cream touched with citrus, lemon-meringue pie, cauliflower florets perhaps … I’ve no idea why I was gripped by such a rush of edible similes. It wasn’t synaesthesia. I wasn’t seeing the flowers as tastes. I think maybe they had just touched some long marinated hunger. I’d not seen anything like them before, but they stirred a memory that made my skin prickle, and my mind went back ten years to when I’d first read of that indigenous and apparently extinct ‘straw-coloured’ orchid – early marsh, subspecies ochroleuca. Given what I now knew about the attitudes of avaricious Victorian orchid hunters, my subsequent behaviour was bizarre. I wandered back and forth, glancing down at the plants, keeping my distance, rather like someone who had spotted a ten-pound note on the pavement and wasn’t sure whether to pounce. Partly this was due to the lingering (but nonsensical) fancy that getting too close to the anatomical detail of an organism reduces it, disassembles it as a whole living being. But inwardly I was hopping with delight at the possibility of having rediscovered a returned prodigal, and the niceties of making the flower’s acquaintance had been shouldered aside by a sense of trophy hunting that would have done credit to Hooker. I’d commodified the orchid, and knew it. So I got down on my knees and paid it proper respect. I noted every characteristic I guessed might be significant, and began to love it. Close-to, the individual flowers in the spike looked as if they were locked together in some botanical Rubik’s cube. I noticed especially the delicious detailing of each flower’s lower lip, its skirt, with a raised ridge down the centre and distinct notches in the outer lobes. Perhaps these provided guidelines for pollinators towards the inner chambers of the orchid, which I could just see down the canal at the base of the petals. I raced home and scoured the guides. The plants were indisputably ochroleuca. In a state of some excitement I contacted Martin Sanford, author of the magisterial A Flora of Suffolk (2010). He confirmed my identification, but gently deflated my fantasy that I’d rediscovered this errant subspecies for Britain. It had gone and come over the years, reflecting the drastic changes in the water table that East Anglia’s wet places have suffered at the hands of intensive arable farming. Habitat changes like this are the major threat to orchids worldwide now, far surpassing the comparatively minor impact of modern collecting. Ochroleuca had in fact reappeared in the Waveney Valley at Redgrave Fen in 1980. A single flower had been seen at Market Weston Fen in mid June 1995 – same site, same time as my own ‘discovery’. Now, as the water levels in more of these special places are under the control of conservation bodies, ochroleuca is reappearing, from dormant seeds which have been dreaming under the desiccated peat for decades. In 2012 there were sixty blooms there, just not in flower at the time I’d visited the fen.
Pride in my own apparent cleverness rapidly subsided, to be replaced by pride for the orchid. I’d seen, by pure luck, probably 95 per cent of the entire British population of a plant now on the Critically Endangered List. It is so distinct from and seemingly reluctant to hybridise with its parent species that I imagine it will have full species status soon – if anyone is still bothered about such niceties. It isn’t as conventionally beautiful as some of its colourful neighbours, but impressions of beauty spring from many roots in the orchid world: rarity, exotic history, bejewelled exteriors, fond associations. I find my vanilla ice cream orchid beautiful for another quality, which it shares with my print of Sander’s slipper. It has character. It’s a survivor, an organism that joins up the dots in the tidal fortunes of East Anglia’s wetlands, and the dots in my life, too, from when I first arrived in its ancestral habitat, feeling a mite endangered myself.