"You’ve seen one orchid," said my late father-in-law, "you’ve seen ’em all." I endorse his view. To my orchid-phobic eye, these flowers are meretricious tarts, the strumpets of the botanical world. You couldn’t pay me to have one in the house. Someone once sent me a potted orchid in my college days as a Thank You for a favor: I gave it away to my scout (as we called our cleaning ladies).
"Ooh, lovely!" she said.
None of this means, of course, that I should recuse myself from reviewing The Lost Orchid by Sarah Bilston, a professor of English at Trinity College, Hartford, who specializes in Victorian literature. Her last book, The Promise of the Suburbs (2019), was a study of how writers mischaracterized 19th- and early-20th century suburbia as a place of dullness and mediocrity, thereby obscuring not just the cultural clout of a growing middle class, but also the extent to which this new semi-urban milieu was a haven where women could achieve a greater degree of man-free autonomy than ever before.
The Lost Orchid, Bilston’s latest book, would appear to find her treading ground outside her specialist literary lane—trespassing, as it were, on botany and natural history, as well as on the history of science and evolution. But hers is, as she tells us, a story of "Victorian plunder and obsession," and she brings to bear on it her obviously impressive understanding of what made the Victorian world tick—its obsessions with class, with Discovery and Empire, and with the natural concomitants of Britain’s (and Europe’s) economic and colonial expansion.
These preoccupations included an increasingly politicized focus on the "exotic" and the Natural Order (whether of plants, animals, or human types), as well as on the need to come to terms with unsettling changes in technology and science. Man-made marvels and the ideas of scientist-philosophers like Charles Darwin, we’re told, had profound implications for conventional religiosity. In truth, the Victorian era was a time when everything—culture, faith, prosperity, politics, society, stability, national identity, and transoceanic competition—was up for grabs.
What do orchids have to do with any of this? Plenty, according to Bilston, who is a most persuasive writer. She tells the tale of "orchidomania" or "orchidelirium," the first obviously the more elegant word to describe the passion for the plant that was raging around the world from about the early 19th century to the beginning of the First World War (in which, among the many casualties of the fusillades in Flanders, was the finest collections of orchids on the continent).
The central protagonist of Bilston’s story is the Cattleya labiata, an orchid regarded as so exceedingly beautiful that it set off a furious race between plant-hunters—yes, that was a profession some people pursued in Victorian times—to find its native source. "Large, with a particularly lustrous purple-and-crimson bloom," Cattleya labiata came to be called Queen of the Orchids. The flower had been discovered in Brazil in 1818 by an English naturalist named William Swainson. Bilston explains how naturalists—behind their seemingly benign and nerdy exterior—were actually the foot soldiers of imperial expansion, whose job it was "to make sense of a vast globe." They found exotic species—of plant, bird, animal, or man—and carefully combed this global natural chaos into a tidy taxonomical order.
Novelists embraced these botanical frontiersmen, featuring them in Boy’s Own-style stories that cast them as heroes who possessed the self-confidence and intrepidity of a superior civilization out to tame an unkempt and dangerous world of dark men and botanic profusion. No doubt inspired by Cattleya labiata, orchids were seen as the floral Holy Grail by these spinners of fictional yarns. In The Priceless Orchid (1890), Percy Ainslie wrote of a lone British hunter in the Yucatán finding the dazzling orchid he seeks. Albert Millican’s Travels and Adventures of an Orchid Hunter (1891), writes Bilston, "encourages readers to empathize with the white protagonist in his violent pursuit of a pink cattleya." The people who rowed his boats, carried provisions, provided his food, and packed and moved his plants on mules "appear only briefly, in passing." Orchids were sexualized—for the obvious reason that they could be said to resemble a woman’s most private parts. A novel by Marvin Dana, The Woman of Orchids (1901), makes explicit "the association of woman and orchid as objects of desire."
The naturalist Swainson—with whom the story of Cattleya labiata originates—shipped samples of its seeds and bulbs to England, where these bloomed to spectacular effect, yet neglected to record precisely where its habitat was. This was maddening to orchidomaniacs: Brazil is a massive country which, at the time, had a near-nonexistent infrastructure and only rudimentary security, making the job of plant-hunters fiendishly difficult. "Where exactly this fabulously rare orchid grew," writes Bilston, "nobody knew." Owing to its pulchritude and rarity, as well as the unmapped mystery of its origins, this orchid is credited as the species that "incited the craze that would sweep across both sides of the Atlantic"—with Britain, continental Europe, and the newly rich United States in its thrall.
Bilston brings to life a rollicking cast of Victorian men who were the movers and shakers of the orchid world: William Jackson Hooker, a brewer-turned-botanist to whom Swainson sent his samples, was the man who brought the famed orchid to bloom; John Lindley, another botanist, whose Collectanea Botanica (1821-26), a compendium of illustrations, included the most lusciously enduring image we have of Cattleya labiata (reproduced in Bilston’s book, one of a number of marvelous plates); William Cattley, a contemporary moneybags and orchid-aficionado after whom Lindley named the species (which really should have been Swainson’s for eternity); and Frederick Sander, a German-born entrepreneur (and amoral operator) who was the foremost orchid dealer in Britain, if not the entire world (he had competition, sometimes fierce, from Belgian orchidists).
The most compelling parts of Bilston’s book are those that deal with the plant-hunters—like the Swede Claes Ericsson, sent to Brazil by Sanders to find the Cattleya labiata—who venture into impenetrable jungles and up steep mountainsides with little protection against local hazards (whether animal, human, or bacterial). Sanders was a notoriously stingy boss who kept Ericsson on a shoestring budget. His tightwad ways were typical of the business, and so those who were attracted to plant-hunting were usually misfits of some kind, fleeing unhappiness in London or Stockholm or elsewhere for an escape to the New World and a shot at redemption (failing which a drinking binge at the end of each sapping day would do just fine).
In the end, orchid-lust died out as a result of its own success, and the greed of those who sold the flowers. "In its very height," writes the excellent Ms. Bilston, "were the seeds of orchidomania’s downfall." With improved hothouse techniques, the large-scale cultivation of orchids became commonplace in Europe. Prices plummeted, and that which had once been rare and precious became ubiquitous and naff. How could you package orchids, Bilston asks, as exotic and glamorous when they were now grown—gasp—in suburban nurseries, available for purchase at a price within the grasp of every middle-class family in the land?
The Lost Orchid: A Story of Victorian Plunder and Obsession
by Sarah Bilston
Harvard University Press, 400 pp., $29.95
Tunku Varadarajan is a contributing writer at the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and North America Analyst for El Debate, a publication in Madrid.