Seven Flowers

by Jennifer Potter

  The first American orchid to arrive in Europe, as cured pods rather than growing plants, was vanilla (Vanilla planifolia), which the Spanish found in Mexico, where it was used to flavour chocolate, the Aztec ruler Moctezuma’s favourite drink. According to an Aztec herbal of 1552, the dried flowers were also ground with other ingredients, placed inside a Mexican magnolia and hung about the neck as a charm to safeguard travellers. Even before the Spanish conquest, vanilla pods reportedly reached Europe as a perfuming agent, although it would be 300 years before vanilla was successfully transplanted to its current centres of production in Indonesia, Madagascar, China, Mexico, the Comoros and elsewhere. Clusius included the dried pods in a late work on exotic fruits and trees, having received a specimen from Hugh Morgan, apothecary to Queen Elizabeth I, but he provided little information about where it came from or what its uses were.

  As the world gradually opened up to European inspection, doctors, naturalists, diplomats and priests travelling to the tropics sent back reports and sometimes dried herbarium specimens of more native orchids: Hans Sloane from his travels in Jamaica (although he mistook the epiphytic orchids he saw for other plants); the Dutch colonial administrator Hendrik van Rheede tot Drakenstein from the Malabar coast of southern India; Engelbert Kaempfer from Japan and Java; the Jesuit missionary Georg Joseph Kamel from the Philippines; and the German botanist Georg Eberhard Rumphius from the Dutch East Indies. The Dutch can also take credit for cultivating the first tropical orchid in Europe: a Caribbean orchid listed as an Epidendrum (the name then given to all epiphytic orchids), introduced from Curaçao to the Dutch garden of grand pensionary Casper Fagel, and hand somely illustrated in Paul Hermann’s Paradisus Batavus of 1698 – the first woodcut of a tropical orchid to appear in Europe.

  It would be more than thirty years before England succeeded in flowering its first tropical orchid: a species now known as Bletia purpurea, despatched from New Providence Island in the Bahamas (sender not recorded) to the Quaker cloth merchant Peter Collinson. Although the plant arrived in a desiccated condition, Collinson took the tubers to Admiral Sir Charles Wager, who owned a fine garden of exotics at Parsons Green in London. Wager had them mulched in a bed of bark for the winter, and by the following summer they had produced purple flowers. Philip Miller gives a confusing account of this particular orchid’s provenance, suggesting that his own roots of the plant had come from the Bahamas, Jamaica (‘where the late Doctor Houstoun found it growing plentifully on the Mountains’) and from Collinson’s American plant hunter John Bartram in Pennsylvania, where it surely would not have survived a winter outdoors.

  But tropical orchids were nonetheless slow to enter cultivation in Europe. Although Linnaeus had included orchids from Asia, the Caribbean and South America in Species Plantarum (1753), those he examined personally would almost all have been dried herbarium specimens. Records for the royal gardens at Kew show, by contrast, the rate at which living orchids were gradually entering the collections of wealthy patrons. In 1768 Princess Augusta, the Dowager Princess of Wales, was growing just twenty-four sorts of orchid at Kew, mostly European natives and much the same ones that Philip Miller had included in his Gardeners Dictionary of the same year. Twenty-one years later, George III’s gardener William Aiton recorded a more impressive collection, with native orchids from Europe, North America, the Cape (despatched by Kew’s first plant collector, Francis Masson), Canada, Newfoundland and the West Indies (Bletia purpurea, for example, which Aiton credits to Dr William Houston). Also included was Phaius tankervilleae, which came from China and was introduced in about 1778 by the Quaker plantsman Dr John Fothergill.

  The great expansion in Kew’s tropical orchids began during the tenure of Aiton’s son William Townsend Aiton, whose updated Hortus Kewensis of 1810–13 contained thirty-two pages of native and foreign orchids, including forty-six tropical species from the West and East Indies, South America and Asia, and some twelve more from Australia and South Africa. Nearly all the tropical orchids were lowland or terrestrial species, as epiphytes could not survive the growing methods then employed.

  Credit for introducing many of Kew’s early tropical orchids goes to some of the great names in plant exploration and botanical imperialism: Sir Joseph Banks, who had travelled to Australia with Captain Cook and advised King George III on all matters scientific and horticultural; Vice Admiral William Bligh, whose concern for his precious cargo of breadfruit sparked mutiny on the Bounty; William Kerr, Kew’s first resident plant collector in China; William Roxburgh, superintendent of Calcutta’s Botanic Garden; and Gilbert Slater and Thomas Evans, both with East India Company connections and fine gardens of exotics on the outskirts of London.

  With strange new orchids arriving from afar, orchid fever was slowly spreading among the upper stratum of society, fanned by a remarkable coincidence of factors at once technical, social, cultural and political. Technology and methods of cultivation were advancing, and gardeners began to realize that ‘“Rule of Thumb” succeeds not in growing orchids but in killing them’, just as the strange, unearthly beauty of tropical orchids caught the fancy of rich collectors able to finance collecting expeditions around the globe and to grow their precious booty back home. Commerce played a part, too, as a small band of specialist nurseries financed collecting expeditions of their own: first Loddiges in Hackney; then James Veitch of Killerton, Exeter and later Chelsea; and from the 1870s, Frederick Sander at St Albans in Hertfordshire.

  As with any craze, rumour and counter-rumour played their part. One of the earliest imported orchids to set the pulse racing was Cattleya labiata, reputedly collected by William Swainson in the Organ Mountains of Brazil in 1818 and sent as packing material around a consignment of other tropical plants to a renowned collector of exotics, Mr William Cattley of Barnet near London. Cattley was curious enough to plant his packing material, so the story goes, producing the first of the species to flower; when later collectors failed to find any trace of this finely coloured orchid – a pale lavender with a prominent crimson lip – it joined the list of supposedly ‘lost orchids’ that drove people wild.

  In fact Swainson found his Cattleya a thousand miles north of Rio in Pernambuco, sending it on to William Jackson Hooker, who would shortly take up the chair of botany at Glasgow University before assuming the directorship of Kew. Hooker judged his Cattleya ‘the most splendid, perhaps, of all Orchidaceous plants, which blossomed for the first time in Britain in the stove of my garden in Suffolk, during 1818, the plant having been sent to me by Mr W. Swainson during his visit to Brazil’. Either Swainson or Hooker sent it on to Cattley, as a fine drawing of one flowering in Barnet in November 1820 appeared in a part-work of rare and curious exotic plants growing in British gardens. The author was John Lindley, soon to become Assistant Secretary to the Horticultural Society of London and the world’s leading orchidologist. Like Hooker, Lindley considered it ‘the handsomest species of the order we have ever seen alive’, and took the opportunity to name the genus after his friend and patron Cattley, ‘whose ardour in the collection, and whose unrivalled success in the cultivation of the difficult tribe of plants to which it belongs, have long since given the strongest claims to such a distinction’.

  In addition to fine plants, the craze for collecting orchids depended on example – patrons with the wealth and passion to make each new find desirable and therefore valuable. Leading the field among the British upper classes was William George Spencer Cavendish, sixth Duke of Devonshire, aided by his talented young gardener Joseph Paxton, whose prestige would earn him a knighthood and a seat in Parliament. Both gardener and duke became avid orchid enthusiasts, their acquaintance dating back to 1823, when Paxton went to work at the Horticultural Society’s experimental garden in Chiswick, on land leased to the society by the duke. Three years later Paxton joined the duke at Chatsworth in Derbyshire, where he assisted in the gardens’ extraordinary transformation. Wealthy enough to send a dedicated plant collector, John Gibson, to the mountains of Assam, the duk
e built up within ten years the largest private collection of tropical orchids in Britain – upwards of 240 varieties by 1834, or nearly a quarter of all types then known, when just a few years earlier the Jardin du Roi in Paris could muster only nineteen orchids in total. (By 1840, Lindley was able to catalogue 1,980 species known to him.) Profoundly deaf, the duke never married and flowers became a ‘necessity of his existence’. In later years, when succumbing to bouts of melancholy, his pleasure was to be wheeled before some object of beauty, on which he would gaze to cheer his spirits, such is the curative power of flowers.

  Recognizing that Britain was becoming in effect the graveyard of tropical orchids – a remark attributed to Joseph Dalton Hooker – Paxton insisted on separate houses for orchids from different climates, maintaining lower temperatures and more efficient ventilation than were then the norm, and keeping walkways well watered. For epiphytes, he followed Sir Joseph Banks in recommending a planting basket containing chopped moss and vegetable mould, spreading a little more moss over the roots and hanging the basket from the rafters. Once the orchid had been coaxed into flower, ‘it may be taken down, and hung up in a warm room of a dwelling house, where, if treated with care, its flowers will continue for a long time’.

  Chatsworth’s success with orchids was warmly applauded by John Lindley, who dedicated his great work on orchids, Sertum Orchidaceum, to the duke, commending to him ‘this history of some of the most beautiful of his favourite flowers’. Lindley could barely contain his excitement as he described the weird and wonderful introductions then entering cultivation, such as the Mexican orchid, Stanhopea devoniensis (now S. hernandezii), which first flowered at Chatsworth in 1837, opening its ‘large rich leopard-spotted blossoms, in all the perfection of their singular form and deep soft colours’ and releasing a heady scent of wintersweet, heliotrope and a perfume called Maréchal. Enjoying its first British flowering in the same year at Loddiges’ Hackney nursery was a charming Chinese orchid, Dendrobium nobile, bought in the markets of Macao by John Reeves, an inspector of tea for the Honourable East India Company, and later supplied as a living plant to Loddiges nursery. From Burma came minute epiphytic orchids resembling insects and tiny animals (Oberonia rufilabris). ‘If the Brahmins had been botanists,’ mused Lindley, ‘one might have fancied they took their doctrine of metempsychosis [the transmigration of the soul] from these productions.’ Also from Mexico, and imported by a Mr Barker from Birmingham, came Cycnoches maculatum, which might once have kept botanists talking for a fortnight, but which now excited only a passing glance of admiration from devotees: ‘Surely it is one of the most curious productions of nature in her wildest mood,’ wrote Lindley. ‘Did any one ever see such a flower before? Which is the top, which is the bottom? What are we to call that long club foot? which is cloven, too; and what the crooked fingers daggled with blood, which spread from the middle of one of the leaves, as if about to clutch at something?’

  A name that crops up repeatedly in works by Lindley and other writers of the times is James Bateman, the creator of the splendidly eclectic, high-Victorian garden at Biddulph Grange in Staffordshire and a renowned orchid scholar himself. Bateman’s particular favourites were South and Central American orchids, and he pioneered cool cultivation techniques suited to Odontoglossum species from the cloud forests of Central America. In a field noted for hyperbole, his monumental work, The Orchidaceae of Mexico and Guatemala, is one of the largest volumes ever produced, meriting a cartoon by his friend George Cruikshank in which this ‘librarian’s nightmare’ had to be raised by pulleys.

  23. The librarian’s nightmare: woodcut from a drawing by George Cruikshank in James Bateman’s The Orchidaceae of Mexico and Guatamala (1837–43).

  Like the Duke of Devonshire, Bateman used his wealth to finance plant-hunting expeditions, and he established a special relationship with George Ure Skinner, a Scottish trader resident in Guatemala who came to orchids late (birds and insects were his first loves in natural history) and then threw himself wholeheartedly into scouring the forests, ‘as if bewitched by the magic of the flower, seeking its secret habitats’. Skinner’s Guatemalan orchids helped Bateman to build up an impressive collection at his family home of Knypersley Hall; and Veitch’s Chelsea nursery later set aside a whole glasshouse to receive Skinner’s introductions. In all, he takes credit for nearly a hundred new species, among them Barkeria skinneri, which Bateman asked Lindley to name after its discoverer, and Lycaste skinneri; the white variety of the latter, renamed L. virginalis, is Guatemala’s national flower.

  You can sense Skinner’s delight on finding an epiphytic orchid, Epidendrum stamfordianum, while paddling his canoe beside the margins of a great lake near Isabel, Guatemala, where he had been detained by cholera. The orchid hung suspended over the water, emitting a perfume of violets. ‘For twenty minutes I stood gazing at it before I could prevail upon myself to disturb it; but I found it in such abundance, and in such splendid flower withal, that I at length nearly filled my canoe before I could stay my hand, fancying each specimen finer than the one before it.’

  In an intriguing echo of tulip fever, Skinner was responsible for arranging auctions of orchids at Mr Stevens’s auction rooms in 38 King Street, Covent Garden, where collectors sold their new plants and orchid enthusiasts could dispose of their collections, among them James Bateman and Mrs Lawrence of Ealing Park, one of the few women of the time to collect orchids on any scale. The first auction devoted purely to orchids was held in 1842, and auctions continued through to the 1880s, selling plants from Skinner himself and some of the great collectors of the day: men like the Bohemian Benedict Roezl, described as ‘perhaps the most intrepid orchid collector who ever lived’; Jean Linden, a native of Luxembourg, who helped to establish Belgium’s orchid trade; the Pole Josef Ritter von Rawicz Warszewicz; nurserymen Loddiges and Frederick Sander; and a few orchids from ‘Zulu country’ consigned by the English plant hunter Robert Plant. The trade in orchids was truly international, with London at its heart.

  A barometer to changing fashions, the prices achieved at auction reflected scarcity values and show how deep pockets were needed to acquire the choicest, rarest orchids. At her death in 1855, Mrs Lawrence’s collection raised nearly £1,000 over two days; her whole estate of Ealing Park had cost just £9,000 less than twenty years earlier. Having inherited his mother’s love of orchids, her son Sir Trevor Lawrence paid £235 in 1883 for a new Cat’s tail orchid (Aerides) introduced by Frederick Sander, but most orchids sold for much less. If you were vigilant it was possible to pick up a bargain, according to advice from the prolific writer on orchids, Benjamin Samuel Williams, whose articles on ‘Orchids for the Million’ in the Gardeners’ Chronicle expanded into the best-selling The Orchid-Grower’s Manual, which went through seven editions between 1852 and 1894.

  Stevens’s orchid auctions long outlived their originator, George Ure Skinner, who became – like so many other plant hunters – a martyr to his passion. When past sixty, Skinner returned to Guatemala for one last visit to wind up his affairs. Delayed in Panama by overcrowding on the weekly boat to Guatemala, he went collecting with his usual enthusiasm, returning to the Caribbean coast for Sunday’s divine service and dining that night on board the Danube. Here he is supposed to have caught yellow fever, reported James Bateman to the Royal Horticultural Society in February 1867, ‘for on Monday he felt uncomfortable, was very ill on Tuesday, and died on Wednesday, the 9th of January’. The ship bringing news of his death also carried a last letter to his old friend James Veitch of the Royal Exotic Nursery at Chelsea, ‘written in high spirits and full of plant gossip’.

  SKINNER’S CORRESPONDENT WAS the son of the original James Veitch who had greatly expanded his father’s nursery at Killerton in south Devon, buying additional land in Exeter in 1832. In 1853, the firm was offered the London nursery of Messrs Knight & Perry in the King’s Road, Chelsea, and with the younger Veitch in charge it developed one of the most extensive and valuable stocks of exotic plants in the c
ountry. Loddiges had just closed on the expiry of their lease, leaving Veitch’s Exotic Nursery as the undisputed king of the orchid nurseries, financing its own plant hunters – the Cornish brothers William and Thomas Lobb had collected for the company since the early 1840s, William in South America, and Thomas in India and South-East Asia – and displaying their plants in a ‘plain yet elegant conservatory somewhat Grecian in its style’. The description comes from an occasional country correspondent to Gardeners’ Chronicle, writing in 1859, who was plainly awed by the sheer variety and splendour of the orchids on display: after the temperate fern house he passed open-mouthed to a glasshouse devoted entirely to aerial orchids, ‘all glowing with health, whilst the air is filled with a delicious perfume such as the beautiful wax-like flowers of these Orchids alone can give’. After another turn he landed in a swamp of pitcher plants, then crossed the nursery’s central path to a house filled with Cattleyas, and two more devoted to ‘parasitical natives’ from tropical forests, temperate orchids and tree ferns. Here the correspondent picked out a blaze of Odontoglossum grande, ‘a perfect bank of butterfly-like flowers, the finest of the kind I have ever seen’, their success attributed to the nursery’s skill in approximating the climate and growing habits of plants in their native lands, ‘instead of jumbling them up together as is often done, to the utter ruin and destruction of many valuable plants’.

  By the time the company published its history in 1906, it claimed to have introduced nearly 240 principal orchid species into cultivation, among them the beautiful blue Vanda coerulea from the Khasi hills of north-eastern India, whose story illuminates the joys and perils of orchid hunting but also the lasting damage inflicted on native habitats by overzealous collecting. First spotted by the explorer and botanist William Griffith in 1837, it was rediscovered in 1850 by Joseph Dalton Hooker on his Himalayan journey, after crossing unhealthy marshes where he and his party had the ‘misfortune’ to lose one of their servants to fever. In a curious sacred grove of fig and banyan trees they stumbled across ‘an immense flowering tuft’ of the flower he judged ‘the rarest and most beautiful of Indian orchids’, which they then found growing in great profusion in oak woods near the village of Lernai. They collected ‘seven men’s loads of this superb plant for the Royal Gardens at Kew’, and a further 360 flower panicles as herbarium specimens, enough to form three piles on the veranda floor, each a yard high.