How ubiquitous the orchid is these days. In our garden centres, supermarkets, shops, restaurants, kitchens, living rooms... I’ve received several as gifts from house guests in the past. Two of those still survive many years later - and I will confess that I am absolutely terrible with houseplants (I am no good with anything that requires any cosseting). Despite some severe neglect, these two orchids have gone on and on, year after year, producing flower stem after flower stem that last months at a time. Along with their highly decorative blooms, no wonder they have been so extremely successful and popular as an indoor, year round, ornamental plant and floral gift. But what I had never really considered was the history of how they got here. With the Kew orchid festival in full swing at the moment, this timely article from Alex Valk sheds some light on the shadier corners of the history of the highly prized orchid.
The dark past of ornamental orchids, by Alex Valk
Marvellous, orchids, aren’t they? So peculiar looking, with their ridiculously long lasting flowers, their crazy stretching roots, their exotic charm. They are so bewitching, in fact, that the world’s wealthy Victorian elite caused irreplaceable, irrevocable destruction to their natural habitats and drove many to extinction in the wild. Everyone knows about Tulipmania. But Orchidelierium was far more dangerous.
Orchids are found in every continent except Antarctica, and we have our own species native to the UK. But it was the ‘exotic’ species which originally captured Victorian imaginations. In 1817 Joseph Banks, who went on to become director at The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, devised a method for transporting orchids in wicker baskets and moss. This development, along with the industrialisation of glass production, paved the way for the elite to bid for ever rarer specimens to display in their sumptuous glasshouses.
The orchids, and the glasshouses, were pretty. But sourcing the specimens was not. Arthur Swinson’s book, The Orchid King, depicts ‘frightful behaviour of orchid collectors, egged on by their scheming employers to obtain the best and the most, very often hunting in the same area as each other, paying spies, and lying and cheating to out-do their rivals.’
Many died on their expeditions. Others engaged in wilfully destructive behaviours, urinating on the plants collected by their rivals after stripping the rest of the habitat bare.
In the late 1800s, Director of the Botanic Gardens in Zurich wrote in The Gardener’s Chronicle: ‘Not satisfied with taking 300 or 500 specimens of a fine orchid, they must scour the whole country and leave nothing for many miles around - the environs of Quito and Cuenca have been perfectly plundered.’
Orchid collector James Bateman, who had commissioned a hunting trip to Demerara (Guyana) on the northern coast of South America, boasted in The Gardener’s Magazine in 1834 that “little, probably, remains to be obtained from that quarter of the world.” Which is not surprising as his head plant hunter, Thomas Colley, made a point of destroying other specimens he found in the wild in order to get a higher price for the ones he brought home.
Let us be clear. Countries had their entire populations of orchids - and the forests in which they grew - completely destroyed. Local people were given no compensation for this loss of habitat, and very little share of the vast sums of money exchanged.
Even in the world of cultivated (bred) orchids the ruthlessness was very clear. Vanilla planifolia, the orchid from which vanilla is sourced, has only become the global ingredient it is today thanks to the breeding skills of a 12 year old boy born into enslavement . Orchids have incredibly symbiotic relationships with specific insects and birds, which makes pollinating them extremely complicated to anyone not possessing an extremely long thin tongue. The mystery of pollinating Vanilla planiflora was solved not by an Oxford educated botanist but by a 12 year old enslaved boy called Edmond Albius who lived on the island of Reunion in 1841. He was then tasked with training other enslaved people across the island on his technique and within 50 years, Reunion was exporting 200 tons of vanilla annually, outstripping Mexico as the world’s largest producer of vanilla beans. Albius died penniless, despite his discovery making billions for others.
Modern day orchids
The modern orchid obsessive will be relieved to hear that the beauties on sale in garden centres have not been stripped from their native habitats and sold to the highest bidder (if they were, they’d probably cost more than a tenner). Orchids are now bred in their millions in laboratories, mostly as artificial hybrids, following the introduction of micropropagation techniques in the 1920s. These techniques are now used across the world and Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) legislation only allows for trade in orchids which have been artificially propagated. So don’t panic - the plant you bought for your mum last year was not ripped from the bark of a tree in Madagascar.
But a black market in orchids is alive and well and is so powerful that even in the gloomy English countryside, the Cypripedium calceolus or Lady’s Slipper orchid was, as recently as 2010, being kept under police protection during its flowering period. The Botanic Gardens, Kew, has extra security in place to protect its orchid collection from thieves, who are now, just as before, hunting for the super rich.
Thankfully, work is being done to repair at least some of the damage done by our Victorian ancestors. The Mathers Foundation, which holds the UK’s national collection of Oncidium orchids, is sponsoring Columbian Orchid Society’s Reserva Orquideas, a 500 hectare site which is being protected for future generations of orchids, plants and people. Meanwhile RBG Kew has many collaborative scientific projects located in Costa Rica, which include constructing a ‘family tree’ for all of its orchid species to learn how to better protect them.
These efforts are laudable. But history matters. Irrevocable damage was - and still is - being done just on the scale of this one plant family. The horticulture industry is still causing huge ecological damage in order to profit from the insatiable desire for pretty flowers, perfect produce and quick fixes: peat based compost, plastic grass, mass produced insecticides and growing chemicals to name a few. Us gardeners must think more about the wider planet - and not just about our own horticultural trophies.
Further reading:
https://longreads.com/2019/10/08/ugly-history-beautiful-things-orchids/
https://edgeeffects.net/orchids/
The Potting Shed Papers by Charles Elliott
Alex Valk is a journalist and communications consultant. She is currently studying horticulture and writing about gardening and environmental issues. You can find her on Twitter @alexvalk, Instagram @valkinthegarden and over on her blog at The Very Green Gardener.
Alex has been paid for this article.
Photo credit: Sui Searle