What’s it about?
In 1818 a curious root with “withered brown scales” arrived in a small English village, tucked – seemingly by accident – in a packing case from Brazil. Fortunately, the brewer who opened the case was interested in botany; he suspected the tuber was something remarkable – an exceptionally rare orchid, never before seen on British shores.
The root richly repaid the brewer’s attentions: “There is certainly no plant of which I have any knowledge that can be said to stand forth with an equal radiance of splendour and beauty,” marveled one of the era’s leading scientists; and to this day it is considered the Queen of Orchids, the “pinnacle of orchid eminence, the epitome of floral beauty.” Its gorgeous flowers and murky origin story quickly attracted fascinated attention, and the orchid – named Cattleya Labiata, after an early cultivator of an offset, William Cattley – gained hallowed, near-mythic status. The man who sent the packing case in the first place had no insights to offer on where it came from or how more could be sourced. Magazines and newspapers breathlessly covered every twist and turn in what became a desperate, wide-ranging hunt for the “lost orchid,” and its relatives, all over South America.
“Orchidmania” or “Orchidelirum” swept up men and women in the cities, suburbs and provinces in nineteenth-century Europe and North America, driving a massive plant trade, fascinating generations, shaping novels, travelogues, memoirs, even musicals. The rarest orchids sold for their weight in gold, while cheaper plants became a popular sight in the bay-windows of new suburban terracing and “villas.” The biggest Nurseries, employing dozens of plant-hunters, generating fortunes, became household names.
But behind the scenes, the men hired by the Nurseries to do the on-the-ground hunting battled for pay and support. Many were migrants and working-class, socially peripheral figures with little recourse if their employers chose to abandon them abroad. Both they and the local people they liaised with to locate plants like the “lost orchid” and extract them from their habitats were written almost entirely out of popular histories, which lauded those selling the plants as great entrepreneurs of the age.
The Hunt for the Lost Orchid, drawing on a trove of near-forgotten letters held at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, traces the arc of a quest and the people involved in an international obsession. A narrative of far more than a flower, it’s a story of the lives caught up in consumerism and collection culture; of scientific curiosity and exploration; of colonialist over-reach. Shining light, too, on Darwin the man and his theories of species, the book reminds us that the dark side of scientific progress may be exploitation and devastation of the environment. This is a work about the energetic pursuit of what many termed the “horticultural Holy Grail,” but it is also about the engines of the Victorian age – and their consequences for our own moment of postcolonial fallout and environmental catastrophe.
The book is forthcoming with Harvard University Press (2025).