Why do orchids have such a fascinating grip on the popular imagination? There are poems, songs, and perfumes dedicated to roses, and famous paintings showcase sunflowers and water lilies. But no other flower has inspired the range of myth and symbolism as the orchid. According to Jim Endersby, the orchid reigns primo in the plant world because it best conveys two essential life themes: sex and death.
Orchid: A Cultural History explores the associations that have endowed this flower with significance, and describes how the orchid’s identity has run the gamut from romance and seduction to decadence and cunning. A reader in the history of science at the University of Sussex, Endersby is the author of A Guinea Pig’s History of Biology (2007) and Imperial Nature: Joseph Hooker and the Practices of Victorian Science (2008). He understands the importance of making science accessible to a general audience, and in Orchid he initially grabs readers’ attention by emphasizing the plant’s historic identity as an aphrodisiac.
The orchid was first linked to sexuality by the ancient Greeks, who named the plant orkhis (“testicle”) and associated it with male fertility. The “father of botany,” Theophrastus of Eresus (ca. 371-ca. 287 b.c.), confirmed its sexual significance when he wrote about the plant’s aphrodisiac properties in Enquiry into Plants. The sexual connotation of orchids became a key part of the plant’s allure, and this mythology was reinforced during the European conquest of the Americas. One Spanish conquistador reported that the Aztec emperor Montezuma consumed large quantities of “a certain drink made of cacao, which they said was for success with women.” The drink (minus sugar) was flavored with spices like chili and tlilxóchitl, or vanilla, which was derived from orchids. The drink was called chocolatl.
Endersby also focuses on the role orchids played in “empire building.” Britain was seized with a mania for orchid-collecting in the 19th century, when the Royal Navy made it possible to import these tubers from far-flung colonies. Endersby connects orchid mania to Britain’s 19th-century transformation: The expanding imperial networks of trade and colonization were nurtured by industrialization and a vastly increased scientific understanding of the natural world. These forces “created the conditions in which orchidmania would emerge and spread.” Because of this transformation, Britain’s orchid obsession had a far different impact than the 17th-century’s “fashionable fancy” over Dutch tulips. Nineteenth-century Great Britain was experiencing a scientific revolution, and orchids came to play an important role in the emergence of natural history as a legitimate science.
The most influential example of scientific inquiry was Charles Darwin’s On the Various Contrivances by Which British and Foreign Orchids are Fertilised by Insects (1862). Written immediately after his 1859 On the Origin of Species, this follow-up was an exhaustive study of orchid anatomy. Endersby describes it as “a key weapon in Darwin’s campaign to win over skeptics by showing evolution at work.” From observing orchids in his own greenhouse for six years, Darwin argued that “natural selection had favored ever-closer links between specific insects and particular flowers, so much so that in a few cases, only one species of insect can pollinate a particular species of orchid.” Endersby writes that Darwin’s orchid study gave natural history “a small but crucial step on the road to becoming . . . modern biology.” As Darwin wrote in a private note, the natural selection he described in his orchid study provided “a theory by which to work.”
Although the author’s main purpose here is “the history of our scientific understanding of orchids,” he also explores orchids’ cultural associations. He opens by comparing how the plants are portrayed in film, ranging from the James Bond thriller Moonraker (1979)—where orchids exemplify both sophistication and death—to Adaptation (2002), a movie based on Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief (1998), which focused on orchid-collecting as obsessive desire.
In literature, Endersby notes that H.G. Wells’s 1894 story “The Flowering of the Strange Orchid” featured a “Killer Orchid” wreaking vengeance on a collector. The malevolent side of orchid identity continued into the 20th century, with one writer explaining that orchids, because they were among the most advanced of plants, were “cleverer and shiftier than all others.” They were actually cunning.
Endersby is especially fond of the role orchids play in hardboiled detective fiction. In Raymond Chandler’s first novel The Big Sleep (1939), Philip Marlowe visits a client in his orchid house, where “the air was thick, wet, steamy and larded with the cloying smell of tropical orchids in bloom.” (The client describes them as “nasty things. Their flesh is too much like the flesh of men. And their perfume has the rotten sweetness of a prostitute.”) A more cheerful depiction appears in Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe series, begun in 1934 and eventually numbering over 30 novels. Wolfe solves crimes to finance his extravagant orchid-growing habit: He had 10,000 orchids living in a rooftop greenhouse above his New York brownstone. His sidekick Archie Goodwin explains:
Wolfe had once remarked to me that the orchids were his concubines: insipid, expensive, parasitic, and temperamental. He brought them, in their diverse forms and colors, to the limits of their perfection, and then gave them away.
Endersby writes that studying orchids in all their realms has provided him with “all kinds of unexpected connections” among literature, science, empire, and sexuality. One of his main conclusions is that since the Victorian orchid craze, orchids “have found a new pollinator—us. By colonizing our imaginations and modifying our tastes and preferences we have been persuaded to assist them with their efforts to reproduce and spread.” He has come to think of them as “fellow organisms,” and quotes a fictional botanist that “as you get to know the orchids, you’ll find you’re sensitive to them, and to other human beings, in a manner you were never aware of before.” If this “bizarre fiction” is true, Endersby concludes, it could help explain the flower’s obsessive hold on our imagination.
Amy Henderson is historian emerita of the National Portrait Gallery.
