The Orchid Thief

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  Almost nothing is recorded about the lives of most orchid hunters except for whom they worked for, what species they discovered, and how they met their fate if they happened to die on the job. One hunter wrote to his sponsor that in spite of all his discoveries he expected to die anonymously “except for the doubtful immortality of a seed catalogue.” Most hunters were German or Dutch or English, most were young, probably very few had families. No journal of the time mentions exactly where they grew up, how they fell into their profession, how well they were schooled if they were schooled at all. No mention is made of how they found their way around the world when finding your way around the world was not an easy thing to do, or how they taught themselves to identify plants that were nearly unknown. Obviously they were all adventuresome and able-bodied. Apparently they had a good sense of direction, mastery of a few foreign languages, and a tolerance for being alone. Certainly they were men who chose to live a life that offered little ordinary comfort, maybe no domestic life at all, most likely only a sprinkling of money. Chances are they were refugees from the conventions of the middle class. Instead they chose lives that would take them to the corner pockets of the world where they would see things maybe no one else ever would, things they thought were more mysterious and different and beautiful than ever imagined. The great travelers of the eighteenth century had sought out the marvels of the civilized world, those achievements that were man-made and had in fact won out over nature. By the nineteenth century curiosity had changed. It might have been the moment when cynicism was born. The Industrial Revolution was proving that not all man-made advances were perfect and many could be awful. Alfred Wallace, a colleague of Darwin’s, once noted that the English working class lived in squalor unknown to the “primitives” he studied in the Amazon. Nature by contrast seemed pure and bewitching. The great travelers turned away from civilization and went to explore the wild world. Fascination with what man could create gave way to the question of how man was created and what if anything distinguished humankind from the rest of the natural world.

  The British Isles have a limited number of native species of plants and animals, whereas the places British orchid hunters explored had an unimaginable profusion of natural forms. The Victorians were tireless name-givers and classifiers, and they set out to categorize the living diversity they were finding on other continents. At the center of this enterprise was the locating, identifying, and classifying of orchids, the greatest of all plant families. As modern living became chaotic and bewildering, the Victorians looked for order in the universe, an outline that could organize their knowledge of every living thing and maybe at the same time rationalize the meaning of existence.

  Orchid hunters had important and consequential but ultimately invisible lives. They discovered hundreds of plant species, but they are mostly unremembered for it. They were the first to trail-blaze many parts of the world, but no place is named for them, no plaque marks their landings, no one recalls that they traveled across many of those places long before the royally commissioned explorers who are credited with discovering them. What they brought out of the roughest jungles was not just gorgeous and astonishing but also essential to science. They saw more of the world than most men of their time, but finally the world forgot them. I used to think that John Laroche was irascible and self-reliant and enterprising enough to have been the perfect Victorian orchid hunter, but I think it would have galled him too much to have no one remember his name.

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  The very first tropical orchid to bloom in England had not been collected by an professional orchid hunter. It was a Bletta verecunda that a Quaker cloth merchant named Peter Collinson had found in the Bahamas in 1731, a hundred years before orchid hunting was in its prime. When Collinson returned to England he gave the Bletta to a friend named Sir Charles Wager, who put the plant in his garden and mulched it with bark for the winter. The plant looked weedy and dry, but the next summer it produced a lovely flower. Other orchids were brought to England during the next few decades by colonial administrators and returning missionaries who had collected the flowers as souvenirs. Captain Bligh of the HMS Bounty brought some back on one of his expeditions to Jamaica. Cattleya labiata came to England in 1818, when a horticulturist named William Cattley found and cultivated some strange-looking plants that had been used as packing material in a shipment of moss and lichens. Orchids had been a high-class hobby in China for three thousand years. The world’s first orchid books were published in 1228, when Chao Shih-ken wrote Orchid Guide for Kuei-men and Chang-chou, and in 1247, when Wang Kuei-hsueh wrote Wang’s Orchid Guide. During the Ming Dynasty, orchids were used to treat venereal diseases, diarrhea, boils, neuralgia, and sick elephants. West Indians had long eaten certain species to relieve ptomaine poisoning from bad fish and used the pseudobulbs for pipes; Malaysians used dendrobiums to cure skin eruptions, dropsy, and headaches; Zulus used orchids as emetics; the Swagi people prescribed orchids for certain pediatric illnesses; in South America, Cyrtopodium orchids, known commonly as cigar orchids, were made into cobblers’ glue and lubricant for violin strings. Nevertheless, in the early 1800s in England, orchids were brand-new. When the first tropical orchids appeared in England they were hardly more than curiosities. In 1813 the orchid collection at Kew consisted of only forty-six tropical species.

  What changed was that in 1833 William Spencer Cavendish saw an oncidium at a small exhibition in London and decided to begin his own collection. Cavendish was the sixth duke of Devonshire. He was deaf and chronically depressed and was suspected of being a changeling because his father had lived with his wife and his wife’s best friend and impregnated them both. Nonetheless Cavendish received the family title. He always lived alone and came to be known as the Bachelor Duke. Cavendish was an ardent and discriminating collector. He assembled a huge library and owned the first four Shakespeare folios and thirty-nine Shakespeare quartos. He loved plants, and in the 1820s he had served as the president of the Royal Horticultural Society. The duke’s gardener was a farmer’s son named Joseph Paxton who had been appointed head gardener at the duke’s estate, Chatsworth, when he was only twenty-three. Paxton was a sort of genius at making things work. Soon after Cavendish hired him, he built a score of greenhouses at Chatsworth, including one called the Great Stove that was the biggest in the world—three hundred feet long and more than a hundred feet wide and heated by seven miles of pipes. In his spare time, Paxton invented a little mesh device called a strawberry crinoline, which was a sort of skirt for a strawberry plant that kept slugs from hopping onto the berries; in his honor, a popular strawberry species was named the Joseph Paxton and remained in cultivation as late as the 1950s. He named a species of dwarf banana Musa cavendishii. The Cavendish was such a successful banana that Paxton received a Royal Horticulture Society medal for it. Supposedly, Paxton had been inspired to work on breeding a dwarf banana after noticing some Chinese wallpaper at Chatsworth that had a tiny banana as part of its design. All British bananas today are descendants of Joseph Paxton’s bananas.

  Paxton was knighted after one of his most famous accomplishments, which involved a giant water lily discovered in 1837 in British Guiana. The lily was thought to be the biggest flowering plant in the world. A Victorian botanist described it as “a vegetable wonder.” After it was discovered, all of horticultural England was competing to grow the first Victoria amazonica on British soil. Paxton won. His lily floated in a special pond at Chatsworth. It had leaves that were six feet in diameter and a flower that was bigger than a head of cabbage and it smelled like pineapple. The flowering of the plant was so momentous that Queen Victoria and Prince Albert came to Chatsworth to see it in flower. Once, just for fun, Paxton and the Bachelor Duke dressed Paxton’s seven-year-old daughter, Annie, in a fairy costume and stood her up on one of the giant lily pads floating in the pond and took a picture. The image of Annie Paxton standing on the lily was a sensation. The writer Douglas Jerrold published a poem that began, “On unbent leaf i
n fairy guise/Reflected in the water/Beloved, admired by hearts and eyes/Stands Annie, Paxton’s daughter.” Water-lily motifs cropped up in wallpaper, china, fabrics, and chandeliers, and posing a child on a water-lily leaf became a photographic cliché. Paxton wasn’t content to merely balance his daughter on the leaf. He found he could load the leaf with not just Annie but with five full-sized children or the equivalent of three hundred pounds of deadweight. After studying the leaf, he decided that it could support so much weight on account of its ribs, which formed a sort of cantilevered trussing. In 1850, Paxton designed a spectacular glass building, the Crystal Palace, for the first world’s fair, the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations. He modeled the Crystal Palace on the giant weight-bearing water-lily pad. The Crystal Palace was an eighteen-acre exhibition hall constructed of crisscrossed iron girders that supported almost three hundred thousand panes of glass. Nothing like the Crystal Palace had ever been built before. It was the first major use of iron in architecture for aesthetic as well as structural purposes, and its great vault of glass was an engineering marvel. The exhibits it enclosed were impressive—a world-record Grammatophyllum speciosum orchid weighing two tons, the Koh-i-noor diamond displayed in a golden birdcage, statues of naked people, unusual pottery, clocks, fabrics, furniture, and a collection of German frogs that had been stuffed and arranged in human poses, which Queen Victoria reportedly loved. Some exhibits were practical—for instance, Francis Parkes unveiled his newly invented all-steel garden fork, which allowed farmers to turn soil easily—but most of the exhibits in the Crystal Palace were regarded by designers of the time as the most tasteless gathering of junk ever seen. On the other hand, Paxton’s Crystal Palace itself was celebrated as a triumph of design. It became the consummate model for Victorian architects and engineers, and elements of its structure are still used in contemporary buildings. Without Paxton’s study of the lily pad’s cantilevered trussing, his glass-and-ironwork palace would never have been built.

  Once the Bachelor Duke was smitten by the oncidium he devoted himself to orchids and instructed Paxton to develop a collection for him. Within ten years, Paxton had assembled the largest orchid collection in England. Paxton assigned a gardener on his staff to go orchid hunting. In 1837 the young gardener sent Paxton from Assam at least eighty or ninety species of plants never before seen in Europe, mostly orchids, but also an exceptional genus of Indian tree, Amherstia nobilis, from Calcutta. The duke’s reaction to the Amherstia was so passionate that Paxton wrote to his wife: “Then came the solemn introduction of the duke to my long cherished love, the Amherstia. I cannot detail how this important introduction took place; suffice it to say that the duke ordered his breakfast to be brought into the Painted Hall where the plant stands, and he desired me to sit down and lavish my love upon the gem while he had his breakfast by it.” Paxton built for the Amherstia a special greenhouse, where it flourished but never flowered. Nevertheless, Queen Victoria visited it in 1843. It must have been one of the most wonderful nights in the world. The queen and the prince drove their horse and carriage through the Bachelor Duke’s Great Stove, which Paxton had illuminated for them with twelve thousand lights.

  The Bachelor Duke’s obsession ignited the fashion for orchids in English high society that continued for decades. Orchids were seen as the badge of wealth and refinement and worldliness; they implied mastery of the wilderness and of alien places; their preciousness made them the beautiful franchise of the upper class. So many new varieties were being found every day that no collector could ever rest—orchids were an endless preoccupation. Once the vogue for orchids began, the prices paid for the plants, the measures taken to obtain them, and the importance attached to them took on an air of madness. This Victorian obsession, this “or-chidelirium,” was a rapacious desire. In intensity, it was similar to the Dutch tulip mania of the 1630s, which reached its zenith in 1637, when the rights to a tulip bulb named Viceroy were sold at auction for a farm’s worth of valuable goods including six loads of grain, four oxen, eight hogs, twelve sheep, wine, beer, and a thousand pounds of cheese. The most valued tulips were those with brilliant streaks and stripes of colors, then thought to be the mark of distinction, and now known by botanists to be the evidence of a devastating flower virus spread by aphids. The Dutch tulip market grew into something much more than gardening—it became a speculative, highly leveraged futures bubble, which soon burst.

  An average Englishman couldn’t afford an orchid collection or a greenhouse or a gardener or a professional hunter collecting for him. Owning orchids was the privilege of the rich, but the desire for orchids had no class distinction. Average Englishmen wanted orchids badly, too. In 1851 a man named Benjamin Williams wrote a series of articles advocating orchid ownership for everybody. The series was called “Orchids For the Millions.” Eventually it was published as a book so popular that it had to be reprinted seven times.

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  The English were horrible orchid growers at first, and they usually killed every orchid they got their hands on. The director of the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew in 1850 became so exasperated that he declared England “the grave of all tropical orchids.” Even if the great turn-of-the-century nurseries like Black & Flory, Stuart Low & Co., Charles-worth & Co., McBean’s, and Sander & Son were graveyards, they were magnificent graveyards, fitted with handblown glass panels and lined with wrought-iron plant benches. Toward the end of the 1800s orchid science progressed enough to make cultivation more reliable and England’s greenhouses finally started to bloom. The plants were no longer being potted in rotted wood and leaves, and instead were put in a healthier growing medium. Joseph Paxton was responsible for probably the most important advance: the English believed that orchids thrived in jungle-like environments, so they kept their greenhouses—what they called their “stoves”—suffocatingly steamy and hot. In fact most orchids prefer temperate perches above the jungle floor, on trees and rocks in the mountains. Until Paxton experimented with cooler, drier greenhouses, English orchids were being boiled to death. In 1856 the first artificial hybrid—a plant made by intentionally cross-fertilizing different species—bloomed. These early orchid “mules” were a botanical shock. Upon seeing one, the orchid grower John Lindley is said to have shouted, “My God! You will drive the botanists mad!” The breeders, the botanists, the hunters, and the collectors of orchids were all men. Victorian women were forbidden from owning orchids because the shapes of the flowers were considered too sexually suggestive for their shy constitutions, and anyway the expense and danger and independence of collecting in the tropics were beyond any Victorian woman’s ken. Englishwomen and orchids have for a long time had an uneasy relationship; in 1912, in fact, suffragettes destroyed most of the specimens at Kew Garden. Queen Victoria, however, was a passionate orchid fancier. She created the office of Royal Orchid Grower and appointed the celebrated grower Frederick Sander to it. For her Golden Jubilee, Sander presented her with an orchid bouquet that was seven feet high and five feet wide, and a collector named Loher named the newly discovered Dendrobium victoria-regina in her honor. Queen Victoria’s affection for orchids added to their glamour in England and around the world. In 1883 Viscount Itsujin Fukuba built the first greenhouse in Asia. It was said to be as big as a mansion, and the viscount filled it with orchids that English growers, and particularly Frederick Sander, sent to him in Japan. In 1891 the Romanovs, who had built their enormous collection thanks to Sander, named him a baron of the Holy Russian Empire. Soon after, Sander awarded himself his own title. He began to refer to himself as the Orchid King.

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  In 1838 James Boott of London sent a tropical orchid to his brother John Wright Boott of Boston. John Boott liked the orchid so much that he asked his brother to send him more. His brother obliged, and over the next few years Boott built a substantial collection in his Boston home. When he died he willed his collection to John Amory Lowell of Roxbury, Massachusetts, who added even more plants to it, and then in 1853 Lowell s
old the whole collection to the tenant in his country residence. The tenant let most of the orchids die. The few survivors were divided among a Miss Pratt of Watertown, Massachusetts, and a Boston man named Edward Rand, who expanded the collection once again, cultivated a cattleya reportedly as large as a small washtub, and then in 1865 sold his estate and donated the collection to Harvard College. This is how tropical orchids came to America. Right off the bat, they had admirers as zealous as their admirers in Europe, and American collectors soon rivaled the English. A collector named Cornelius Van Voorst, of Jersey City, New Jersey, bought his first orchid in 1855, and by 1857 he had amassed almost three hundred species, including an Ansellia africana that was so large that two men could hardly lift it. General John Rathbone of Albany, New York, started his collection in 1866. He wrote to a friend in 1868: “I was so delighted with the plant and flowers that I caught the Orchid fever, which I am happy to say is now prevailing to considerable extent in this country, and which I trust will become epidemic. In 1867, so that I might successfully grow this charming family of plants, I built a house exclusively for Orchids.”