Episode 337: Orchid Obsession

00:00:01.580 –> 00:00:07.480 <v Sarah Wilson>This is the Roots and All Podcast, and I’m your host, Sarah Wilson. Join me as I talk about all aspects of garden, with some of the top horticulturists from around the world. In this episode, I’m joined by author Sarah Bilston to explore the strange allure of orchids and the daring and often destructive pursuits of the plant hunters who sought them. We delve into the economic and ecological entanglements of botany, the lasting impacts of orchidomania on countries like Brazil and what we risk losing when we oversimplify the tangled roots of horticultural history.

00:00:37.380 –> 00:00:43.380 <v Sarah Bilston>I was born and raised in Suffolk, and so my parents bought a house. When I say in the middle of the fields, I really mean that. I mean, it was fields on all four sides. So I really grew up in the countryside and lived there until I was 18 when I went to the University College London. And I went to study English literature and then went from there to Oxford to do my PhD. And then after that, I moved to the States in 2001. But I’ve retained really close connections to Suffolk. My mother lived there until actually a month ago when she died. But I sort of stayed very connected to England, to Suffolk in particular, and to the countryside. And I think that’s perhaps partly why I’ve always been really interested in, and I’ve written quite a bit about gardens, gardening, horticulture, even before this most recent book on orchids.

00:01:31.160 –> 00:01:47.500 <v Sarah Wilson>I’m sorry to hear about your mum. But lovely still that you’ve kept that tie in to Suffolk, because I think that the book that you’ve written, it’s very connected to the whole English horticultural scene, albeit kind of international as well, because it spreads around the globe, this whole crazy thing around orchids. But can you just first tell us about the book? But also, did you set out to do something when you started writing the book, or were you just kind of seeing where this story took you?

00:01:57.080 –> 00:01:58.340 <v Sarah Bilston>So that’s a great question. So basically, my last book was called The Promise of the Suburbs, because I’m a specialist in the literature of the British 19th century. And I was really interested in writing about how Victorians experienced the suburbs as they were growing, right? So if we go, and by the way, I’ll come back to orchids in just a minute, I promise. But if we walk into any city like London, like Manchester, we’ll see huge amounts of the work that the Victorians did building out the suburbs. And it had long been said that there was nothing really written about that, and that that was an odd phenomenon, and that Victorians, it was almost as if they hadn’t noticed it. And my book was about the fact that they had noticed it. And so it was really all about the literature and the literary response to the suburbs in the 19th century, and was also asking why have we not noticed it before? And one answer to that question was actually women wrote about it quite a lot, and we actually haven’t tended to be quite so interested in literature that women wrote. For example, writing about interior decoration and gardening, which of course were activities that women were very involved in. And so I had a whole chapter on the literature of the suburban garden. And as I was writing that, so this is the last book, not this new one, I kept on noticing references to orchids and to this phenomenon called orchidomania. And obviously, I had heard of tulip mania, but I had never heard of orchidomania. I was kind of interested that there was even a word for it. There was another word, orchid delirium, you saw them both. And I kept on seeing these references to orchids. And so first of all, I was just, I mean, like any researcher, when you spot something that’s a bit odd, you think you want to figure out what’s going on. But the other thing I found surprising was all these references to orchids in literature that was aimed not at like really elite collectors, but people who lived in the suburbs. And these were really the new middle classes. And I think I had probably imagined that it was only the rich who were collecting orchids in the 19th century. And so the fact that I kept on seeing all this discussion of orchids in middle class literature, and often as well in literature aimed and written by women, that again struck me as something I needed to understand. Like how was it that the middle classes were so interested in orchids in the 19th century? So that was what got me started when I finished that book on the suburbs. It was in the back of my mind. I kept thinking, you know, I’ve got to figure that out. So I started researching it. And as I started researching it, I, you know, as is often the way with research, I came across another puzzle. And the next puzzle was this, almost always in discussions of the Victorian obsession with orchids written by Victorians themselves, there was reference to something that they called the Lost Orchid. And the story went something like this, that an orchid had arrived by accident, actually in Suffolk, in Halesworth, Suffolk in 1818, and nobody quite knew how it got there, it arrived in a packing case, but it was absolutely glorious once it bloomed. But no one could figure out quite how it got there, or how to recover more of them. But nonetheless, people became really fascinated and wanted more. And so this phenomenon of orchidomania or orchid delirium began, as more and more collectors went out in pursuit of glorious orchids. But that it took 75 years for that particular orchid, sort of the original orchid, so to speak, to be discovered again. And then there was another mysterious story about its recovery, because many different people gave different accounts of how it had been discovered. According to one story, a businessman went to visit a friend in France. The friend was an entomologist, had recently received some beetles, and mixed in with the beetles was this glorious orchid. In another story, a man at a ball saw an orchid in a lady’s corsage, didn’t want to stare too hard at it, but sidled up to her, asked her where it came from, and that was how the lost orchid was discovered. Then in yet another story, a different businessman completely saw a painting of an orchid at the World’s Fair in Paris, that coincidentally was where the Eiffel Tower was first unveiled to the world. Anyway, he saw a painting of an orchid, realized that it was special, and again, asked questions, and so the lost orchid was discovered. As I say, any researcher loves it when there’s a puzzle, and I thought all of this sounded quite remarkable. I thought it was odd that it had arrived by accident. I thought it was odd it took 75 years to rediscover, and I thought it was odd that there were so many different stories about its rediscovery. And what particularly got me, and this is where my literary criticism sort of came in, was those stories of rediscovery, they sounded to me like fiction. They sounded to me like the plots of Victorian novels. My first book was actually about Victorian popular fiction, so I’ve read a lot of those. And the story of a painting that gets spotted, but turns out to lead to clues to identity, which ultimately reveals the truth, that is just such a cliched Victorian plot. So I had this instinct that there was something else going on. I had this instinct that there was a lot of fictionalizing going on. And so really the book emerged out of my desire to figure out what might be going on. And as you sort of implied in your question, I sort of just plunged in and I just kept on asking questions and going back a little bit further and going back a little bit further and looking for letters and finding more letters. Basically step by step by step until eventually I did discover, particularly at the end of my story, quite a remarkable conspiracy. So my instinct that there was something here did turn out to be correct.

00:07:27.380 –> 00:07:41.680 <v Sarah Wilson>And one of the things I think that you again imply towards the end of the book is that it’s very tempting probably as a writer, researcher, historian, and actually just somebody reading, it’s very tempting to try and tie these stories up in a bow. But what do we miss do you think when we try and do that?

00:07:45.180 –> 00:07:53.880 <v Sarah Bilston>So I think it’s really, and I thought about this a lot as a writer when I was working on the book, because as I sort of implied before, there was a lot, I think, of fictionalizing going on. And I think it was quite deliberate. And that’s probably not surprising when you realize there was a lot of money to be made and they were businessmen. I will just say, by the way, I was a bit surprised about this. The degree to which businessmen, the later part of the 19th century, understood the kind of viral stories were a way to get business and to drive consumers to their business. I think I had not realized that Victorians were as good at figuring out all of that as I think they actually were. And so part of what I wanted to do was uncover the story making that surrounded orchids in the 19th century. But I also, at the same time, I wanted to make my own book readable. And this was a big kind of develop for me. I had written academic books before, as I said, but they were very much aimed at specialists in my field. And this time I really wanted to write a book that I thought anybody would want to read that was kind of exciting and it was page turning. In other words, I wanted to bring in story myself, but I wanted to figure out how to do that in a way that wasn’t just kind of reproducing what the businessmen that I thought in my book had been doing, which is to say, using story a little bit dangerously to tell fake truths in order to generate interest. So I was trying to do it in a way that was ethical. I was trying to write an exciting story, but also to honor the fact that not everything does tie up with a bow. And so at the end of the book, I actually very carefully take some time to say, this is what I think I have managed to do and this is what I think I haven’t managed to do. And so partly through that and through footnotes, I tried to, as I say, be an ethical storyteller.

00:09:26.440 –> 00:09:35.600 <v Sarah Wilson>So obviously the business is cottoned on to the fact that if they kind of made this ground story behind their products, then it would, as you say, go viral and sell more. Was there also a case to be made that individual plant hunters or not even plant hunters, but horticultural people, you know, people of note of the time, were they inflating their own part in the story? Or is it just that we kind of have their source material, therefore they tend to get dragged into the narrative?

00:09:54.480 –> 00:10:12.420 <v Sarah Bilston>One of the things that I was really interested in as the research into the book kind of evolved, was I saw that there was a really striking difference between the way that the discovery of orchids was represented in the press and the way in which it was represented in letters. And so again, that became something that I really, really wanted to understand in more detail. And so again, just to say that there was lots written about hunting orchids in the 19th century. When I sort of spotted that in my early research, I was definitely onto something that was so much written about it. But the standard way in which it was represented, and when I say represented, I mean both sort of in print and also in illustrations and paintings, was very much that European hunters were finding orchids through enormous ingenuity and a sort of horticultural know-how. And so this story fit and meshed really nicely with a story that the Victorians liked to tell about themselves, right? Which was that they were becoming very knowledgeable and that they were also using their tremendous kind of geopolitical achievements for good, right? They were taking over the world, but what they were doing in the process was bringing insight and knowledge both to people and to the landscape. Now, of course, obviously, we question that, we more than question that, we recognize all the fake narratives that are behind that story, but that was certainly the story Victorians like to tell about themselves. And orchid hunting was certainly one, I think this is part of why it was such a popular and sort of widely discussed phenomenon. You could see that it fits really well there. So there were lots of accounts of brave orchid hunters, and they could be from a range of different kinds of backgrounds, right? They could be gentlemanly and well-heeled. They could be scientists who were pushing back the boundaries of knowledge and were known to be doing so and publishing books. Or they could be men who were employed by the big orchid businesses. But a common thread in all of those was that they had enormous ingenuity, that they were tremendously courageous, and that they were deeply committed to pushing back the boundaries of knowledge and to bringing the riches of the world to Britain, both to delight true aficionados and also to help scientists understand more about, particularly early in the period, about God’s plan and the species that God had put on the earth. And then, you know, as increasingly theories of evolution penetrated the ways in which evolution and natural selection worked. But as I say, the common thread always that these great advances were taking place through European ingenuity. The letters are stories of utter confusion. They’re stories of circling rather than advance, of bewilderment, of failure, of loss. Whereas the printed stories tend to be about accumulation. You know, there’s a million orchids arrived just this year. You know, we’ve imported 100,000 just in the last season, right? That would be something that businesses would tend to represent as kind of endless accumulation. The counter of that in the letters was losses. Boxes of orchids freezing, for example, in the auction rooms. Orchids dying on the ships. Orchids getting trampled underfoot. Orchids that were discovered that whoever was collecting them had not done a great job of packing them and they got too damp and they had all rotted. And so this was again, what sort of fascinated me was the counter narrative that was not just revealing the degree to which what was in print wasn’t entirely true, but also pointed out more generally just the granular details of how orchid hunting actually unfolded on the ground, which you never see in printed texts. And so again, part of what I wanted to do was really figure that out. How did an orchid literally arrive on somebody’s window sill? How did it get there? And the letters were one way I really kind of figured that out. Exactly how it got down from the tree. Who did it? How it got packed up? The ships that it traveled in, the journeys, the routes they took, the customs houses they arrived in. It was really, I was really curious in kind of understanding that massive infrastructure, which had been quite invisible to us. And as I was doing it, I was particularly keen to point out who else was in that system. One of the great moments of relief for me in the book was when I started finding the names of people. And my book is particularly focused actually in the North East of Brazil, because The Lost Orchid was, it was known that it was from somewhere in the North East of Brazil. And so that’s where a lot of my research focused, but was where I was able to start getting the names of people in Brazil, who were actually involved in that process. So really, I wanted to bring their voices, their stories back into the narrative and show in general, that actually, of course, how an orchid was discovered was not a brave intrepid explorer showed up, looked around, thought, where could this orchid be? Let me use my brilliant knowledge. I can figure it out. Aha, here it is. What actually happened was the hunters would arrive in a neighborhood and would say, I’m looking for some orchids. What do you think? And of course, the local people all had extremely sophisticated understanding of the ecosystems and would say, oh, okay, this is interesting. All right, let me tell you and I’ll show you. And really, it was through their knowledge that the majority of orchids were really kind of uncovered. It was absolutely their involvement that was part of what had been written out in the familiar published story of orchid hunting.

00:15:26.260 –> 00:15:41.660 <v Sarah Wilson>And one of the quotes actually that you have in the book, well, actually it’s a quote from another work and you say, it’s no accident that disciplines such as botany in ecology emerged in concert with economic concerns of finding more efficient ways of exploiting natural resources, which yeah, it’s so true, isn’t it? You know, the more we kind of explored our horticultural scene, the more we just went absolutely bonkers and went around the world just taking stuff. It was an incredible impact.

00:15:50.340 –> 00:15:52.080 <v Sarah Bilston>And I find that so painful, right? Like, I mean, so painful that hand in hand with, I do think a kind of, you know, a deep fascination with plants and the environment in the 19th century, right? Which, and I, you know, the kind of conservation movement emerges really in the 1880s and 90s. And I want to celebrate that in so many ways. And yet, the business of hunting plants was all the way through, about extracting and removing. And I will just say, the Lost Orchid becomes very untangled in the story, because by the 1870s and 80s, as the Victorians are really, really picking up the hunt for this orchid that they want to find again, they are grasping that one reason it might in fact be lost, if it is indeed lost, is because of humans’ impact on the environment. And that that may be why it’s lost, because so many trees have been felled and so many ecosystems have been destroyed. And that does partly, the conservationist movement is kind of prompted by this realization of what has been done and orchids were very much sort of in the room of the birth there.

00:17:03.220 –> 00:17:05.280 <v Sarah Wilson>And another mystery to me that emerged when I was reading it, is it giving too much away to say whether the lost orchid was ever found?

00:17:05.280 –> 00:17:05.640 <v Sarah Bilston>I think in some sense the answer is yes, I really do. And I think that because I was so grateful that the world’s leading orchid biologist in this particular orchid was in touch with me. And he has done a lot of work at Kew assessing the sheets that Victorians put together in which they actually did put dried bits of plant. And he’s kind of assessed them and judged that, yes, he said that the orchid that was discovered in the 1890s, although quite how I do think that that’s a big part of my book, which I won’t give all of that away. But the orchid that was discovered in the 1890s, he said, yeah, I really think this is from the same population. I think they’re conspecific. I think this is The Lost Orchid. But even there, it’s a complicated story because, you know, natural selection had unfolded for 75 years by that point. And the orchids that were then known in Europe up until its rediscovery were all descendants of the original plant. And so, you know, of course, in a deep sense, they couldn’t be exact clones of that. So I think, you know, there are questions about what do we even mean when we say, is it the same plant? And this, again, was why Darwin and natural selection end up playing quite a big role in the book, because questions about what does it mean to say what is the same were obviously very urgent all the way through the period, actually. And certainly did play a part in the later part of the period as orchid specialists wondered to what did they mean when they say, is it the same or not?

00:18:28.460 –> 00:18:37.140 <v Sarah Wilson>Yeah, and it’s really interesting to watch people kind of tying themselves in knots trying to identify this thing and you map all that in the book and it’s great to sort of see it unfold. But obviously you’ve seen now paintings, you’ve studied this orchid, this fabled orchid, and this whole legend sprung up around it. There was a whole industry, literally a mania of people who just, you know, couldn’t get enough of this orchid. Is it proportional to the actual flower itself? Or did the flower just become a symbol for this kind of thing that possessed society and business and all the rest of it, and then made this flower, this particular holy grail?

00:19:03.440 –> 00:19:13.660 <v Sarah Bilston>My sense is that when it was first seen, I’m always moved by descriptions from the 1820s and 30s of people who first see it. And they’ve really never seen anything like it. And they say this is maybe the most beautiful flower. It’s certainly the most beautiful orchid. It is just extraordinary. And they describe it in such kind of lyrical detail that it does seem to me that at the very least, early viewers felt that there was something really sublime about this orchid, that it was almost bringing them closer to God because it was so truly lovely. But then obviously once lots of other glorious orchids in similar colors and shapes and sizes have arrived, it’s hard to see that this particular one could any longer retain that, right? Once it’s no longer just something that people are seeing for the first time. So I do think that by the end of the century, yes, I think that holy grail like quality that it takes on is full because of what it stands for. By the end of the century, Victorians were so excited at the beginning of the era by their own innovation and technology and advance, right? So at the beginning, Victorians, anything with the word new in front of it was great. They loved looking for the new. So the early part of the century was like, we can find new orchids. Look what we’re doing. Look what we’re achieving. We’re pushing out these infrastructural developments, steamships, rail, all the rest of it. By the end of the century, it’s really like there’s been a bit of a 180. The attraction of the old is really what starts to take on this new luster because they feel so anxious about what they’ve achieved. Even as they’re also continuing, don’t get me wrong, to push growth, they’re becoming very anxious about degeneration, about whether the country, whether the nation, the empire is starting to fall apart, and about the impact that they’ve had on the globe. The Lost Orchid, I think, becomes an emblem of that in the later part of the century. Has it been destroyed through deforestation? Has it been lost because of this urge, this mania for the new? Yes, I think by the end of the century in particular, it becomes part of a much greater Victorian angst about what it is that they’ve really done and achieved.

00:21:19.920 –> 00:21:28.940 <v Sarah Wilson>I find it quite easy sometimes with the benefit of hindsight to kind of look back on the behaviours of people in the book, for example, that you’ve documented. But how different are we as consumers and is consumerism today to what it was back then?

00:21:34.940 –> 00:21:36.280 <v Sarah Bilston>I mean, I think that’s right. And again, I find that sort of painful that there were people ringing the bell in the 1870s, 80s and 90s saying, oh my goodness, wait a minute, we are creating catastrophe. We have already created catastrophe. Species are going extinct. Wait a minute, we have to rethink what it is that we’re doing in our relationship to the environment. But it’s very hard to get people to listen, particularly I think when damage isn’t unfolding directly under their eyes. And of course, the damage that was being done in Brazil, well, that was half a world away as far as I think many Victorian consumers were concerned. And they didn’t really want to know. They now had nurseries on every suburban high street where they could buy plants that could make their bay windows look glorious or, you know, glorious plants that they could put in their gardens. And they didn’t really want to know how those had arrived and they didn’t really want to think about it. And as long as the damage was unfolding, as I say somewhere else, they were able to ignore that. And I think, of course, that continues to be a major problem today, right? That if it’s not something that we can immediately see, we tend not to want to think too much about the impact we’re having on the environment. And it’s just very, very hard, I think, to break through.

00:22:54.580 –> 00:22:55.560 <v Sarah Wilson>Agreed. So dare I ask what could be next on the horizon for you in terms of your research and possibly more books?

00:23:03.460 –> 00:23:05.220 <v Sarah Bilston>Yeah, there will certainly be more books. And so I’d written two academic books. I’d actually written two novels before. And the way that I ended up approaching this book, which was to say to do sort of a lot of archival research, but then to sort of figure out how to communicate it to a broad readership and how to make it, I hope, page turning. That was a challenge that I absolutely loved. I enjoyed every minute of working on this book. So it will be another, I think, similar book, nonfiction, but with a puzzle. And I’m still debating on exactly which puzzle to turn to next.

00:23:35.600 –> 00:23:38.500 <v Sarah Wilson>Thank you very much to Sarah for a brilliant interview and book. And thanks to you for listening, as always. If you like this episode, you might be interested in episode 154, Modern Plant Hunters with Dr. Sandy Primrose, and episode 54, Growing Orchids in Your Garden with Dr. Wilson Wall. You can download or listen to the podcast direct from the website rootsandall.co.uk. Please also check out my Patreon where you can make a one-off donation or take out a monthly subscription to help support the podcast. Because if you enjoy the show, please help it continue. I also have a GoFundMe where you can make a one-off donation. Even a one-off donation of one pound helps, and I’ll be really grateful for your support. So please go to Patreon or GoFundMe and search for Roots and All Podcast.