SYMHC Classics: Victorian Orchidelirium

Published Nov 9, 2024, 2:00 PM

This 2018 episode covers the craze in the 1800s when orchids became a status symbol and the cornerstone of a high-dollar industry. Collecting the plants involved adventure and excitement -- and a high death rate.

Happy Saturday. Today we are returning to an episode on flowers, specifically orchids, and the tremendous enthusiasm for them during the Victorian era. This originally came out on July second, twenty eighteen. Enjoy Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. And if you listen to the twenty eleven Tulipmania episode that Sarah and Deblina did you know already that sometimes people go a little mad in their obsessions when it comes to plants. And today we're going to talk about another episode in history in which plants became a status symbol and the cornerstone of a high dollar industry. And while we're not really going to talk about him later on in this episode, I'd did want to mention that this one also brushes up against our episode on Joseph Paxton in the Crystal Palace, because Paxton also cultivated gardens and built a conservatory for William Cavendish, the sixth Duke of Devonshire, also known as the Bachelor Duke, and in that job, he gathered the largest collection in England for his royal employer. The bachelor Duke had also fallen victim to orchid delirium, which was an intense obsession with the plants that was sweeping through Victorian England at the time, and that is what we were talking about today. So orchids date back at least twenty million years. In two thousand and seven, a bee was discovered. It was preserved in amber and it dated back that far and also still had orchid pollen stuck to its wings. A fossilized orchid from New Zealand is dated back twenty one million years. It's possible that orchids existed as far back as the Late Cretaceous period around eighty million years ago, or maybe even longer. Yes, so they survived when the dinosaurs did not. Orchids grow all over the world. The only inhospitable areas are open water, true deserts, and glaciers, and there are species of orchid that grow from the ground, but a lot of varieties are epiphytes, meaning that they grow on other plants or rocks. Some even grow on fungus. They are sometimes mentioned as being parasitic. That's not actually the case. They're getting their nutrients from the air around them. They just kind of need a place to perch. And unsurprisingly for a plant family that can thrive in so many different places, there is a vast range of species of orchid. There are more than twenty seven thousand species of orchid. Some sources will list that number is even higher. More are being discovered all the time. This incredible range makes the taxonomy of the Orchidacea challenging. The flowers of orchids can range from single flowering plants to multiple blooms on a stalk, and this is the most diverse flour family. Orchids are usually pollinated by insects or birds, and the plants have evolved to make themselves as appealing as possible to their pollinators. A lot of times the plants have a petal or leaf shapes that enable pollinators to rest on the plant while they're making a visit. An estimated one third of orchid species have figured out some kind of trickery to ensure their propagation, so there are varieties that look and smell like female bees so that solitary males will come and spread their pollen around. The Dracula orchid attracts insects that usually eat dung by emitting a lot of different horrifying smells that reproduce the sense of not just animal excrement, but also urine and decaying meat. Yeah, that's one of those plants where I will admit just because I like Gothic ethings by virtue of it being called the dracula orchid, I'm like yes, and then knowing what it smells like, hard pass. The slipper orchid has a really unique structure that first offers an inviting drink from its pouch like structure that's like the pebal on the bottom is kind of shaped like a little pouch, and then that will trap insects attracted to it in the pouch with only one way out, and that path involves the insect passing through usually a tight opening that ensures that its body is covered with pollen grains pollinia, and then, once free, when that insect is drawn to the next bloom, those pollen grains are deposited and new ones are picked up, and so on. A single orchid plant can produce as many as seventy four million seeds, and in the while they require exposure to a symbiotic fungus to germinate in controlled conditions like nurseries and home germination, a special growing medium is used instead. Orchids can also propagate asexually through division, when a single plant splits into two actively growing pieces. Yeah, that division approach was used a lot by some of the people that we will be talking about later. The other thing that I think we should mention is that a lot of these orchids are so specific in the way they have evolved to attract one specific pollinator, and it becomes a really unique relationship. Orchids have of course been revered by humans throughout recorded history. They were thought to have aphrodisiac qualities in ancient Greece, they were used to flavor food by the Aztecs, and they have been used in traditional Chinese medicine for centuries to treat everything from lung and kidney disease to tonsilitis and even cancer. While studying the angercum sesquepadale, Charles Darwin came to the conclusion at this flower which has a really deep bloom and then a nectary, which is the glandular organ that secretes nectar. Sometimes it's deep at thirty centimeters, which is a little over eleven inches. They concluded that it must have evolved alongside a moth species that had a unique trait to allow oh it to be pollinated. So to explain how this flower with this very deep well could be pollinated, he theorized that a moth must have a proboscis that could extend up to almost the length of the entire flower's depth. And this particular bit of orchid study has become really famous because coevolution at this point was a very new idea, and because Darwin did not have a moth specimen to back up this theory. Charles Darwin died in eighteen eighty two without ever having his hypothesis confirmed. In nineteen oh seven, though, a subspecies of the giant congo moth, which came from Madagascar, just as Darwin's orchid samples had, was discovered. This moth subspecies, named ex Morgani predicta, was approximately sixteen centimeters from wingtip to wingtip, and it had a proboscis which sat coiled on its head and then could extend twenty centimeters or more. It seemed to fit the bill, but it wasn't until nineteen ninety two more than a century after Darwin's death that scientists were finally able to actually observe and capture footage of these large moss pollinating those orchids. It looks really cool, it does, it's really neat. But what's important for today's show in terms of the work that Darwin was doing with orchids, is that it all happened in the second half of the nineteenth century, and at the same time, particularly in Victorian England, orchideleirium was becoming a significant phenomenon. Botanist William John Swainson is often credited with introducing orchids from Brazil to Great Britain and sparking the obsession with these flowers, but that happened actually by accident, at least according to legend. So the story goes that Swainson had picked up a number of other plant samples to ship back home to England in the eighteen teens, and he used unbloomed orchids, which he believed at the time to be weeds, as packing material, and the orchids bloomed either en route to their destination or just after the parcels were unpacked, depending on your source, and immediately captured the attention of everyone who saw them as great Britain continued to expand its power through colonization, exoticism, flourished. People of means became collectors of rare and exciting things from all around the world, and orchids became an obsession for some of them. Naturally, a cottage industry grew to fill this expanding demand for these blooms, and the second half of the nineteenth century saw the business of orchid collecting growing and selling, reaching cutthroat levels of competition. And coming up, we are going to talk about a man who came to be known as the Orchid King, but first we're going to pause for a word from one of our sponsors. One of the most famous entrepreneurs to capitalize on orchid delirium was Frederick Sander. Sander was born in Germany in eighteen forty seven. At the age of twenty, he had moved to London and started working for a seed company, but he didn't stay there for long because while he was working there, he met a Czechoslovakian botanist named Benedict Rosel, and before long the two men decided to go into business together. Rosel was more than twenty years older than Sander. He'd been working with plants since he was twelve, first as an apprentice gardener and then tending the gardens of European aristocracy. In the eighteen fifties, he had moved to Mexico and set up a hemp nursery, but he had an accident. There was a machine that he invented to clean hemp fiber and it severed one of his hands. He went back to Europe before switching careers to become a plant hunter, and he replaced that lost hand with a hook, and according to legend, that gave him some added cachet on his adventures. Yeah, he apparently was a very tall, striking man to begin with, and then when he had this hook hand, it kind of fulfills every Victorian romantic novel fantasy of like a rough and rugged person. And he is kind of talked about that way even today when you read about him in books about orchids. And when Rosel met Sander, he had been collecting plants abroad for some time, but he had never had a partner who could receive them and then sell the inventory back home, which meant that he would have to travel back and forth with the plants, and it cut down on his time to collect, and because he had been a one man operation, his success was modest. But once Rosell teamed up with Sander, that changed rapidly. The two of them set up shop in the Saint Albans district north of London. Sander had a great head for business and Rosel just no longer encumbered by having to worry about the fate of his shipments. Once they reached England, could just keep on collecting without any kind of constraint. They were quickly trading in orchids and volumes that were way beyond anything that had done before. They had a warehouse adjacent to their shop that was literally packed to the rafters with stock. Rosel worked for decades with Sander, making trips all over the world to collect orchids before he retired a very wealthy man, with dozens of plants named after him and having discovered more than eight hundred different species. In eighteen seventy three, Frederick Sander built his first greenhouse so that he could cultivate his own seedlings as well as importing stock. But within a few years it became obvious that he was really quickly going to deplete that space, so in eighteen eighty one he left the seed shop and he expanded significantly to a four acre parcel of land where he built five dozen greenhouses. He also contracted additional orchid hunters, eventually employing twenty three men to travel the globe and find him new plants. He also wrote a four volume compendium of orchids titled Reichmbachia Orchids Illustrated and Described. It had illustrations by Henry George Moon, which are beautiful. It described almost two hundred species of orchid and was published over the course of several years in the late eighteen eighties. In eighteen eighty six, Sander became Queen Victoria's official royal orchid grower, a title which also gave his business a boost. He had also incidentally dedicated one of the volumes of Reichenbachia to her, and Sander used his high volume of acquisition and production to expand his customer base. Eventually, even middle income plant enthusiasts could afford to possess an orchid because of his work. Sander opened a nursery across the Atlantic in New Jersey to fill demand, but he found running at long distance to just be too difficult, and he sold that business in eighteen ninety six. Two years before he got rid of that North American nursery, he had opened another nursery outside of Bruges, Belgium, and the Belgium enterprise, being much closer to London, was more easily manageable for Sander. He could go over there and stay for a while and handle things, but also quickly travel back home to oversee things in the London office. And that Belgium office quickly expanded, just as his English compound had. I think it too, ended up with about five dozen greenhouses, and that one also diversified a lot and carried a really wide variety of plants, including azaleas, lilies, and palms. Sander was well respected. He had a reputation as an honest, direct and energetic businessman. His love of orchids seemed to have been really genuine, and he won a lot of awards at international exhibitions for both new species that he introduced and for hybrids that were developed in his nurseries. Dealing in orchids was in some ways kind of like trading stocks today, where the values of plants could fluctuate wildly over short periods of time. At one point, according to an account by Sander, he sold an orchid to a lawyer from Liverpool for twelve dollars, which already was probably not the tiniest amount you could imagine being for a flower. But then five years later that attorney sold it back to him for a thousand and While Sander enjoyed the wheeling and dealing, receiving shipments, and tending the nurseries, the men that he was sending out into the world to find new orchids were literally risking their lives. To give a sense of just how perilous this work was. According to the book The Woodland's Orchids, written by Frederick Boyle and published in nineteen oh one, French orchid hunter Leone Humboldt had relayed to the author that while he was collecting orchids in Madagascar, he and his brother had hosted a dinner in Tamatave, which is now known more commonly, I believe, as Tomasina. Twelve months after that dinner, Leon Humboldt was the only man from that table left alive. As orchid hunters made their way around the globe, they really really often met with bad ends. Some of them were murdered, some of them died after run ins with wild animals, a lot of them died of tropical diseases, and some of them just vanished. Yeah, and there were instances where they were murdered, sometimes by other plant hunters. This was really a very cutthroat business. Hunter William Arnold drowned in the Arenaco River in Venezuela while he was hunting for specimens, and that was after he had barely avoided a high probability of death in a duel with another orchid hunter over a disagreement. The duel never actually quite happened, but they were right up to it. Even Benedict Rosel, who was very successful at all of this, met with grave misfortune in his travels. He was robbed at gun or knife point, or sometimes both, seventeen times over his career. His nephew, Francis at Klaboch, died of yellow fever after the two of them went on an expedition together. William Mikolitz was one of Sanders's best agents, and Sander was relentless in pushing him. There were numerous occasions where the man met with ill fortune, and he would cable back to Sander that the trip had gone really awry and he wanted to return to England to regroup, and Sander always told him, no, no, stay there, go back collect more samples. And at one point he even sent him to Columbia when the country was very dangerous to travel in due to violent internal conflict. That conflict had been going on for a long long time, but there were times when it escalated and Sander did not care. He just sent him in to get more flowers. There was a particularly violent experience in Papua New Guinea in which Mikolitz witnessed several beheadings and dismemberments, and that left him really shaken and desperate to go back home, but on orders, he stayed there and found more orchids. He survived his career as an orchid hunter, but he didn't wind up retiring in style. He was almost destitute when he died back home in Germany. Yeah, there's one story, and I feel like we should mention in all of these stories that the people that were telling them were the men who survived. So there is also the probability that some embellishment may have happened in this case, Mikolitz did survive, but there is a story that at one point he had been in the midst of an area that had had a lot of violence for a long time due to various internal conflicts. He had wanted to leave, Sanders sent him back and he ended up finding this orchid that was really prized, but it was growing on a dead body, so he had to kind of steel himself just to collect this flower. That poor man, to me, just seems like so abused in that relationship. But another orchid hunter, Albert Milliken, had several successful expeditions, and he actually penned a very popular book about his job titled Travels and Adventures of an Orchid Hunter. But unfortunately he took one too many trips. He was stabbed to death on his last mission in the Andes. In contrast, there was a pair of brothers, William and Thomas Lobb, who worked as plant hunters for Vitch Nurseries. They both managed to retire from plant hunting rather than dying on the job. While there were definitely a number of business dramas in their lives and there was a great deal of adventure, the two of them bandaged traveling separately to collect a wide variety of plant species, a lot of them are still common in gardens today, and they died after settling down after their wilder exploits. Yeah, I actually have some plans to do an episode just on the two of them and then not so distant future, and next up we're gonna delve into just how very tricky it was for orchid hunters to get their found prizes back to Europe, provided that they collected them and did not die along the way. But first we're going to take a little sponsor break. So in this next section there is a piece from an article that I'm going to read which is written in nineteen oh six. It includes some language that is outdated and racist at this point, but I wanted to include it so you have a sense of how this whole thing was sort of romanticized and seen, and even while acknowledging that it was difficult, it kind of is written in this way that suggests like dashing adventure, because even if a hunter did manage to find orchids and survive, collecting them and then getting to the next step was also really really hard work. This is from a nineteen oh six article which ran in the Washington DC Evening Star, and was written by William George Fitzgerald, who wrote, quote, for difficult as it is to find rare orchids at all, the trouble only begins when the hunter discovers them. He must pack and prepare them for transportation by koli and assam by long necked lama in the Andes, by raft or elephant, and contrived to get them thousands of miles across the ocean in such a condition that at least twenty percent of them will arrive with some vitality in them. And yet ten thousand plants may be collected on some remote Andean peak or Popuan jungle with infinite care and consigned to Europe, the freight alone accounting for thousands of dollars, Yet on arrival there may not be a single orchid left alive. The plants themselves were also endangered by all the very mania that was driving all this orchid hunting. For one, when an orchid hunter found a new species, it was pretty standard practice to just dig up every single to keep the fine to themselves. On occasions, the hunters would also sabotage one another. Sander advised his men to urinate on other hunters halls if the opportunity arose to try to destroy their work. A needless to say, conservation of the ecological systems where they were hunting these orchids was not a priority at all. No Rosal in particular had kind of a reputation for being kind of sloppy and a little bit borish and destructive in his collecting methods. By the nineteen twenties, though, advancements were being made both in cultivating orchids from seeds and by reproducing them through division, and that slowly drove down the delirium that had propelled all of those dangerous expeditions. Additionally, a lot of the men who had been drawn to the adventure of orchid hunting were dead, and the few who had survived were retired. In nineteen seventeen, the Lady Slipper orchid was to cleared extinct in Great Britain. The Lady Slipper, as its name suggests, has a little pouch that looks like the delicate toe of a slipper, and then above that pouch are normally three petals, with the topmost petal usually larger than the two that fall to the side, often there's a little twist. This flower is gold and burgundy, and orchid enthusiasts just could not help themselves when it came to cutting the flowers and digging them up, which often left them to die in the process. In the nineteen thirties, a single remaining Lady Slipper orchid was found growing wild in Great Britain in Yorkshire Dales. That was the last known wild orchid there not the last known wild one on earth. Just for clarity, and even though Orchidelirium had calmed down to the point of non existence by the time of this discovery, that single plant kicked off a refreshed obsession, in part just because of the financial value of the plant. This was so intense that the plant had to be guarded by police and conservation minded volunteers from plant hunters who might try to find it. Once its existence became public knowledge, a group called the Sipper Petium Committee, which was named after the plant's Latin name, formed to protect the plant in the immediate sense and then also to set out a long term plan for its well being. They kept the exact location of that Lady Slipper orchid a secret, and that orchid is still alive today. In the late nineteen eighties, scientists finally managed to propagate the plant and raise seedlings. Those seedlings, once they reached a certain level of growth, were then planted at various other secret sites in Northern England. Although a lot of them did not live to maturation, the few that did survive had to be protected during the flowering season, just as that parent plant had. Eventually, a nature reserve in Lancashire was able to foster a Lady Slipper orchid population that was hardy enough that it is now open to visitors, So that location of the first one is still secret to most people. So there's a real problem in the ongoing obsession with orchids. Apart from all the problems that we've already been talking about of you know, yeah, in the modern era, there are still people that hunt for orchids. If you saw the movie adaptation or read the book it was adapted from, The Orchid Thief, there are still people that trade in this although adaptation, i should say, is a very very loose adaptation of that book. Yeah, So, apart from all the many problems we've already talked about, the problem that's keeping botanists from having the fullest range of information about orchids. Today is secrecy. When plants are discovered that are believed to be valuable, often they're kept totally secret and the interest of profit over science. Today's orchid industry is estimated to be a nine billion dollar business annually, and there are, as i said, still people who smuggle orchids, but that too is problematic outside of any issues of morality or financial ethics. And that's because most orchids evolved in ways that require, as we mentioned earlier, very specific pollinators. It's not like you could take any given orchid and just kind of put it in with bees and let nature work it out. Not all orchids would work that way, so it's often difficult even for botanists to properly replicate the needs of these plants. So collectors who are still willing to pay top dollar for one that is collected from the wild that is maybe rare and exotic, may in fact doom those very plants that they value so highly because care is so difficult that not everybody can manage it. Yeah, but it also means that things that threaten their pollinators threaten the plants too. It's all tied together. Yes, there are a lot of stories if you start digging about, like ecological whoopsie daisies that happen when people are trying to collect an orchid, or there's an orchid that comes and goes. I read one story, and I I did not write it down, so I don't have the details of its location exactly correct. But a botanist had seen this orchid and then had gone back to the place that it was some years later to study it some more, and it wasn't there anymore. And they had found out from a local that there was a fire, and that there were frequent fires because of some industrialization in this swampland, And so they got all kinds of activism going and sort of like stopped the industrial stuff that was causing those fires. And then it turned out that that particular orchid had evolved in a way that it needed a fire in its cycle every certain number of years. So even when we try to intercede in an ecologically sound way, sometimes it does not work with whatever orchid is being examined or desired well. And of course, the day you do not need to travel all over the world to get an orchid. You can buy them at the store. You can order all kinds of them online at for a wide variety of price points. Some of them are still going to cost you several thousand dollars though, Yeah, I mean, it's again fascinating to me the range that you can get an orchid for fifteen bucks if you're very low end, all the way up to you know, many thousands of dollars. Also, I just as a coda, wanted to mention that just in case you think you are not an orchid fan, or you're not into them, or you don't cross paths with them, next time you bite into a delicious slice of cake or a cookie, you might want to think of orchids, because that's where vanilla comes from, and vanilla is delicious and amazing. It is those those brown flecks you see in like French usually not French vanilla, because that's that's refined in a way that you don't see the brown flex but in like natural vanilla things, those little brown flex those are orchid seeds and they are delicious. Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. If you'd like to send us a note, our email addresses History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com and you can subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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