Profitable Wonders James Le Fanu
THE ORCHID is the most tenacious and long-lived of flowers, as I am reminded daily, gazing at the Phalaenopsis ama
bilis on the kitchen window sill that, eight months on, is as pristine as the day it was purchased. From the tangled roots and drooping green leaves at its base, a bare foot-long stem rises upwards, tipping over to form a couple of slender branches weighed down (or so it seems) by a cascade of a dozen identical blossoms: a halo of pure white symmetrical heart-shaped discs surrounding that most distinctive feature of the orchid family, the modified third petal or labellum (lip) – here tinged on its inner surface with a blush of pale green emblazoned with delicately radiating red stripes. Could anything be more dramatic and yet so fair, sustained only by the gases absorbed from the air and an occasional spraying, when I remember, of a fine mist of water droplets.
The orchid’s ability to survive on virtually nothing is one of the great miracles of the floral world, allowing it to flourish in every conceivable habitat – as readily in tropical rainforests as on icy mountain peaks, bogs, moors and deserts. They can be found growing out of rocks, sprouting on office rooftops and telegraph poles and even underground – the tiny rhizanthella was only discovered in 1928 by an Australian farmer investigating the source of a mysterious sweet smell emanating from a crack in the soil.
Consequently, the number of species (25,000, with a further 150,000 hybrids) exceeds by far that of any other flower – the rose by contrast can muster only a paltry 150 – and in a profusion of appearances that verges on the inexhaustible. ‘Nature’s playfulness’, noted the 17th-century botanist Jacob Breynius, ‘is most strikingly visible among orchids.’
The inventiveness of the patterns of coloration could not be more exuberant – streaked, smeared, mottled, freckled, splashed across their petals in every conceivable combination of hues, ivory and hot pink, green and burgundy, yellow and white. Meanwhile, the shape of the flowers can be so fantastical as to ‘take on the form’, Breynius noted, ‘of birds, lizards, insects, a lazy tortoise or melancholy toad’.
My phalaenopsis resembles a moth in flight, habenaria the outstretched wings of a white egret and Orchis italica a crowd of naked men. Peristeria elata, the national flower of Panama, is known as the Holy Ghost orchid because of its similarity to a dove perched on its nest, while Dracula simia bears an uncanny resemblance to a grinning monkey’s face.
The orchid’s combination of the strange and beautiful prompted in the mid-19th century a frenzied ‘orchidelirium’ fuelled by wealthy patrons and commercial entrepreneurs whose emissaries scoured the world for rare and novel specimens. At his country seat, Chatsworth, the sixth Duke of Devonshire, together with his talented gardener Joseph Paxton, assembled the largest collection in private hands – a quarter of the known species of the time. Paying a visit, the secretary of the Horticultural Society, it is reported ‘could scarcely contain his excitement’ when witnessing the first flowering of a Mexican orchid named in the Duke’s honour, ‘opening its large rich leopardspotted blossoms in all the perfection of their singular forms and deep soft colours while releasing a heady scent of a wintersweet and heliotrope’.
The modes of orchid pollination are famously as inventive as the flowers themselves, if not more so, with diverse species being pollinated by the same insects in quite different ways. Almost more remarkable still, the reverse, are those orchids that perversely restrict themselves to a single type of pollinator, as in the phenomenon of pseudo-copulation first described in 1917 in the Algerian orchid Ophrys speculum. Ophrys has assumed the shape, colour and odour of the female scoliid wasp with a glossy blue ‘body’ fringed by thick reddish-brown velvety hairs. Its sexual appeal to the male scoliid prompts him to attempt copulation – resulting in its own pollination.
The wonders never cease. Four years ago botanist Ed de Vogel from the Netherlands discovered the world’s only truly night-flowering orchid in the forests of New Guinea. The blossom of Bulbophyllum nocturnum opens at 10pm, revealing intricate appendages resembling the mushroom-like fruiting bodies of slime mould suspended from long threads that ‘move in the slightest current of air’. Its most frequent pollinators, Dr de Vogel suggests, are likely to be night-feeding midges in pursuit of a tasty meal.
The orchid’s ability to survive on virtually nothing is one of the great miracles of the floral world