The Orchid Thief (9 page)

Orchid hunters’ hauls got bigger and bigger toward the middle of the 1800s. This was partly motivated by rapacity and shortsightedness, but also by the fact that plant transportation was so unreliable that most of the plants shipped to Europe arrived dead—you needed to collect a huge haul to end up with even a small surviving heap of plants in London. In a letter to the Royal Horticultural Society in 1819 a nurseryman noted that only a few of a thousand plants shipped to him survived the trip. In 1827 a Whitechapel surgeon named Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward put a caterpillar to pupate in a glass jar and promptly forgot about it. Probably there was a little soil in the jar, because months later when Ward remembered the caterpillar, he noticed that a tiny fern and a few sprigs of grass had sprung up in the jar. Ward surmised
that plants might flourish if they were kept in a sealed glass container with a little moisture and protected from London’s dirty air, and that it might be possible for someone to cultivate exotic plants this way even inside a dark apartment. He then took a bigger jar and put in more plants and eventually created a miniature garden that was so extraordinary that landscape designers and horticulturists came to his house just to admire it. Word of Dr. Ward’s indoor jungle got around, and soon a fern-filled “Wardian case” became a fixture in Victorian living rooms. Ward himself created the most elaborate of Wardian cases, which contained a fish tank, a fern garden, a chameleon, and a Jersey toad.

Dr. Ward further surmised that his glass cases might overcome the difficulties of plant transportation, and in 1834 he built a prototype, filled it with English ferns, and sent it on a six-month ship ride to New South Wales. The ferns thrived. He then shipped tender Australian ferns back to England in a sealed case, and they also survived. Ward published a magazine article in 1839 describing his Wardian cases; and in 1842 expanded it into a book called
On the Growth of Plants in Closely Glazed Cases
. Wardian cases were adopted directly by European gardeners. Now instead of only one in a thousand plants surviving a journey, more than nine hundred of a thousand plants would make it alive. The Wardian case made possible a new economy of botany. Profit-making plants like tea trees, tobacco, cork oak, and coffee bushes could be moved from their native continents to another, and from one region of a country to another. Natural boundaries melted; the world shrank to the size of a glass caterpillar jar. Inside a Wardian case, Joseph Paxton could ship an
Atnherstia nobilis
from India to Chatsworth Hall; Joseph Hooker could send a consignment from Tierra del Fuego to the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew of full-grown Argentinean trees.

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Even after the Wardian case improved plant transportation, the huge hauls continued anyhow, and garden journals in England began publishing warnings about emptying the jungles. Some well-traveled places were already so deflowered that to find any orchids or to hope to find new species, hunters traveled to more and more remote jungles in places such as Surabaja, the Naga Hills, the Irrawaddy River area, Yap, and Fakfak. They combed through the East Indies island by island. In one journal a Malaysian botanist wrote that there were barely any orchids left in his country. In 1878 a Swiss botanist wrote: “Not satisfied with taking 300 or 500 specimens of a fine orchid, [collectors] must scour the whole country and leave nothing for many miles around.… These modern collectors spare nothing. This is no longer collecting; it is wanton robbery.” A collector returning from Colombia reported that the places where
Miltonia
used to flourish were now “cleared as if by forest fire.” Even the most inaccessible places were crowded with orchid hunters. Joseph Hooker climbed through the Khasia Mountains in Assam; the place was mobbed when he got there. He wrote to his father: “What with Jenkins’ and Simon’s collectors here, twenty or thirty of Falconer’s, Lobb’s, my friends Raban and Cave and Inglis’s friends, the roads here are becoming stripped like the Penang jungles, and for miles it sometimes looks as if a gale had strewed the road with rotten branches and Orchidae. Falconer’s men sent down 1000 baskets the other day.” Early shipments from the tropics to England consisted of maybe fifty plants. Glass was so expensive that most greenhouses were small; fifty plants amounted to something in a small greenhouse. Then in 1845 Britain repealed the high tax on glass and thus launched the era of enormous plant houses, such as the Palm House at Kew Gardens, with
its forty-five thousand square feet of pale green glass panels. Collectors and nurserymen wanted more of everything. In 1869 the Suez Canal opened, making the voyage from Africa, Madagascar, and Asia to Europe much shorter and more survivable. Hunters got better at their work, and by the 1870s shipments contained thousands and even tens of thousands of flowers. On one expedition for odontoglossums in Colombia, four thousand trees were chopped down and ten thousand orchids peeled off them. Even that number was soon surpassed. On May 4, 1878, an English grower named William Bull announced he was about to receive a record-sized consignment of two million plants.

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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 in 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.