Orchids

Visiting the big hot house at Wisley recently, I spent some time with the orchids there and then realised that I did not know what an orchid was. This prompted me to go along to the splendid library there and borrow this book about them.

A popular and discursive introduction to orchids, one of a number of books of the same kind from Reaktion. A small book of around 250 shiny pages with lots of coloured pictures. A publisher which has drawn two previous notices, at references 2 and 3, one of them feeding an earlier fascination with yew trees. For which last see, for example, reference 4. While the post at reference 5 is very much preliminary to this one.

The author, Dan Torre, is a senior lecturer in design and social context in the School of Design at RMIT, an Australian university of technology, design and enterprise with more than 90,000 students. Not a botanist, but he does write books about plants.

There are lots of striking pictures, a lot of them being the sort of thing that one might find in fancy botany books of old, but I found it a bit irritating that they were not very well keyed to the text.

I read that a lot of orchids go in for rather specialised arrangements for pollination, often involving just a single species of animal, mostly of the flying sort. Also involving flashy specialisation of the lower petal, this being what makes them attractive to both the pollinators and us.

Part of this is the (almost universal) bilateral symmetry of the flower as a whole, which makes it easy for us to project the faces of both humans and animals onto them. Radial symmetry, while attractive in other ways, is no good in that department.

Along with many other plants, the roots of all orchids are closely associated with fungi, with different orchids associated with different fungi – and being rather particular about it. I might say that I first noticed the connection between fungi and trees near fifteen years ago, back at reference 10

Which links to another feature being the very large numbers of very small seeds. Which makes wind dispersal easy – but very dependent on landing on just the right sort of fungus for germination and growth. A fungus which makes up for the lack of the on-board provision which other, larger seeds go in for. No doubt there are people out there writing computer programs to play out the various gaming issues involved here.

There was a wave of fashion for orchids spanning most of the nineteenth century, not quite the same as the fashion of tulips a couple of centuries previously, but along similar lines. One feature being massive orchid stripping expeditions to tropical forests, operations which resulted in chopping down huge numbers of trees and wasting huge numbers of orchids. In parallel, we had lots of lavishly illustrated books, a lot of them from our colonies, perhaps the work of bored and lonely administrators, copies of some of which eventually wound up in one of the RHS libraries.

A fashion which extended to filling one’s house with them and wearing them. I read that cattleyas were particularly popular and then remembered that Proust included quite a lot of them in his famous book about Swann’s love affair with Odette de Crécy. See, for example, page 232 of Volume 1 of the Pléiade edition. Reminding me that the work of Proust, timeless though it might be, also reflects the fads and fashions of his time – a time of excess in Paris, just as it was in London. The literary French at least do seem to be quite keen on flowers, with other authors majoring on daisies or camelias. Not to mention the ostrich feathers once sported by Lily Langtry. But for cattleyas, in botanical terms a genus of the orchid family, see reference 6.

More recently we have learned micro-propagation, which produces most of the huge numbers of orchids sold in our shops, much more cheaply and without damaging tropical forests.

People have been writing about and painting orchids for a long time – in the west, in the east and in-between. Shakespeare, for example, put some into the mouth of Gertrude in Hamlet, Act IV, Scene VII:

 Where both grosser name and fingers are taken from the curious shape of the tubers underneath the plant.

I started to skip a bit when I got to chapter four, picturing orchids. Altogether too many book, pictures and other works of art and entertainment. OK, so orchids have a pretty big footprint out there, but I have no present need to know all about it. That said, maybe we will make the effort to get to the North Gallery at Kew Gardens, maybe an hour from Epsom, to see the work of Marianne North.

Things picked up again when I got to chapter six, consuming orchids. The root tubers of orchids were once widely consumed, with Australians doing a great deal of it – at least until the Europeans came along with their crops and animals which destroyed much of their habitat. In Australia again, once often called yams, although real yams are from a neighbouring family, the Dioscoreaceae. Literally so at reference 9, where Dioscoreaceae is immediately followed by Orchidaceae.

A hot drink called salep, a concoction of these roots was popular for a bit in the UK, before being supplanted by tea and coffee, and is still to be found in various places around the world. An important ingredient of a popular variety of Turkish ice cream.

While vanilla is made from the seed pods of the orchids of the vanilla genus. Orchids which grow a bit like runner beans and which have seed pods which look like runner beans – without actually being beans at all. A lot of the necessary fertilisation is done by hand and converting bean to vanilla is a reasonably complicated process, albeit one which has been known in its essentials for a long time.

Conclusions

A book which seems a bit long at times and which could have done with a bit of pruning and with better linking of text to pictures. But it very much did what I was looking for, providing me with an accessible and wide-ranging introduction to this large and important family of flowers.

I would think there is something here for anyone with something more than a passing interest. But over to BH to see what see makes of it.

PS 1: lifted from reference 7 below.

PS 2: checking with OED, I find plenty of salep. Said to be from the Turkish or Arabic, a nutritious meal made from dried orchid tubers. We are referred to saloop, where the meaning is extended to a hot drink made of powdered salep, milk and sugar, sold in the streets of London to worksmen, first and last thing. Usage in both senses appears to have been current in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The word ‘slop’, an old word from up north, for which there is a long entry, does not appear to be connected, except perhaps figuratively, with saloop made too thin, slopping around in its (slop) bowl. A word with two major clusters of meanings, that is to say various items of clothing and slopping in the sense most often used today. Plus various odd meanings, for example a charmed bag used to steal milk from cows – a more or less obsolete usage from the very beginning of the fourteenth century.

PS 3: oddly, neither catalyea, catleya nor cattleya are to be found in Littré. Perhaps Littré did his field work before the wave of fashion for them. But the last of these does make it to the 2008 number of Le Petit Larousse.

References

Reference 1: Orchid – Dan Torre – 2023.

Reference 2: https://psmv2.blogspot.com/2013/11/a-disappointment.html. 

Reference 3:  https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2017/09/reaktion.html 

Reference 4: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/08/albury-two.html. The unusual bottle featured here still graces the windowsill above where I type now.

Reference 5: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/06/who-are-orchids.html. 

Reference 6: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cattleya. 

Reference 7: https://www.rmit.edu.au/. 

Reference 8: https://www.kew.org/kew-gardens/whats-in-the-gardens/marianne-north-gallery. From which it appears that the art is hung rather promiscuously. But sadly, on the website, they don’t just show you a few samples, you have to look at an earnest talking head on YouTube. Bing does rather better, and one of his hits is included at the top of this post.

Reference 9: Guide to flowering plant families - Wendy B. Zomlefer - 1994. University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill.

Reference 10: https://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/2010/06/tree-nuts.html.