SYMHC Classics: Victorian Orchidelirium

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.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
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

(00:22):
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

(00:43):
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,

(01:06):
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

(01:29):
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

(01:50):
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

(02:13):
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

(02:35):
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,

(02:57):
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

(03:19):
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,

(03:42):
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

(04:04):
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

(04:27):
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

(04:47):
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

(05:10):
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

(05:31):
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

(05:52):
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

(06:12):
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

(06:34):
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

(06:55):
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

(07:17):
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

(07:40):
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

(08:02):
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

(08:25):
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.

(08:51):
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,

(09:11):
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

(09:33):
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

(09:54):
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

(10:15):
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

(10:37):
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

(10:59):
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

(11:22):
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

(11:43):
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

(12:05):
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

(12:26):
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

(12:47):
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.

(13:09):
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

(13:32):
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

(13:55):
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,

(14:16):
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

(14:37):
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

(14:58):
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,

(15:19):
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

(15:41):
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.

(16:03):
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

(16:24):
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

(16:47):
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

(17:12):
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

(17:35):
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

(17:58):
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

(18:29):
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,

(18:49):
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

(19:11):
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

(19:32):
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

(19:55):
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

(20:16):
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

(20:37):
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

(21:00):
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

(21:22):
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.

(21:44):
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

(22:05):
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

(22:27):
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

(22:52):
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

(23:13):
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

(23:36):
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

(24:00):
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

(24:20):
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.

(24:43):
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.

(25:04):
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

(25:25):
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.

(25:50):
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

(26:11):
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

(26:31):
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.

(27:02):
Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. If
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