July 2, 2018 • 30 mins
Orchids date back millions of years. But in the 1800s, the plants 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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in History dot com slash Tour. Welcome to stuph you
missed in History class from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello,
(01:05):
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm
Tracy V. Wilson. And if you listen to the to
Lipmania 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.
(01:29):
And while we're not really going to talk about him
later on in this episode, I did want to mention
that this one also brushes up against our episode on
Joseph Paxton and 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
(01:50):
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're talking about today. So orchids
date back at least twenty million years and two thousand
(02:13):
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 as 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
(02:33):
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 orchids 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
(02:55):
are sometimes mentioned as being parasitic. That's not actually the case.
They're getting the 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.
(03:15):
Some sources will list that number is even higher. More
are being discovered all the time. This incredible range makes
the taxonomy of the orchidacey challenging. The flowers of orchids
can range from single flowering plants to multiple blooms on
a stalk, and this is the most diverse flower family.
Orchids are usually pollinated by insects or birds, and the
(03:38):
plants have evolved to make themselves as appealing as possible
to their pollinators. A lot of times the plants have
a pedal 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
(03:58):
that look and smell 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,
(04:19):
that's one of those plants where I will admit just
because I like gothic thing. It's by a virtue of
it being called the dracula orchid. I'm like yes, and
then knowing what it smells like. Hard pass. Uh. The
slipper orchid has a really unique structure that first offers
an inviting drink from its pouch like structure that's like
(04:39):
the pedal 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 loom, those pollen grains are
(05:02):
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.
(05:23):
Orchids can also propagate a sexually 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
(05:44):
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 but the Aztecs and they have been used
in traditional Chinese medicine for centuries to treat everything from
(06:06):
lung and kidney disease to tonsilitis and even cancer. While
studying the anglicam Sesquepedale, Charles Darwin came to the conclusion
that this flower, which has a really deep bloom and
then a nectary, which is the glandular organ that secretes nectar,
sometimes as deep as thirty centimeters, which is a little
(06:26):
over eleven inches. They concluded that it must have evolved
alongside a moth species that had a unique trait to
allow 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.
(06:48):
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 eighty two
without ever having his hypothesis confirmed. In nineteen o seven, though,
a subspecies of the giant congo moths, which came from Madagascar,
(07:11):
just as Darwin's orchid samples had, was discovered. This moth subspecies,
named ex Morghani predicta, was approximately sixteen centimeters from wing
tip to wing tip, 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 nine more than a century after Darwin's death,
(07:34):
that scientists were finally able to actually observe and capture
footage of these large moths 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 or kids, is that it all happened
in the second half of the nineteenth century, and at
(07:55):
the same time, particularly in Victorian England, orchid delirium 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
(08:16):
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.
(08:39):
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 nineteen century saw the business
(09:01):
of orchid collecting growing and selling, reaching cutthroat levels of competition,
and coming up, we're going to talk about a man
who came to be known as the orchid King. But
first we're gonna pause for a word from one of
our sponsors. One of the most famous entrepreneurs to capitalize
(09:24):
on orchid delirium was Frederick Sander. Sander was born in
Germany in eighteen forty seven, and 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 Rosal, and before long the two men
decided to go into business together. Rosal was more than
(09:47):
twenty years older than Sander. We've 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
(10:09):
careers to become a plant hunter. And he replaced that
lost hand with a hook, and according to legend, that
gave him some added cache a on his adventures. Yeah,
he apparently was very tall, striking man to begin with,
and then when he had this hook hand, it kind
of fulfills every like Victorian romantic novel fantasy of like
a rough and rugged person um. And he has kind
(10:30):
of talked about that way even today when you read
about him in books about orchids. And when Rosal 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
(10:53):
was modest. But once Rosal teamed up with Sander, that
changed rapidly. The two of them set up shop in
the St Albans district north of London. Sander had a
great head for business, and Roseal 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
(11:16):
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. Rosell 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
(11:39):
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 eighty one
he left the seed shop and he expanded significantly to
a four acre parcel of land where he built five
dozen green houses. He also contracted additional orchid hunters, eventually
(12:04):
employing twenty three men to travel the globe and find
him new plants. He also wrote a four volume compendium
of orchids titled reich Embacchia or Chids Illustrated and Described.
It had illustrations by Henry George Moon, which are beautiful
It described almost two hundred species of orchid and was
(12:25):
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 reich Imbachia to her, and Sander used
his high volume of acquisition and production to expand his
(12:46):
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 it 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,
(13:08):
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
(13:29):
five dozen greenhouses, and that one also diversified a lot
and carried a really wide variety of plants, including azalea's
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
(13:51):
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
(14:14):
imagine paying 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 Woodlands Orchids,
(14:37):
written by Frederick Boyle and published in nineteen o one,
French orchid hunter Leon 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 believes Thomasina. Twelve months after
that dinner, Leon Humboldt was the only man from that
table left alive. As orchid hunters made their way around
(15:01):
the globe, they really really often met with bad ends.
Some of them were murdered, some of them died after
run ends 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.
(15:23):
Hunter William Arnold drowned in the Arena Co 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.
(15:46):
He was robbed at gun or knife point, or sometimes both,
seventeen times over his career. His nephew, frances At Klabock,
died of yellow fever after the two of them went
on an expedition together. William Mikolitz was one of Sander's
best agents, and Sander was relentless in pushing him. There
were numerous occasions where the man met with ill fortune
(16:07):
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 have been going on for a long long time,
(16:28):
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
and which Michael Its 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.
(16:49):
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. There's one story,
and I feel like we had mentioned 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. Michoelitz
(17:10):
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
(17:30):
a dead body, so he had to kind of steal
himself just to collect the flower. Uh. 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
(17:54):
he took one too many trips. He was stabbed to
death on his last mission. In the Andes and cont Us,
there was a pair of brothers, William and Thomas Lobb,
who worked as plant hunters for Bitch 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
(18:14):
of adventure, the two of the bandage 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 in the not so distant future. Uh.
And next up, we're gonna delve into just how very
(18:37):
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 gonna
take a little sponsor break. So in this next section, uh,
there is a piece from an article that I'm going
(18:59):
to read which is written nineteen o 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 aid hunter did manage
(19:20):
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 o six article which ran
in the Washington d c. 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
(19:42):
and prepare them for transportation by cooley and awesome 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 of them
will arrive with some vitality in them, and yeah, at
ten thousand plants may be collected on some remote Andean
(20:03):
peak or Papuan 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
(20:26):
pretty standard practice to just dig up every single one
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. Needless to say, conservation of
the ecological systems where they were hunting these orchids was
(20:48):
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 acting methods.
By the nine twenties, though, advancements were being made both
in cultivating orchids from seeds and by reproducing them through division.
(21:09):
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 we're dead, and the few who had survived were retired.
In nine seventeen, the Lady Slipper orchid was declared extinct
(21:29):
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 pedals, with the topmost pedal usually larger than the
two um that fall to the side. Often there's a
little twist. This flower is gold and burgundy, and orchid
(21:50):
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 Dale's. That was the last
known wild orchid there, not the last known wild one
(22:12):
on earth. Just for clarity, and even though orchid delirium
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.
(22:34):
Once its existence became public knowledge, a group called the
Slipper Petium Committee, which was named after the plant's Latin
name for him, 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
(22:55):
still alive today. In late nineteen eighties, scientists finally managed
to propagate the plant raised 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,
(23:16):
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
(23:37):
problems that we've already been talking about of you know, yeah,
in the modern era, there are still people that hunt
for orchids. Uh. 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
(23:59):
we've are you 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 sacred and the interest
of profit over science. Today's orchid industry is estimated to
be a nine billion dollar business annually, and there are,
(24:23):
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
(24:43):
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
(25:06):
manage it. And it also means that things that threatened
their pollinators threatened the plants to it's all tied together. Yes,
there are a lot of stories if you start digging about, uh,
like ecological whoopsie daisies that happened when people are trying
to collect an orchid, or there's an orchid that like
comes and goes. I read one story, and I did
(25:29):
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, uh, and
that there were frequent fires because of some industrialization in
(25:51):
this swamp land. 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 uh work
(26:14):
with whatever orchid is being examined or desired. Well, and
of course today 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 a for a wide variety of price points.
Some of them are still going to cost you several
(26:35):
thousand dollars though, Uh 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
(26:59):
of ache 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 flex
you see in like French and 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're delicious.
(27:25):
Do you also have some listener mail for us? I do,
And because we landed this orchid discussion on food, I
thought I would do a listener mail that was about food. Uh,
it is about one of our older episodes. It's from
our listener Brittany, and she says, Hi, Holly and Tracy,
first and foremost, I have to thank you both for
the hours of listening, learning, and laughing y'all have brought
me over the past year and a half. I discovered
(27:46):
the show early last year when my mom was in
the hospital recovering. I hope her mom is doing great now.
Through the drives to and from the hospital, time spent
sitting and waiting and nights I could not sleep. Y'all
were my companions. I felt like I had two new friends,
share a new love of Disney and fashion with Holly,
and the homestate connection with Tracy of North Carolina. And
I'm sure I looked a little bit odd laughing to
(28:07):
myself on my commute and sitting alone in public, But
now I can't wait for my time in the car
to catch up on the old and new episodes alike.
I'm marking my way through the archives, and I just
listened to your episode A Brief History of Peanut Butter,
and I found myself craving my mom's favorite peanut butter
based treat, and I wanted to share it with y'all
in case you felt like some adventurous baking. I was
raised in a household with my grandmother, a Southern cook
(28:28):
who grew up during the Depression. Thus I developed a
fondness for some foods my friends found pretty odd. See
banana and mayo sandwiches and pear salad with mayo and
parmesan cheese. A lot of mayo going on here. Even
I was thrown off when one Christmas, my mom taught
me how to make her favorite candy, Potato Candy. This
confection is made of mashed potatoes, powdered sugar, and of course,
(28:49):
peanut butter. I have included a link to a recipe
very similar to my mom's. Let me know if you
have the chance to make it and what you think.
I have not done so yet, but it sure is
on my list now because I love of making crazy things.
I love potatoes, I do too, and I like candy. Um,
not always in a sweet tooth mood, but when I
am lookout and that sounds really interesting, so I will um.
(29:13):
We can post the link to that recipe uh in
our show notes and we can all try making Potato
Kiddy if we wish. But thank you so much, Brittany.
That sounds really yummy and fun. I'm a big fan
of putting crazy stuff together on sandwiches as well. Now
I'm literally just thinking about sandwiches, so give me a minute.
(29:36):
If you would like to write to us, you can
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You can also find us on social media as missed
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(29:56):
visit us at missed in history dot com. For more
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Hey listeners, we have got some live shows coming up. Sunday,
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(00:20):
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(00:43):
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in History dot com slash Tour. Welcome to stuph you
missed in History class from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello,
(01:05):
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm
Tracy V. Wilson. And if you listen to the to
Lipmania 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.
(01:29):
And while we're not really going to talk about him
later on in this episode, I did want to mention
that this one also brushes up against our episode on
Joseph Paxton and 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
(01:50):
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're talking about today. So orchids
date back at least twenty million years and two thousand
(02:13):
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 as 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
(02:33):
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 orchids 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
(02:55):
are sometimes mentioned as being parasitic. That's not actually the case.
They're getting the 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.
(03:15):
Some sources will list that number is even higher. More
are being discovered all the time. This incredible range makes
the taxonomy of the orchidacey challenging. The flowers of orchids
can range from single flowering plants to multiple blooms on
a stalk, and this is the most diverse flower family.
Orchids are usually pollinated by insects or birds, and the
(03:38):
plants have evolved to make themselves as appealing as possible
to their pollinators. A lot of times the plants have
a pedal 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
(03:58):
that look and smell 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,
(04:19):
that's one of those plants where I will admit just
because I like gothic thing. It's by a virtue of
it being called the dracula orchid. I'm like yes, and
then knowing what it smells like. Hard pass. Uh. The
slipper orchid has a really unique structure that first offers
an inviting drink from its pouch like structure that's like
(04:39):
the pedal 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 loom, those pollen grains are
(05:02):
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.
(05:23):
Orchids can also propagate a sexually 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
(05:44):
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 but the Aztecs and they have been used
in traditional Chinese medicine for centuries to treat everything from
(06:06):
lung and kidney disease to tonsilitis and even cancer. While
studying the anglicam Sesquepedale, Charles Darwin came to the conclusion
that this flower, which has a really deep bloom and
then a nectary, which is the glandular organ that secretes nectar,
sometimes as deep as thirty centimeters, which is a little
(06:26):
over eleven inches. They concluded that it must have evolved
alongside a moth species that had a unique trait to
allow 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.
(06:48):
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 eighty two
without ever having his hypothesis confirmed. In nineteen o seven, though,
a subspecies of the giant congo moths, which came from Madagascar,
(07:11):
just as Darwin's orchid samples had, was discovered. This moth subspecies,
named ex Morghani predicta, was approximately sixteen centimeters from wing
tip to wing tip, 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 nine more than a century after Darwin's death,
(07:34):
that scientists were finally able to actually observe and capture
footage of these large moths 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 or kids, is that it all happened
in the second half of the nineteenth century, and at
(07:55):
the same time, particularly in Victorian England, orchid delirium 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
(08:16):
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.
(08:39):
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 nineteen century saw the business
(09:01):
of orchid collecting growing and selling, reaching cutthroat levels of competition,
and coming up, we're going to talk about a man
who came to be known as the orchid King. But
first we're gonna pause for a word from one of
our sponsors. One of the most famous entrepreneurs to capitalize
(09:24):
on orchid delirium was Frederick Sander. Sander was born in
Germany in eighteen forty seven, and 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 Rosal, and before long the two men
decided to go into business together. Rosal was more than
(09:47):
twenty years older than Sander. We've 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
(10:09):
careers to become a plant hunter. And he replaced that
lost hand with a hook, and according to legend, that
gave him some added cache a on his adventures. Yeah,
he apparently was very tall, striking man to begin with,
and then when he had this hook hand, it kind
of fulfills every like Victorian romantic novel fantasy of like
a rough and rugged person um. And he has kind
(10:30):
of talked about that way even today when you read
about him in books about orchids. And when Rosal 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
(10:53):
was modest. But once Rosal teamed up with Sander, that
changed rapidly. The two of them set up shop in
the St Albans district north of London. Sander had a
great head for business, and Roseal 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
(11:16):
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. Rosell 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
(11:39):
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 eighty one
he left the seed shop and he expanded significantly to
a four acre parcel of land where he built five
dozen green houses. He also contracted additional orchid hunters, eventually
(12:04):
employing twenty three men to travel the globe and find
him new plants. He also wrote a four volume compendium
of orchids titled reich Embacchia or Chids Illustrated and Described.
It had illustrations by Henry George Moon, which are beautiful
It described almost two hundred species of orchid and was
(12:25):
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 reich Imbachia to her, and Sander used
his high volume of acquisition and production to expand his
(12:46):
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 it 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,
(13:08):
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
(13:29):
five dozen greenhouses, and that one also diversified a lot
and carried a really wide variety of plants, including azalea's
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
(13:51):
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
(14:14):
imagine paying 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 Woodlands Orchids,
(14:37):
written by Frederick Boyle and published in nineteen o one,
French orchid hunter Leon 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 believes Thomasina. Twelve months after
that dinner, Leon Humboldt was the only man from that
table left alive. As orchid hunters made their way around
(15:01):
the globe, they really really often met with bad ends.
Some of them were murdered, some of them died after
run ends 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.
(15:23):
Hunter William Arnold drowned in the Arena Co 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.
(15:46):
He was robbed at gun or knife point, or sometimes both,
seventeen times over his career. His nephew, frances At Klabock,
died of yellow fever after the two of them went
on an expedition together. William Mikolitz was one of Sander's
best agents, and Sander was relentless in pushing him. There
were numerous occasions where the man met with ill fortune
(16:07):
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 have been going on for a long long time,
(16:28):
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
and which Michael Its 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.
(16:49):
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. There's one story,
and I feel like we had mentioned 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. Michoelitz
(17:10):
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
(17:30):
a dead body, so he had to kind of steal
himself just to collect the flower. Uh. 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
(17:54):
he took one too many trips. He was stabbed to
death on his last mission. In the Andes and cont Us,
there was a pair of brothers, William and Thomas Lobb,
who worked as plant hunters for Bitch 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
(18:14):
of adventure, the two of the bandage 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 in the not so distant future. Uh.
And next up, we're gonna delve into just how very
(18:37):
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 gonna
take a little sponsor break. So in this next section, uh,
there is a piece from an article that I'm going
(18:59):
to read which is written nineteen o 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 aid hunter did manage
(19:20):
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 o six article which ran
in the Washington d c. 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
(19:42):
and prepare them for transportation by cooley and awesome 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 of them
will arrive with some vitality in them, and yeah, at
ten thousand plants may be collected on some remote Andean
(20:03):
peak or Papuan 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
(20:26):
pretty standard practice to just dig up every single one
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. Needless to say, conservation of
the ecological systems where they were hunting these orchids was
(20:48):
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 acting methods.
By the nine twenties, though, advancements were being made both
in cultivating orchids from seeds and by reproducing them through division.
(21:09):
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 we're dead, and the few who had survived were retired.
In nine seventeen, the Lady Slipper orchid was declared extinct
(21:29):
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 pedals, with the topmost pedal usually larger than the
two um that fall to the side. Often there's a
little twist. This flower is gold and burgundy, and orchid
(21:50):
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 Dale's. That was the last
known wild orchid there, not the last known wild one
(22:12):
on earth. Just for clarity, and even though orchid delirium
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.
(22:34):
Once its existence became public knowledge, a group called the
Slipper Petium Committee, which was named after the plant's Latin
name for him, 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
(22:55):
still alive today. In late nineteen eighties, scientists finally managed
to propagate the plant raised 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,
(23:16):
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
(23:37):
problems that we've already been talking about of you know, yeah,
in the modern era, there are still people that hunt
for orchids. Uh. 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
(23:59):
we've are you 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 sacred and the interest
of profit over science. Today's orchid industry is estimated to
be a nine billion dollar business annually, and there are,
(24:23):
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
(24:43):
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
(25:06):
manage it. And it also means that things that threatened
their pollinators threatened the plants to it's all tied together. Yes,
there are a lot of stories if you start digging about, uh,
like ecological whoopsie daisies that happened when people are trying
to collect an orchid, or there's an orchid that like
comes and goes. I read one story, and I did
(25:29):
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, uh, and
that there were frequent fires because of some industrialization in
(25:51):
this swamp land. 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 uh work
(26:14):
with whatever orchid is being examined or desired. Well, and
of course today 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 a for a wide variety of price points.
Some of them are still going to cost you several
(26:35):
thousand dollars though, Uh 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
(26:59):
of ache 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 flex
you see in like French and 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're delicious.
(27:25):
Do you also have some listener mail for us? I do,
And because we landed this orchid discussion on food, I
thought I would do a listener mail that was about food. Uh,
it is about one of our older episodes. It's from
our listener Brittany, and she says, Hi, Holly and Tracy,
first and foremost, I have to thank you both for
the hours of listening, learning, and laughing y'all have brought
me over the past year and a half. I discovered
(27:46):
the show early last year when my mom was in
the hospital recovering. I hope her mom is doing great now.
Through the drives to and from the hospital, time spent
sitting and waiting and nights I could not sleep. Y'all
were my companions. I felt like I had two new friends,
share a new love of Disney and fashion with Holly,
and the homestate connection with Tracy of North Carolina. And
I'm sure I looked a little bit odd laughing to
(28:07):
myself on my commute and sitting alone in public, But
now I can't wait for my time in the car
to catch up on the old and new episodes alike.
I'm marking my way through the archives, and I just
listened to your episode A Brief History of Peanut Butter,
and I found myself craving my mom's favorite peanut butter
based treat, and I wanted to share it with y'all
in case you felt like some adventurous baking. I was
raised in a household with my grandmother, a Southern cook
(28:28):
who grew up during the Depression. Thus I developed a
fondness for some foods my friends found pretty odd. See
banana and mayo sandwiches and pear salad with mayo and
parmesan cheese. A lot of mayo going on here. Even
I was thrown off when one Christmas, my mom taught
me how to make her favorite candy, Potato Candy. This
confection is made of mashed potatoes, powdered sugar, and of course,
(28:49):
peanut butter. I have included a link to a recipe
very similar to my mom's. Let me know if you
have the chance to make it and what you think.
I have not done so yet, but it sure is
on my list now because I love of making crazy things.
I love potatoes, I do too, and I like candy. Um,
not always in a sweet tooth mood, but when I
am lookout and that sounds really interesting, so I will um.
(29:13):
We can post the link to that recipe uh in
our show notes and we can all try making Potato
Kiddy if we wish. But thank you so much, Brittany.
That sounds really yummy and fun. I'm a big fan
of putting crazy stuff together on sandwiches as well. Now
I'm literally just thinking about sandwiches, so give me a minute.
(29:36):
If you would like to write to us, you can
do so at History Podcast at house to works dot com.
You can also find us on social media as missed
in History pretty much everywhere, and our website is missed
in History dot com and there you will find every
episode of the show that's ever existed, plus show notes
for any of the ones that Tracy and I have
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