The forgotten story of a decades-long international quest for a rare and coveted orchid, chronicling the botanists, plant hunters, and collectors who relentlessly pursued it at great human and environmental cost.
In 1818, a curious root arrived in a small English village, tucked-seemingly by accident-in a packing case mailed from Brazil. The amateur botanist who cultivated it soon realized that he had something remarkable on his hands: an exceptionally rare orchid never before seen on British shores. It arrived just as "orchid mania" was sweeping across Europe and North America, driving a vast plant trade that catered to wealthy private patrons as well as the fast-growing middle classes eager to display exotic flowers at home. Dubbed Cattleya labiata, the striking purple-and-crimson bloom quickly became one of the most coveted flowers on both continents.
As tales of the flower's beauty spread through scientific journals and the popular press, orchid dealers and enthusiasts initiated a massive search to recover it in its natural habitat. Sarah Bilston illuminates the story of this international quest, introducing the collectors and nurserymen who funded expeditions, the working-class plant hunters who set out to find the flower, the South American laborers and specialists with whom they contracted, the botanists who used the latest science to study orchids in all their varieties, and the writers and artists who established the near-mythic status of the "lost orchid." The dark side of this global frenzy was the social and environmental harm it wrought, damaging fragile ecologies on which both humans and plants depended.
Following the human ambitions and dramas that drove an international obsession, The Lost Orchid is a story of consumer desire, scientific curiosity, and the devastating power of colonial overreach.
Rezensionen / Stimmen
Focuses on a single flower that took Europe and America by storm...[a] spirited account. -- Jenny Uglow * New York Review of Books * Draws on an extensive body of letters, newspapers, and novels to demonstrate how one rare flower could come 'to signal wealth and power, or connoisseurship, or modernity, or attachment to the past, or scientific acumen'-sometimes all at once. * New Yorker * A finely researched account of a fascinating period in scientific history that will appeal to lovers of orchids, exploration, and Victoriana. -- Danielle Clode * Australian Book Review * Sarah Bilston's book is about the 1891 expedition that set out to find a near-mythical example, a purple and crimson flower - Cattleya labiata - that grew deep in the Brazilian rainforest. Her cast includes the Swedish plant hunter Claes Ericsson, the nurseryman Frederick Sander who sponsored him, and Erich Bungeroth, a rival in the quest. The story sometimes has the trappings of a chase thriller but Bilston is assiduous in revealing that behind the expedition lay a host of other forces: from colonialism, commerce and communication, and the hold plants had on the imagination of writers, all the way to Darwin and the scientific revolution. -- Michael Prodger * New Statesman * Bilston studies the orchidomania of late-nineteenth-century Britain, during which hothouses spilled over with blooms, hundreds of thousands of them, in febrile purples, ambers, and scarlets...The flowers' rarity and fickle temperament-even shielded from the dour English weather by greenhouses, they survived only under the greenest of thumbs-made them precious commodities. Like bottles of champagne recovered from old shipwrecks, they invited connoisseurship." -- Dan Piepenbring * Harper's Magazine * One of the best books I have read for a very long time...Bilston weaves social history, biography and botany together to explain how the mystery became of international significance among botanists and nurserymen. Also, her prose is magnificent: so clear, so well measured and so pleasing to read. -- Charles Quest-Ritson * Country Life * Unspools a sprawling saga of greed, triumph, and evolution, all swirling around the hunt for an elusive orchid...Readers will be engrossed. * Publishers Weekly * A tale of botany and greed...conveys in colorful detail the 'chaotic urgency' of the feverish pursuit of a remarkable epiphyte. A vibrant natural history. * Kirkus Reviews (starred review) * Enthralling, authoritative, and discerning, The Lost Orchid is a brilliant account of the Victorian obsession over an exotic flower and the environmental destruction that resulted from Western imperialism. -- Kristen Rabe * Foreword Reviews * Deeply and meticulously reported, The Lost Orchid thrillingly illuminates the strange and marvelous world of Victorian orchid collecting, complete with its deceits, vanities, achievements, and obsessions. Bilston is the perfect guide through this eccentric piece of history, placing it firmly in the larger context of cultural and social conquest. -- Susan Orlean, author of <i>The Orchid Thief</i> A riveting history of Victorian orchid mania and its consequences. Bilston deftly illuminates not only the stories and myths that drove an ever-growing trade in orchids, but also the enduring human and environmental costs of this obsession. -- Kirk Wallace Johnson, author of <i>The Feather Thief</i> The Lost Orchid is about much more than a mysterious flower. It is an extraordinary tour de force of fine-grained history, deftly tracing the contours of trade, imperialism, greed, scientific argument, and exploitation of both people and nature itself. It is an almost perfect demonstration of what a work in science and literature should be: careful, precise, fully responsible and original, and itself quite a literary accomplishment. Bilston's scholarship is profound and extraordinarily far-reaching. Her detailed and humane discussion of key figures in this history, moreover, resonates with significance amid the crises of our own times. -- George Levine, author of <i>Darwin Loves You: Natural Selection and the Re-enchantment of the World</i> This book is an enticing portal to another world-one both intimately familiar and strangely foreign-filled with unbridled obsessions, maniacal exploitation, mythical quests, mundane struggles, and larger-than-life characters. -- Edward D. Melillo, author of <i>The Butterfly Effect: Insects and the Making of the Modern World</i>
Sarah Bilston is Professor of English Literature at Trinity College. She is the author of The Awkward Age in Women's Popular Fiction, 1850-1900: Girls and the Transition to Womanhood and The Promise of the Suburbs: A Victorian History in Literature and Culture, as well as the novels Sleepless Nights and Bed Rest.
