The Lost Orchid

THIS ITEM IS AVAILABLE FOR PRE-ORDER ONLY AND WILL BE RELEASED ON 06 MAY 2025.

A Story of Victorian Plunder and Obsession

The forgotten story of a decades-long international quest for a rare and coveted orchid at the height of Victorian orchid "mania"- and the plant-hunters, botanists, and collectors who relentlessly pursued it at great human and environmental cost.

In the early nineteenth century, "orchid mania" drove a vast plant trade that catered to wealthy private patrons and Big Nurserymen-and increasingly, the fast-growing middle classes eager to display exotic flowers at home. Then, in 1818, a curious root with "withered brown scales" arrived in a small English village, tucked - seemingly by accident - in a packing case sent from Brazil. The amateur botanist who opened the case and cultivated the tuber realized that he had something remarkable on his hands: an exceptionally rare orchid, a striking purple-and-crimson bloom never seen on British shores. Soon named cattleya labiata but more popularly dubbed the "Queen of the Orchids," it arrived as voracious popular desire for orchids-buying them, selling them, cultivating them, and showing them - swept across Europe and North America.

This particular bloom quickly became one of the most coveted varieties in both Europe and America-as well as one of the most difficult to rediscover in its natural habitat. As stories of its exceedingly rare beauty spread through both scientific journals and popular culture, European orchid dealers and plant hunters initiated a massive search for the "lost orchid" across South America. Sarah Bilston uncovers the story of this international quest, introducing the collectors and nurserymen who funded expeditions, the working class European hunters who set out to find them, the South American laborers and specialists with whom they contracted, the naturalists and botanists who used the latest science to study orchids in all their varieties, and the writers and artists who helped the "lost orchid" achieve near-mythic status. The dark side of this international obsession, she shows, was the social and environmental damage it wrought as plant-hunters and aspiring botanists invaded local communities in pursuit of orchids, failing to grasp the part they played in damaging fragile habitats until the final decades of the century.

Following the people - men and women, young and old, rich and poor - who drove an international obsession, The Lost Orchid in a story of consumer desire and collection culture, scientific curiosity and discovery, and the power and the devastation of colonial overreach.