This article from The Times U.K. is full of purple prose about orchids, and naturally it caught my eye:
"IN WESTERN civilisation, the rose may bespeak
courtly love, and the lily purity, but orchids say something else, and
bluntly — sex."
The writer goes on to describe the orchids’ steamy connotations throughout history:
" In Hamlet Queen Gertrude cannot bring herself to say the “grosser name” that “liberal shepherds” give to Orchis mascula, one of the flowers Ophelia picks before taking the plunge.
It
might have been any one of the hundred or so vernacular names for
orchids that abounded in 16th and 17th-century England, none of them
exactly printable."…So marked was the connection that John Ruskin
proposed changing the very name “orchid” to remove its “unclean or
debasing association”.Of course, the orchid’s legacy of sexual connotations is a
testament to human prurience rather than any real properties that these
plants may possess.
Sadly, that last sentence wasn’t only one in the article to burst my bubble. It goes on to describe what sounds like absolutely fabulous orchid show — that took place last year. Rats. However, there’s some delicious information in the article about the history of the orchid in society.
Here’s a link to some pictures of the lovelies that were present at the show.
I’m not too crushed. The 2005 World Orchid Conference in Dijon, France, is only a few months away….
Times Online
March 12, 2003
Orchid orgy is fertile ground for sexual intrigue
By Mark Griffiths
IN
WESTERN civilisation, the rose may bespeak courtly love, and the lily
purity, but orchids say something else, and bluntly — sex. The paired
spherical tubers of Europe’s native orchids have prompted their use as
aphrodisiacs since ancient times. It was the father of botany,
Theophrastus (371-287 BC), who first recorded the name orkis for these plants, derived from the Greek for testicle. So lurid is his account of the supposed effects of orkis on humans and other animals that the relevant passage in the Loeb edition of Enquiry into Plants was excised until recently to protect scholarly sensibilities.
In Satyricon Petronius has a brew made from orchid tubers doled out in brothels as a safeguard against flagging spirits. In Hamlet Queen Gertrude cannot bring herself to say the “grosser name” that “liberal shepherds” give to Orchis mascula, one of the flowers Ophelia picks before taking the plunge.
It
might have been any one of the hundred or so vernacular names for
orchids that abounded in 16th and 17th-century England, none of them
exactly printable. By the late 19th and early 20th centuries, exotic
orchids had supplanted our native species in the popular imagination,
suggesting feminine allure or free-range sensuality rather than male
potency.
Proust identifies his most lethal coquette with the Brazilian Cattleya labiata, and The Picture of Dorian Gray
contains orchids “as effective as the seven deadly sins”. So marked was
the connection that John Ruskin proposed changing the very name
“orchid” to remove its “unclean or debasing association”.
Of course, the orchid’s legacy of sexual connotations is a
testament to human prurience rather than any real properties that these
plants may possess. But a lecture to be given at 3pm on Friday at this
week’s European Orchid Show will demonstrate that orchids are not
without sexual intrigue themselves. Given by Jim Mant and Florian
Schiestl, two biologists based at the Geobotanical Institute, the
lecture is titled Pollinator Attraction and Speciation in Sexually Deceptive Orchids.
It describes the latest research into the curious phenomenon of
pseudocopulation. Most common among European and Australian terrestrial
orchids, this is a ruse whereby the plants’ flowers mimic females of
their pollinator insects in shape, colour, scent and even movement.
Male insects are attracted to the flowers, “mate” with them and, in the
course of their fruitless frenzy, pick up pollen which they transfer
unwittingly to another flower in the next cold embrace.
In Australia 300 species in nine genera of orchids deploy
pseudocopulation, mostly duping male wasps. In Europe the deceit is
confined to one genus of 80 species, Ophrys, which contains the
familiar English bee orchid. Their targets are heart-breakingly
described as “pseudocopulating male solitary bees”.
Mant and Schiestl have analysed the scents given off by these
orchids and have found that the Australian species produce between one
and three biologically active odour compounds, whereas the European
species are more profligate: for example, the early spider orchid Ophrys sphegodes
alone produces 14 compounds. In both cases, however, these olfactory
cocktails contain the same active substances as are found in the female
sex pheromones of the pollinator insects.
Their lecture is one of a series of 40 that run from tomorrow
to Saturday at the Royal Horticultural Society’s Lawrence Hall. Part of
the European Orchid Conference and Show, the country’s largest orchid
show to date, the lectures cover aspects of this most flamboyant and
enigmatic of plant families, from the orchids collected on Dr
Livingstone’s Zambezi expedition to the latest DNA investigations.
Another feature of this orchid orgy is an exhibition in the
RHS Lindley Library that tells the story of the society’s close
involvement with these plants. It began in the early 1800s when one of
the society’s presidents, the 6th Duke of Devonshire, first fell in
love with an orchid at a flower show — a brief encounter that sparked
orchidmania and which was ultimately responsible for the great
Victorian hothouse craze. Since the 1890s, every orchid that has
received an award from the RHS Orchid Committee has been swiftly
rendered in watercolours by the society’s official orchid artist. A
selection of these beautiful plant portraits track 100 years of hard
work and horticultural fashion. They include examples of a half-century
of dedication from a remarkable woman. Born in modest circumstances in
Camberwell, South London, Nellie Roberts was transfixed as a young girl
by an orchid in the window of a flower shop. She conveyed her
excitement to the Royal Horticultural Society, which appointed her its
first official orchid artist in 1897. She was still painting them as
late as the 1940s.
Both world wars did much to cool the aristocratic passion for
orchids as heating fuel became prohibitively costly, plant exploration
and importation were curtailed and gardeners were thrown into another
kind of effort. But horticulture, like orchids, adapts, and the million
or so blooms on display at the RHS this week bear witness to the
democratisation of this grandest of gardening fancies. Among them are
plants that will thrive in most domestic circumstances, from the
bathroom to the backyard. Shown by the pick of the world’s orchid
growers, they include bestselling potplants and species that are new to
science, extravagantly lovely giants and intricate miniatures that
would have defied even Roberts’s talents. As Charles Darwin wrote in
1862: “An examination of their many beautiful contrivances will exalt
the whole vegetable kingdom in most persons’ estimation.”
POLLENATRIX 