The Lost Orchid: A Story of Victorian Plunder and Obsession

English literature scholar Bilston (The Promise of the Suburbs) unspools a sprawling saga of greed, triumph, and evolution, all swirling around the hunt for an elusive orchid. British naturalist William Swainson arrived in Brazil in 1816 “animated by a passionate, chaotic, destructive urge to discover.” In financial straits and short on social skills, Swainson saw this venture as a chance to make a name for himself. Among the specimens he sent back to Britain was the Cattleya labiata, a lustrous purple and crimson bloom—considered “the epitome of floral beauty”—that launched a wave of “orchidomania.” A disruptive, brutal cadre of orchid hunters descended on South America, many of them “socially peripheral figures”—“rootless, working-class, ill-educated”—who would lie, steal, or do anything else it took to find specimens. Orchid retailers, meanwhile, created a rosy alternate reality in their marketing campaigns, drawing on tropes from contemporary adventure stories by authors like Rudyard Kipling to depict orchid hunters as heroes. Even as hybridization and advances in greenhouse technology meant orchid-growing was possible for British gardeners, the search for the Cattleya labiata continued. Bilston scours myriad firsthand sources to construct an edifying story of imperialism, the rise of the natural sciences (including Darwin’s fascination with orchids), and some genuine tales of adventure and derring-do. Readers will be engrossed. (May)