About orchids

by Frederick Boyle

For such men orchids are a blessed relief. Fancy has not conceived such loveliness, complete all round, as theirs—form, colour, grace, distribution, detail, and broad effect. Somewhere, years ago—in Italy perhaps, but I think at the Taylor Institution, Oxford—I saw the drawings made by Rafaelle for Leo X. of furniture and decoration in his new palace; be it observed in parenthesis, that one who has not beheld the master's work in this utilitarian style of art has but a limited understanding of his supremacy. Among them were idealizations of flowers, beautiful and marvellous as fairyland, but compared with the glory divine that dwells in a garland of Odontoglossum Alexandræ, artificial, earthy. Illustrations of my meaning are needless to experts, and to others words convey no idea. But on the table before me now stands a wreath of Oncidium crispum which I cannot pass by. What colourist would dare to mingle these lustrous browns with pale gold, what master of form could shape the bold yet dainty waves and crisps and curls in its broad petals, what human imagination could bend the graceful curve, arrange the clustering masses of its bloom? All beauty that the mind can hold is there—the quintessence of all charm and fancy. Were I acquainted with an atheist who, by possibility, had brain and feeling, I would set that spray before him and await reply. If Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like a lily of the field, the angels of heaven have no vesture more ethereal than the flower of the orchid. Let us take breath.

Many persons indifferent to gardening—who are repelled, indeed, by its prosaic accompaniments, the dirt, the manure, the formality, the spade, the rake, and all that—love flowers nevertheless. For such these plants are more than a relief. Observe my Oncidium. It stands in a pot, but this is only for convenience—a receptacle filled with moss. The long stem feathered with great blossoms springs from a bare slab of wood. No mould nor peat surrounds it; there is absolutely nothing save the roots that twine round their support, and the wire that sustains it in the air. It asks no attention beyond its daily bath. From the day I tied it on that block last year—reft from home and all its pleasures, bought with paltry silver at Stevens' Auction Rooms—I have not touched it save to dip and to replace it on its hook. When the flowers fade, thither it will return, and grow and grow, please Heaven, until next summer it rejoices me again; and so, year by year, till the wood rots. Then carefully I shall transfer it to a larger perch and resume. Probably I shall sever the bulbs without disturbing them, and in seasons following two spikes will push—then three, then a number, multiplying and multiplying when my remotest posterity is extinct. That is, so Nature orders it; whether my descendants will be careful to allow her fair play depends on circumstances over which I have not the least control.

For among their innumerable claims to a place apart among all things created, orchids may boast immortality. Said Sir Trevor Lawrence, in the speech which opened our famous Congress, 1885: "I do not see, in the case of most of them, the least reason why they should ever die. The parts of the orchideæ are annually reproduced in a great many instances, and there is really no reason they should not live for ever unless, as is generally the case with them in captivity, they be killed by errors in cultivation." Sir Trevor was addressing an assemblage of authorities—a parterre of kings in the empire of botany—or he might have enlarged upon this text.

The epiphytal orchid, to speak generally, and to take the simple form, is one body with several limbs, crowned by one head. Its circulation pulsates through the whole, less and less vigorously, of course, in the parts that have flowered, as the growing head leaves them behind. At some age, no doubt, circulation fails altogether in those old limbs, but experience does not tell me distinctly as yet in how long time the worn-out bulbs of an Oncidium or a Cattleya, for example, would perish by natural death. One may cut them off when apparently lifeless, even beginning to rot, and under proper conditions—it may be a twelvemonth after—a tiny green shoot will push from some "eye," withered and invisible, that has slept for years, and begin existence on its own account. Thus, I am not old enough as an orchidacean to judge through how many seasons these plants will maintain a limb apparently superfluous. Their charming disposition is characterized above all things by caution and foresight. They keep as many strings to their bow, as many shots in their locker, as may be, and they keep them as long as possible. The tender young head may be nipped off by a thousand chances, but such mishaps only rouse the indomitable thing to replace it with two, or even more. Beings designed for immortality are hard to kill.

Among the gentle forms of intellectual excitement I know not one to compare with the joy of restoring a neglected orchid to health. One may buy such for coppers—rare species, too—of a size and a "potentiality" of display which the dealers would estimate at as many pounds were they in good condition on their shelves. I am avoiding names and details, but it will be allowed me to say, in brief, that I myself have bought more than twenty pots for five shillings at the auction-rooms, not twice nor thrice either. One half of them were sick beyond recovery, some few had been injured by accident, but by far the greater part were victims of ignorance and ill-treatment which might still be redressed. Orchids tell their own tale, whether of happiness or misery, in characters beyond dispute. Mr. O'Brien alleged, indeed, before the grave and experienced signors gathered in conference, that "like the domestic animals, they soon find out when they are in hands that love them. With such a guardian they seem to be happy, and to thrive, and to establish an understanding, indicating to him their wants in many important matters as plainly as though they could speak." And the laugh that followed this statement was not derisive. He who glances at the endless tricks, methods, and contrivances devised by one or other species to serve its turn may well come to fancy that orchids are reasoning things.

At least, many keep the record of their history in form unmistakable. Here is a Cattleya which I purchased last autumn, suspecting it to be rare and valuable, though nameless; I paid rather less than one shilling. The poor thing tells me that some cruel person bought it five years ago—an imported piece, with two pseudo-bulbs. They still remain, towering like columns of old-world glory above an area of shapeless ruin. To speak in mere prose—though really the conceit is not extravagant—these fine bulbs, grown in their native land, of course, measure eight inches high by three-quarters of an inch diameter. In the first season, that malheureux reduced their progeny to a stature of three and a half inches by the foot-rule; next season, to two inches; the third, to an inch and a half. By this time the patient creature had convinced itself that there was something radically wrong in the circumstances attending its normal head, and tried a fresh departure from the stock—a "back growth," as we call it, after the fashion I have described. In the third year then, there were two heads. In the fourth year, the chief of them had dwindled to less than one inch and the thickness of a straw, while the second struggled into growth with pain and difficulty, reached the size of a grain of wheat, and gave it up. Needless to say that the wicked and unfortunate proprietor had not seen trace of a bloom. Then at length, after five years' torment, he set it free, and I took charge of the wretched sufferer. Forthwith he began to show his gratitude, and at this moment—the summer but half through—his leading head has regained all the strength lost in three years, while the back growth, which seemed dead, outtops the best bulb my predecessor could produce.

And I have perhaps a hundred in like case, cripples regaining activity, victims rescued on their death-bed. If there be a placid joy in life superior to mine, as I stroll through my houses of a morning, much experience of the world in many lands and many circumstances has not revealed it to me. And any of my readers can attain it, for—in no conventional sense—I am my own gardener; that is to say, no male being ever touches an orchid of mine.

One could hardly cite a stronger argument to demolish the superstitions that still hang around this culture. If a busy man, journalist, essayist, novelist, and miscellaneous littérateur, who lives by his pen, can keep many hundreds of orchids in such health that he is proud to show them to experts—with no help whatsoever beyond, in emergency, that which ladies of his household, or a woman-servant give—if he can do this, assuredly the pursuit demands little trouble and little expense. I am not to lay down principles of cultivation here, but this must be said: orchids are indifferent to detail. There lies a secret. Secure the general conditions necessary for their well-doing, and they will gratefully relieve you of further anxiety; neglect those general conditions, and no care will reconcile them. The gentleman who reduced my Cattleya to such straits gave himself vast pains, it is likely, consulted no end of books, did all they recommend; and now declares that orchids are unaccountable. It is just the reverse. No living things follow with such obstinate obedience a few most simple laws; no machine produces its result more certainly, if one comply with the rules of its being.

This is shown emphatically by those cases which we do not clearly understand; I take for example the strangest, as is fitting. Some irreverent zealots have hailed the Phalœnopsis as Queen of Flowers, dethroning our venerable rose. I have not to consider the question of allegiance, but decidedly this is, upon the whole, the most interesting of all orchids in the cultivator's point of view. For there are some genera and many species that refuse his attentions more or less stubbornly—in fact, we do not yet know how to woo them. But the Phalœnopsis is not among them. It gives no trouble in the great majority of cases. For myself, I find it grow with the calm complacency of the cabbage. Yet we are all aware that our success is accidental, in a measure. The general conditions which it demands are fulfilled, commonly, in any stove where East Indian plants flourish; but from time to time we receive a vigorous hint that particular conditions, not always forthcoming, are exacted by Phalœnopsis. Many legends on this theme are current; I may cite two, notorious and easily verified. The authorities at Kew determined to build a special house for the genus, provided with every comfort which experience or scientific knowledge could suggest. But when it was opened, six or eight years ago, not a Phalœnopsis of all the many varieties would grow in it; after vain efforts, Mr. Thiselton Dyer was obliged to seek another use for the building, which is now employed to show plants in flower. Sir Trevor Lawrence tells how he laid out six hundred pounds for the same object with the same result. And yet one may safely reckon that this orchid does admirably in nine well-managed stoves out of ten, and fairly in nineteen out of twenty. Nevertheless, it is a maxim with growers that Phalœnopsis should never be transferred from a situation where they are doing well. Their hooks are sacred as that on which Horace suspended his lyre. Nor could a reasonable man think this fancy extravagant, seeing the evidence beyond dispute which warns us that their health is governed by circumstances more delicate than we can analyze at present.

It would be wrong to leave the impression that orchid culture is actually as facile as market gardening, but we may say that the eccentricities of Phalœnopsis and the rest have no more practical importance for the class I would persuade than have the terrors of the deep for a Thames water-man. How many thousand householders about this city have a "bit of glass" devoted to geraniums and fuchsias and the like! They started with more ambitious views, but successive disappointments have taught modesty, if not despair. The poor man now contents himself with anything that will keep tolerably green and show some spindling flower. The fact is, that hardy plants under glass demand skilful treatment—all their surroundings are unnatural, and with insect pest on one hand, mildew on the other, an amateur stands betwixt the devil and the deep sea. Under those circumstances common plants become really capricious—that is, being ruled by no principles easy to grasp and immutable in operation, their discomfort shows itself in perplexing forms. But such species of orchids as a poor man would think of growing are incapable of pranks. For one shilling he can buy a manual which will teach him what these species are, and most of the things necessary for him to understand besides. An expenditure of five pounds will set him up for life and beyond—since orchids are immortal. Nothing else is needed save intelligence.