Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Orchidelirium

Why the lady’s slipper makes life seem worth sticking around for

issue 01 July 2017

The lady’s slipper orchid, Cypripedium calceolus, is both a beautiful and silly–looking plant. It is the strangest of our native orchids, with a fat yellow pouch and burgundy twisting petals. It doesn’t quite look as though it belongs in the gentle English countryside and, for a while, it didn’t belong at all. Why did I drive for two hours just to see one flower? In part because of its strange backstory. It’s not just a fabulous flower; it’s a plant that tells us about our society and the madness of all human nature.

This flower sent Victorian botanists bonkers. They were so gripped by what was known as Orchidelirium that they couldn’t stop digging up the poor Cypripedium or picking its flowers. Orchid mania meant that by 1917, the plant was declared extinct in the United Kingdom — and that would have been that, were it not for just one lady’s slipper which managed to cling on, out of sight, until the 1930s, when a botanist found it in bloom in the Yorkshire Dales.

That discovery triggered a whole new order of madness involving round-the-clock surveillance, police protection, and a secretive committee to protect the plant. Orchid maniacs crept towards it, eager to steal a cutting worth thousands of pounds. Policemen and volunteers in tents with tripwires kept guard during the flowering season. That particular native Cypripedium is still alive today, and its location is still a secret. The Cypripedium Committee are the only ones trusted with the details of where it grows; even they rarely visit.

In the 1980s, scientists at Kew Gardens set to work trying to propagate it, a struggle as orchid seeds are grumpy little things, germinating only if they’ve been picked at just the right time and with help from a special sort of rare fungi.

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