Orchid Flower History

from customs officials and environmentalists than wild animals or unfriendly natives. But this rarefied end of the market is a far cry from the orchid's latest incarnation as a cheap-and- cheerful pot plant, available for a tenner, to stick on the kitchen windowsill.

The sixth duke of Devonshire, one of the most fanatical among the Victorian collectors, kept his orchids in a 300ft-long, specially built greenhouse. The very idea of orchids for the masses would have made his aristocratic eyeballs pop out. But even his impressive conservatory would pale beside the 36,000sq metres of Lennard van der Weijden's greenhouses in Amsterdam. They are so vast that the staff whiz round them on bicycles. When the benches reserved for orchids just coming into flower are full, you can see up to 60,000 plants all blooming away at once.

This mass of pink, white, cream and yellow orchids is an impressive sight. Van der Weijden's grandfather started the nursery in 1948, but it was Lennard's father Jacques who began specialising solely in orchids, 30 years ago. Now the van der Weijdens' main line is the Phalaenopsis, the easiest to grow. This is the round-petalled variety also known as the moth orchid. Its arched stems of blooms range from pure white through pastel and deep- pink to yellows and peachy shades; sometimes it's mottled or striped. It's the one you'll have seen in department stores and garden centres; on reception desks of hotels, hairdressers and restaurants; as table centrepieces at the last wedding you went to; in the background in television studios. It's also quite possibly the one you gave your mum for her birthday this year.

The serried ranks of orchids in the van der Weijden greenhouses come in all the colours and sizes possible for Phalaenopsis. But the trays waiting to be shipped off for sale contain individual plants that look eerily identical: same size, same patterning, same number of blooms per stem. They are clones. These days you don't have to clamber into the jungle canopy and risk life and limb to gather specimens. Nor do you have to painstakingly nurture the plants along from seed. You simply ring the lab and place your order.

"We buy over half of our stock from a big Dutch laboratory, a little from Belgium and some from Germany," explains van der Weijden. "At the lab they take a clump of cells and put them in a nutrient- rich medium. They can cut the clump and then cut it again, so you can get a few thousand plants from one cell, all the same height, the same pattern, the same flowering period." There's no season to cloning, so a plentiful supply of lab-hatched orchids can be on sale for key flower-buying dates such as Mother's Day, Easter and Christmas, plus all points in between.

The Victorian orchid growers would have marveled at this high-tech process. The van der Weijdens' baby plants spend the first two years of their lives in flasks at the lab. After that, they are big enough to be transplanted into trays of bark, and specialised greenhouses nurture them until they are three years old and big enough to pot. Growing orchids in bark allows plenty of air to reach their roots. "Almost every orchid is an epiphyte, so their roots would be stuck to the trunk of a tree, which is why they need air," explains van der Weijden. "Another company buys the plants and pots them for us, then we grow them on until they are big enough to flower - about another 30 weeks."
The van der Weijdens' premises are arranged with every mod con to keep an orchid comfortable.

A sophisticated computer system monitors the orchid greenhouse heat and humidity, and the weather and wind speed outside. The computer opens and shuts windows, activates blinds for shade, turns the heating on and off and even keeps an eye on the weather forecast, sent in four times daily from Schiphol airport. The automatic watering and spraying systems keep the plants moist, and the computer adds fertilizer to the water when required. The trays of plants sit on metal grids that rise and fall at the press of a button, so hundreds of plants can be moved at once, effortlessly. Even the flowering time can be precisely controlled, though it means a temporary cessation of pampering. "When we want the orchids to make a flower spike, we drop the temperature to 19 degrees, which shocks the plants into producing a spike," says van der Weijden.

The secret of the success of Phalaenopsis orchids, he says, is that it is happy at room temperature, flowers for a long time and, of course, can be sold cheaply. He does grow other, more capricious varieties, such as the "Vanda" from Thailand, which needs spraying six times a day, the tall, elegant "Cambria" and the fringed "Cattleya". But where the company will shift a mere 10,000 or so "Vanda" in a year, it will sell 1.5 million Phalaenopsis.

Van der Weijden's own favourite is the delicate "Vanda Orchid". Even turning out tens of thousands of plants a week as he does, he says that orchid growing is not just a job; that there is an element of love in what might seem like a wholly business-like relationship. When Lennard's father drove me back to the airport, we made a detour via his house, to see where he started his business in what is now the garage. The living-rooms and windows are festooned with orchids, great swathes of blooms. He doesn't get sick of orchids, working with them every day? No, he loves them too.

Loved or not, orchids are big business. The world orchid retail value is about pounds 7bn, and large-scale Dutch growers have cornered the European market. The van der Weijdens sell a Phalaenopsis for around EUR6 to EUR8 (pounds 4 to pounds 5.50); it will eventually retail at around EUR15 (pounds 10). A "Vanda" sells for EUR15 wholesale and fetches around EUR50 (pounds 35) in a shop. British orchid growers can't achieve the Dutch-style economies of scale that would allow them to match these prices. Some even buy blooms from Holland to sell on. "We can't compete, so though we grow a few Phalaenopsis, we buy in most of what we need from Europe," says Liz Johnson, owner of McBean's Orchids, a nursery near Lewes in East Sussex.

McBean's orchid nursery has a long and venerable history. It was started in 1879 by a Scotsman, James Ure McBean. His son, Albert, developed a severe case of orchidelirium and made McBean's one of the great British orchid establishments. Johnson acquired the orchid nursery in 1993. She began her career teaching children with special needs, and then moved into the autospace engineering sector. At the same time she was a keen amateur orchid grower, and a customer of McBean's. When she read in the Financial Times that the orchid nursery had gone into receivership, she put in a bid. "I couldn't let the orchid plants and history go," she says. "There are so few of the old orchid nurseries left."

Johnson grows rare varieties, and specialises in types that don't clone readily and have to be coaxed from seed. One of her orchid greenhouses is full of Odontoglossum, which has delicately frilled, beautifully marked blossoms. Odontoglossum can only rarely be cloned, because the plant's own tissues produce toxins that are fatal to the new plantlets. "You won't see a houseful anywhere else in Europe," she says proudly. McBean's, which is one of only two orchid nurseries to have exhibited at every Chelsea Flower Show since the first in 1912, is most famous for its Cymbidiums, which produce graceful sprays of as many as 20 long-living blooms at a time. Johnson and her team grow Cymbidiums from seed, and then select the best specimens for cloning, in the on-site laboratory.

The `Phalaenopsis' orchid currently flooding the market often leave something to be desired in terms of quality, says Johnson. "If you count the buds on the spikes, many of the plants sold in mass outlets only have five flowers. The best quality is nine-plus." And, she says, when buyers are conditioned to the hardy, long-lasting Phalaenopsis, whose flowers last for months and which will speedily flower again, they get upset when a more expensive type only blooms for a few weeks. "They say, `But it's an orchid!' when the flowers die on their Paphiopedilum," she sighs.

In general, though, she welcomes the current upsurge in interest on orchids. "Orchid buyers divide into hobbyists and pot-plant people, and why shouldn't the pot-plant people have more choice? It's a good idea for them to learn more about orchids." Many shop-bought orchids, though, suffer a swift death due to lack of care, in particular overwatering. "Lots of the high- street retailers sell them in pots with no drainage holes, and a Phalaenopsis shouldn't sit in water. If you have a pot with no holes, you should water literally a spoonful at a time, and take it out of the container when it has finished flowering."

Inside Johnson's orchid lab, there are shelves of jars of green slime and jelly. These are seedling and cloned ` orchids at various stages of development. It takes a while for the green fuzz to grow into something recognisable as a mass of baby plants; there could be thousands in a single jar. It takes seeds up to seven years to reach a saleable size; the clones grow up rather faster. Each jar is labelled; the goo in "1294" will eventually be miniature Cymbidium, "Doris Dawson", a green albino variety, while "0256" is a batch of white hybrid Odontoglossums in the making.

At McBean's, there are tiny orchids such as the Sigmatostalix radicans that can barely be seen with the naked eye, and specimens such as the Stanhopea, which has massive perfumed blooms. Johnson is particularly passionate about Paphiopedilums - the slipper orchids, with their distinctive pouched flowers. While some are pretty little pink things, some look alien, even predatory; they are just on the beautiful side of grotesque.

It is around the weirder, rarer, specimens that orchid mythology has grown; tales of crazy millionaires and gun-toting smugglers, of thievings and shootings and violence, of people for whom orchids have become a complete obsession. The film Adaptation, starring Nicolas Cage and Meryl Streep, had Susan Orlean's book The Orchid Thief at its core. Orchid Fever, by Eric Hansen, is another orchid-based bestseller. There can't be many other plant-centred non-fiction films or books that have critics falling over themselves to praise the excitement of the tale.

True orchid enthusiasts know no reason. Hansen spoke to a Japanese property developer called Hiroshi Ikarashi, whose home was devastated in the 1994 Kobe earthquake. Ikarashi rushed naked from the wreckage of his house to check on his greenhouse. "Thanks to God," he told Hansen, "the greenhouse all broken, but plants only knocked on their side. I tell you, I am astonish. But then I begin to wonder: where my wife in the rubble of our house?"

Just before Christmas 2000, two young orchid hunters, Tom Hart Dyke and Paul Winder, then aged 24 and 29, were freed after being held for nine months by rebels in Colombia. Hart Dyke, known as the Indiana Jones of the orchid world, became hooked on orchids while at primary school, and has searched for specimens in Thailand, Sumatra, Japan, Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala, Panama and Belize. Interviewed shortly after his release, he said: "I guess you could say it was an orchid too far. I thought we were going to die but it was worth it. When you see orchids flowering they are extraordinary. Seeing something like a slipper orchid bloom can make you feel faint."


It's unlikely that Cage or Streep will ever star in a film about Phalaenopsis cloning. The romance of orchidelirium has suffered from the Phalaenopsis pile-'em-high-sell-'em-cheap philosophy. Liz Johnson has heard the story of how one particularly enterprising Sussex grower used to take his orchids to London every Friday night, and hawk them outside the Bank of England. "The rich people coming out of the Stock Exchange would usually buy an orchid for their wife - or their mistress," she says. "If it had been a good day for the financial markets, that grower must have made a lot of money." He wouldn't do so well now. All those stockbrokers could simply nip into Marks and Spencer in their lunch hour and grab a Phalaenopsis off the shelves.
Lvd Weijden tel: 00 31 65 472 6861. McBean's Orchids, Cooksbridge, East Sussex, tel: 01273 400 228, www. mcbeansorchids.co.uk. McBean's offers free Open House Weekends.

Blooming everywhere: the ubiquitous `Phalaenopsis' orchid, yours for just a few pounds thanks to Dutch scientists

Aspidistra A favourite from Victorian times to the 1930s. Once handed down through families, sometimes over as long as a century. Initially regarded as a symbol of respectability, the aspidistra became shorthand for middle-class stuffiness, though it's a stylish, understated plant in demand in Japan for use in ikebana (flower arranging).

Parlor palm Edwardian homes were not complete without a graceful parlour palm with elegant fronds. These willowy palms are still popular today. The "Dicksonia" tree ferns may be more trendy, but they can't match this plant for elegance.

Cacti Cacti are plants for people who can't really be bothered with plants. Once every decade or so they might grudgingly throw out a flower, but mostly they sit quietly gathering dust and being undemanding. Ideal for busy, important people with no time for watering - cactis' popularity boomed in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Rubber plant Tall, imposing and shrugs off neglect, the rubber plant is a 1960s and 1970s suburban classic. It's also the archetypal office plant; find it in the corner between the photocopier and the coffee machine, its pot garnished with a mulch of fag-ends and empty sugar packets.

Swiss cheese plant No 1970s Habitat-furnished pad was complete without a monstrous, brooding Swiss cheese plant in a rustic-look terracotta pot, towering towards the ceiling and threatening to topple on to the leather sofa.

Yucca A native to Mexico and the West Indies, the Yucca elaphtipes's popularity flourished in the late 1980s - it was to Ikea what the Swiss cheese plant had been to Habitat a decade earlier. Cheap, cheerful and practically impossible to kill, the yucca and the yuppie defined the decade.