19 February 2025
7 min read
Orchidelirium: Kew’s dried flower collection reveals a Victorian infatuation
You probably know about 17th-century Dutch tulipmania, but what about orchidelirium in Victorian Britain? Thousands of dried orchids in Kew's herbarium tell the story of a 19th-century obsession.
Orchids are special. Every February, crowds from around the world flock to Kew’s iconic orchid festival to admire an unrivalled display of these most breath-taking flowers. It is an appropriate location: orchids have been cultivated at Kew for more than 250 years and over the centuries Kew has played a central role in discovering their secrets.
That contribution continues to this day, with the digitisation of over 190,000 dried orchid specimens in Kew’s herbarium – an achievement designed to make one of the world’s largest and most diverse collections easily available to researchers around the planet, at no charge. This digital resource provides scientists and orchid enthusiasts with invaluable taxonomic, geographic and habitat data. It is crucial information that helps experts understand plant ecosystems and enables conservationists to do a better job in protecting endangered species.
But Kew’s dried orchid collection is more than that. It is also a unique historical record, revealing collectors’ growing fascination with a plant family that includes over 30,000 wild species, plus more than 100,000 hybrids and cultivars.
A history of obsession
Orchids, which are found on every continent except Antarctica, are one of the world’s largest flowering plant families and they have intrigued people for thousands of years. In both traditional Chinese and ancient Greek medicine, orchids were thought to possess important curative properties, while the Aztecs used fruit from the vanilla orchid to flavour their ceremonial chocolate drink xocoatl.
However, enthusiasm for the Orchidaceae family reached new heights in 19th-century Britain when rich collectors – often aristocrats, bankers or industrialists – paid huge prices for exotic tropical orchids taken from the wild around the globe.
In 1821, William Spencer Cavendish, the 6th Duke of Devonshire and the owner of Chatsworth, was so beguiled by a single Psychopsis papilio butterfly orchid that he paid £100 on the spot, equivalent to about £10,000 in today's money. This was just the beginning. Interest in tropical orchids exploded in the years that followed as collecting expeditions brought more and more showy specimens back to Europe, many of which were put up for auction in London. The precious plants went into carefully managed hothouses, where they were cultivated by teams of gardeners employed by some of Britain’s wealthiest and most powerful families.
At Chatsworth, orchids were grown in the Great Conservatory, which was built in 1840 and was big enough to drive a carriage through. Members of the Rothschild banking family were also avid collectors, cultivating plants in glasshouses at Gunnersbury Park, Tring Park and Exbury Gardens. Some species were even named after the family in recognition of their role in orchid science, including the rare Rothschild's slipper orchid from Borneo, Paphiopedilum rothschildianum.
The Victorians’ obsession with orchids is recorded across Kew’s herbarium, on faded sheets of paper holding well-preserved mounted specimens. Other well-known 19th-century figures who were compulsive orchid collectors included the banker Baron John Schröder, who grew orchids is his gardens in Egham, and the Birmingham industrialist and politician Joseph Chamberlain. Specimens from these collectors and many more are carefully filed away in boxes on shelves in the herbarium.
An age of scientific curiosity
The Victorian era was also an age of intense scientific curiosity, and the peculiar lifestyles of orchids – involving special relationships with both insects, for pollination, and fungi, for seed germination – proved irresistible to many naturalists, including Charles Darwin. In 1862, he correctly predicted that Angraecum sesquipedale, a star-shaped orchid from Madagascar with a 30cm-long nectary, must be pollinated by a creature with a similarly long tongue. Years after his death, Darwin was proved right when the giant Xanthopan morganii praedicta hawkmoth was discovered to be the pollinator.
Feeding the Victorians’ growing appetite for exotic orchids were several specialist nurseries, including Conrad Loddiges & Sons in Hackney, James Veitch & Sons in Kensington, and Frederick Sander in St Albans. Sander, who was originally from Germany, became known as the Orchid King and was famous for sending his army of collectors all over the world in search of exotic specimens.
Unfortunately, 19th-century collectors paid little regard to preserving orchids in the wild and their collecting expeditions frequently plundered forests, causing lasting damage and pushing several species to the verge of extinction.
While Kew was not involved in mass orchid shipments, it was an early centre of expertise and cultivation, and may have indirectly contributed to over-collecting by providing details on where plants grew. The first record of orchids having been grown at Kew dates back to 1768, when it was still Princess Augusta's private garden and the plants were mainly European specimens. Orchid numbers increased greatly from 1841 to 1885 under the first two directors of the Royal Botanic Gardens – William Hooker and his son Joseph – who were both enthusiasts for the plants.
Orchid conservation
Today, Kew still has a world-leading collection of living orchids, in addition to its huge reserve of dried specimens. But conservation is now centre stage. In the 21st century, the threats to orchids in the wild remain just as real as in the heyday of Victorian collecting, according to Mike Fay, who heads the Conservation Genetics team at Kew.
“Orchids today are one-and-a-half times more likely to be threatened with extinction than flowering plants as a whole: roughly 40% of angiosperms are threatened, whereas for orchids it’s 60%”
he said. “We still have problems with illegal, unsustainable and undocumented collecting, as well as habitat degradation – and climate change is an increasing threat. Orchids are particularly vulnerable to climate change because of the specificity of their relations with both fungi and pollinators.”
The problem is highlighted by the early spider-orchid Ophrys sphegodes, which uses sexual deception to get the male mining bee Andrena nigroaenea to pollinate its flowers. It is a cunning ploy, yet these days it is not working well. It depends on orchids flowering before female bees emerge, so that naïve male bees try to mate with them – but warmer springs mean female bees now often take flight before flowering, depriving the plants of their chance to con the males.
The scale of the challenge was revealed by combining extensive herbarium records at Kew and elsewhere with long-term weather data, which allowed researchers to model early spider-orchid flowering and bee emergence dates going back to the 17th century.
Threats piling up
Kew is not only a reservoir of historical knowledge. It also plays an active part in reintroducing orchids into the wild. In Britain, where the lady’s slipper orchid Cypripedium calceolus was pushed to the brink of extinction by Victorian collectors, Kew scientists have worked for 30 years to reintroduce the species using laboratory-propagated seedlings. The project reached a landmark in 2024 when a seedling that had grown naturally was found, meaning the reintroduced plants had successfully reproduced.
Sadly, such painstaking work to save one species in one country is not feasible for all the many species at risk around the world. And the threats are piling up.
Despite strict rules making it illegal to trade in wild orchids internationally without a permit, trafficking is rampant, and many orchids are now offered for sale openly on social media. The race to bag a rare specimen means new orchids are often under threat as soon as they are discovered. In 2010, a new species of slipper orchid in Vietnam, Paphiopedilum canhii, was collected to near extinction within a matter of months.
Orchids face further pressure in places where they are valued as a source of medicine or food, which often leads to dangerous levels of over-collection. Many are used in Chinese and ayurvedic medicine, while tubers from some species are key ingredients for popular traditional foodstuffs – such as salep, found in starchy drinks and stretchy dondurma ice cream in Turkey, and chikanda, a savoury delicacy eaten in southern Africa.
Faced with the scale of these challenges, Kew is working with conservationists not only to clamp down on illegal trade but also to preserve biodiversity at the habitat level. This includes initiatives such as establishing Tropical Important Plants Areas (TIPAs) to conserve key areas of biodiversity worldwide, including tropical forests and their unique populations of orchids.
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