I've just finished reading a book called The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean, a writer with the New Yorker magazine. It's a true and wide-ranging account of one man's scheme to steal endangered ghost orchids, Polyrrhiza lindenii, out of the Fakahatchee swamp in Florida. His plan - which was scuppered - was to use micropropagation to clone them by the million, and then rake in a packet while making this rare species legally available to masses of orchid fanciers.
It's a gallop of a read, but as it's written by a reporter rather than a plants person, it doesn't quite have the authentic whiff of blood-fish-and-bone that we gardeners crave. Still, it got me thinking about orchids, nicking plants from the wild, and plant-lust in general.
Lust is a fairly apt term to use when describing the emotions raised by orchids, because the thing is, orchids are sexy. Their glandular, organic flowers are powerful, elemental - and disconcertingly reminiscent of things sexual. We're not talking about the pretty-pretty cymbidium hybrids that appear in garden centres around Christmas, but plants like the Pap hiopedilum species with their tumescent veined pouches, or members of the Oncidium genus with their lippy, splayed presentations.
Orchids, according to Ms Orlean's book, were so suggestive that Victorian ladies were not allowed to grow them. Nonetheless, Queen Victoria herself was a keen orchid fancier (amazing what you can get away with when you're queen). And here in Glasnevin, where there was a world-famous collection, the botanical artist Lydia Shackleton, a Quaker from Ballitore in Co Kildare, painted over 1,000 orchid watercolour portraits from 1884 onwards.
Of course, all orchids aren't so erotically charged. Some are exquisitely, eerily beautiful, like Calanthe triplicata which bears dozens of red-throated, snowy-white flowers. This species was one of the parents of the very first orchid hybrid to be bred in the West, and its offspring (dubbed an "orchidaceous mule" by botanist John Lindley) caused consternation and excitement when it flowered in 1856. The orchid family's readiness to interbreed foretold chaos in the naming of varieties, and put a burning desire into the hearts of plant breeders, who realised that, godlike, they could create endlessly different permutations of this coveted plant.
Another reason orchids arouse such acquisitive passion is that they are terribly highly evolved: in terms of plant IQ, they leave all other green things wearing the dunce's hat. And they have considerably more cop-on than some creatures, employing wonderful wiles to dupe various insects into carrying their pollen from plant to plant and thus fertilising and perpetuating the species. Paphiopedilum rothschildiana, for instance, has markings that look like a herd of aphids, the food of a certain fly larva. After the fly lays her eggs, she becomes trapped in the orchid's pouch, and in extricating herself becomes anointed with pollen. Some orchids exude the odour of rotting meat to attract carrion flies, while others produce flowers that resemble the female of the pollinating insect's species. When the male attempts to mate the orchid he ends up not just frustrated, but with the pollen parcels - pollinia - stuck to his body, which he carries on to the next pseudofemale. Some of the cleverest orchids are those of the Dimorphorchis genus, which carry two entirely differently coloured and scented flowers on the same stem - one for night-time pollination, the other for daytime. With such a combination of beauty and intelligence, it's not surprising that collectors have gone absolutely barmy over orchids, and 10 billion dollars of orchids are traded worldwide annually. Nowadays it is illegal to collect orchids from the wild without a permit, and most of those on the market are captive-bred.
Not so, though, in the heyday of "orchidelirium" during Victorian times. Millions of orchids were ripped out of the forests of Asia and South and Central America. Tons of plants were shipped back to Europe, most dying on the voyage. Competition between the plant hunters was fierce, and areas were completely stripped of every single orchid. No one can say how many orchid species were totally wiped out during those times.
The Victorians were also crazy about ferns, and in this country the little Killarney fern (Trichomanes speciosum) was almost extinguished. Masses of it were sold to tourists, who brought it home and promptly killed it. Being a "filmy" fern, its fronds are only one cell thick, and if it does not get constant high, high humidity, it dies out. Thanks to those early fern-lovers it is now desperately rare, and a protected species. On the other hand, another Irish speciality that no longer exists in the wild is now a valued garden plant the world over. The entire population of Irish yew (Taxus Baccata `Fastigiata'), that funereal, dark column of churchyards, came from a single tree found in Fermanagh in the mid-18th century by George Willis when he was out hare coursing.
He dug it up, divided it and gave half of it to Lord Mountflorence, on whose property it was later spotted by a nurseryman who took cuttings, eventually sending the tree all over Europe and America. If George Willis hadn't uprooted that first fastigiate yew (it's a variety that does not come true from seed), there'd be no solemn parades of Irish yew decorating formal gardens throughout the globe. Which is a nice argument for removing endangered species from the wild, but one I don't think the authorities would appreciate.