There are more than 25,000 species of orchids in their natural state, sharing one most striking characteristic: they are all blatantly seductive. Eric Hansen, an assiduously inquisitive, cosmopolitan San Franciscan, notes that "Botanists have spent their careers exploring how these flowers manipulate, connive, court and cheat insects into having sex with them".
The word orchid is derived from the Greek orkhis, meaning testicle. The name was conferred in recognition of the shape of its root-tubers. However, the allure of its blossoms and fragrance is distinctively feminine. Orchids use mimicry to achieve pollination in the wild, as gullible moths, wasps, bees and others fly promiscuously from flower to flower. Furthermore, the beauty of orchids beguiles humans. Orchids don't contract orchid fever; people do.
Hansen traces obsessive orchidophilia back to the Chinese Emperor Shen Nung, who wrote of Bletilla hyancinthiana in 2800 BC. Confucius called the orchid "the king of fragrant plants". European colonial explorers, such as Bligh, Cook and Drake, collected orchids from the Americas and the Far East. Early in the 19th century, the sixth Duke of Devonshire had an enormous greenhouse built, 300 feet long, 150 feet wide and 35 feet tall, to house his orchids. There was "a Victorian orchid frenzy," Hansen writes, entailing the expenditure of "vast sums of money".
Until a short time ago, collecting and breeding orchids was an esoteric cult of the rich. Now, however, the American Orchid Society has about 30,000 members, Hansen reports, and there may be as many as five million "serious orchid hobbyists worldwide". In recent years, it has been estimated, they have produced some 100,000 hybrids.
According to his publisher, Hansen has had various bizarre jobs, working as "a wild dog hunter and a barber in Mother Teresa's centre in Calcutta". He was once "shipwrecked for two weeks on an uninhabited Red Sea island and has been imprisoned in Israel, the Yemen and Afghanistan for travelling without permission". He was evidently motivated by the right temperament to undertake the research for this curious, entertaining book, spending "more than five years roaming the lunatic fringe of the orchid world".
He began his arduous investigation by leading two American orchid growers on an expedition into a Borneo rain forest to look for specimens of a rare orchid called Paphiopedilum sanderianum. "It's the holy grail of orchids," said one of Hansen's companions, expressing fanaticism that Hansen found fascinating. "Maybe only a dozen botanists have seen it bloom in the wild. It has the whole orchid world in turmoil. Conservationists, scientists and commercial growers are at each other's throats over the plant."
Although orchids are universal and prolific, the demand for them has become so great that supplying orchids is a $9 billion a year business, and there is some anxiety about threats of extinction. Administrators of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, with headquarters in Geneva, in efforts to protect orchids have established draconian penalties for smuggling the flowers and seeds across international boundaries. For illegally importing protected orchids into the United States, for example, there are fines up to $500,000 and prison sentences up to 10 years. Hansen feels that the Swiss bureaucrats are out of touch with reality. He is a persuasive polemicist with a keen appreciation of oddities and a sardonic wit.
Patrick Skene Catling is an author and critic