Bateman, Skinner, and the Kiddies Carol Siegel

BATEMAN, SKINNER, AND THE KIDDIES CAROL SIEGEL RADER JOE’S SELLS ORCHIDS for $9.99. With bring him international fame and acclaim and distin- a ceramic pot. And decorative moss. Sometimes guish him when he was just a young man. Twith two spikes. Wrapped in cellophane. With a He was only a precocious boy of eight when orchids bow. You can put them in your shopping cart right next touched his heart. His mother and father were lovers of to your toilet paper and pork chops. They are pretty, plants and gardens and gave that love to their son. As meant to be disposable, and, to most shoppers, no big he said: deal. It was not always that way. I was devoted to orchids long before I knew There was a time when orchids were stunning and what an orchid was, indeed the word itself was glamourous and thrilling, when men risked everything strange to me when I heard my mother apply to have the exotic, the mysterious, the rare new orchids. it to a beautiful plant with spotted leaves and There was a time when Victoria was Queen, but orchids speckled fl owers which I had gathered in a were King, and England was seized with orchid mania. country lane and regarded with great admira- By 1837, the rich were exchanging fortunes for just one tion. ‘That,” she said, “is an Orchis.” rare orchid, and fearless collectors were braving terrify- It is legendary that ten years later while a student ing dangers to bring them back. at Magdalen College, Oxford, he became totally en- This is the story of one such rich man, James Bate- amored of orchids during a visit to Thomas Fairburn’s man, and one such fearless collector, George Ure Skin- nursery at Oxford. He said, “This sealed my fate.” ner, who for thirty years formed a partnership that When he should have been at class, he spent a morning changed the orchid world. Together, they introduced at at the nursery. Fairburn, who had been a gardener to least 100 new orchid species to cultivation and taught Sir Joseph Banks and Prince Leopold, entranced Bate- the world how to grow them. Theirs was a friendship man with a curious orchid plant with leathery leaves devoted to the “kiddies,” as painter Edward Cooke called them, the orchids that set the Victorian world on fi re. James Bateman Catches Orchid Mania As orchid historian Luigi Berliocchi says, “One of the orchid’s most colorful chroniclers was James Bate- man (1811-1897) whose personality and range of inter- ests exemplifi es the vein of eccentricity that ran through many of the gentleman-amateur biologists of the nine- teenth century.” Bateman had money to hire orchid ex- plorers and the time and ability to communicate with the botanical personalities of his time. He had money and talent to establish facilities to grow and fl ower orchid plants and the contacts to have them identifi ed by top London botanists like John Lindley. He not only grew orchids, but he wrote about them and hired top- rate artists to draw them. He published books that were an international sensation and built gardens that were the wonder of his time. He was the ultimate Victorian gentleman. Obviously, Bateman was brilliant as well as rich. His fortune was a fortune made from the Industrial Revo- lution, a fortune inherited from his grandfather’s coal mines and iron foundries, cotton mills and steam en- gines. It was a recent fortune, but a vast one nonethe- less, and it gave him the means to pursue a life of lux- ury in the company of noblemen and intellectuals. He was not interested in commerce or industry, but, luckily for the orchid world, he was passionate about orchids and devoted much of his brilliance to them. He called ©RHS, Lindley Library orchids “the master passion of his life.” They were to James Bateman 18 Orchid Digest, April, May, June 2013 and stout roots. It was Renanthera coccinea, and Fair- Bateman Organizes burn showed him the colored drawing of the Chinese air plant in the pages of the Botanical Magazine as it had an Orchid Hunting Expedition fl owered in Prince Leopold’s garden. Bateman later re- Bateman described himself as being “impatient at called: the tardy rate at which new species crossed the seas” Of course, I fell in love at fi rst sight, and as and organized an expedition to search for new orchids Mr. Fairburn asked only a guinea for his plant in Demerara and Berbice, British Guiana. He was still (high prices not yet in vogue), it soon changed only a college student at the time, but with his father’s hands and travelled with me to Knypersley, encouragement, he sent Thomas Colley, Fairburn’s when the Christmas holidays began. I had foreman, to collect orchids in 1833. Colley sent back 60 caught my fi rst orchid…. different orchid species, one third of them new to culti- Bateman’s botanical hooky-playing incurred the vation. In those days, it was the mark of a gentleman to wrath of the vice-president of the college, Dr. Daubeny, be able to sponsor such a diffi cult and exciting expedi- who famously required Bateman to write out half the tion, much like sponsoring a trip to the moon to bring Book of Psalms as punishment for his absence. back moon rocks would be today. The species Bateman- He was punished but most certainly not dissuaded. nia colleyi commemorates the relationship between the He had caught “orchidmania” after “catching” his fi rst two men. orchid, and he was driven to collect ever more orchids However, in Bateman’s obituary in Gardeners’ Chron- at his estate, Knypersley Hall. Bateman was a frequent icle, it says that, unfortunately, “To one of them, the visitor and buyer at the famous nursery of George ugliest as it happens, Dr. Lindley affi xed the names of Loddiges in Hackney. He had immense admiration for Batemannia colleyi, thus associating the names of the Loddiges as an orchid grower and said of him, “I doubt employer and collector.” An account of the expedition, whether any man ever loved the plants as much as he.” one of the fi rst of Mr. Bateman’s contributions to bo- Bateman was bitten by the orchid bug and would never tanical literature, was published in Loudon’s Gardeners’ recover. Magazine. It was the start of Bateman’s brilliant writing career. In 1834, the Botanical Register published several new species from Colley’s expedition. One of them was On- cidium lanceatum (Trichocentrum lanceanum) named for Bateman’s friend John Henry Lance. Bateman related proudly that Colley had found a tree covered with this species and, knowing that Francis Henchman, another “traveler” working for Low’s nursery was not far be- hind, stripped the tree of all the orchids. Bateman later said, without regret, that the species was not found before or since. He says rather boastfully, “Everyone was prepared to go down on their knees…offering their greatest treasures in exchange.” This sad commentary reveals the unsustainable way that orchids were collected in Victorian times, even by those who were sup- posedly educated. In subsequent decades, this stripping of the jungle by collectors only increased. The hauls just kept getting bigger and bigger; by 1878, William Bull boasted that he had gotten a consignment of two million orchids while Bernard Roezl once sent eight tons of orchids in a single shipment. Herr Orgies, Director of the Botanical Gar- dens of Zurich complained in 1877: Not satisfi ed with taking 300 or 500 specimens of a fi ne orchid, they must scour the whole country and leave nothing for many miles around… no collector henceforth will fi nd any… there. These modern collectors spare nothing. This is no longer collecting; it is wan- ton robbery… ©Ron Parsons, grown by White Oak Orchids ©Ron Parsons, grown Trichocentrum lanceanum (Oncidium lanceatum) named for Bateman’s friend, John Henry Lance. Orchid Digest, April, May, June 2013 19 ©Ron Parsons, grown by Marni Turkel ©Ron Parsons, grown by Denver Botanical Garden ©Ron Parsons, grown Barkeria skinneri, which Lindley named for the explorer, Oncidium leucochilum George Ure Skinner. was in the first box of orchids from Skinner. Bateman Enlists Skinner The fi rst Odontoglossum to arrive in England alive, now Rhynchostele bictoniense, was included which started the to Hunt Orchids popularity of that cool-growing genus. It was an excit- Bateman became intrigued with George Ure Skinner ing beginning to a thirty-year friendship that turned (1804-1867) while Bateman was still a student. Skinner strangers into dear old friends and associates and just started a mercantile company in Guatemala. He had kept the boxes of orchids coming. taken to collecting birds and insects which he sent to The Museum of Natural History in Manchester where Bateman was studying. Bateman became totally in- fected with orchid mania and thought there must a rich harvest of orchids in raw and unexplored Guatemala. He excitedly wrote to Skinner describing orchids and making little sketches requesting that Skinner, a com- plete stranger, start sending him orchids he collected. As Bateman later remembered: My letter, dated March 17, 1834, reached him in due course, and, as he never tired of tell- ing me, the day of arrival was as it were a new birthday, for it gave a fresh interest to his life, which never left him even to its latest hour! Shortly thereafter, the fi rst box of orchids from Skin- ner arrived. Bateman remarked, “Never shall I forget my intense delight in the opening of that box.” Although collected at random, every plant was new to cultivation in England.

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