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Deceived by Orchids: Sex, Science, Fiction and Darwin

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Deceived by Orchids: Sex, Science, Fiction and Darwin BJHS 49(2): 205–229, June 2016. © British Society for the History of Science 2016 doi:10.1017/S0007087416000352 First published online 09 June 2016 Deceived by orchids: sex, science, fiction and Darwin JIM ENDERSBY* Abstract. Between 1916 and 1927, botanists in several countries independently resolved three problems that had mystified earlier naturalists – including Charles Darwin: how did the many species of orchid that did not produce nectar persuade insects to pollinate them? Why did some orchid flowers seem to mimic insects? And why should a native British orchid suffer ‘attacks’ from a bee? Half a century after Darwin’s death, these three mysteries were shown to be aspects of a phenomenon now known as pseudocopulation, whereby male insects are deceived into attempting to mate with the orchid’s flowers, which mimic female insects; the males then carry the flower’s pollen with them when they move on to try the next deceptive orchid. Early twentieth-century botanists were able to see what their predecessors had not because orchids (along with other plants) had undergone an imaginative re-creation: Darwin’s science was appropriated by popular interpreters of science, including the novelist Grant Allen; then H.G. Wells imagined orchids as killers (inspiring a number of imitators), to produce a genre of orchid stories that reflected significant cultural shifts, not least in the presentation of female sexuality. It was only after these changes that scientists were able to see plants as equipped with agency, actively able to pursue their own, cunning reproductive strategies – and to outwit animals in the process. This paper traces the movement of a set of ideas that were created in a context that was recognizably scientific; they then became popular non-fiction, then popular fiction, and then inspired a new science, which in turn inspired a new generation of fiction writers. Long after clear barriers between elite and popular science had supposedly been estab- lished in the early twentieth century, they remained porous because a variety of imaginative writers kept destabilizing them. The fluidity of the boundaries between makers, interpreters and publics of scientific knowledge was a highly productive one; it helped biology become a vital part of public culture in the twentieth century and beyond. When orchids attack In the late nineteenth century, no plants were more pampered than orchids. During an ‘orchidmania’ that rivalled the Dutch tulip mania, distant jungles were ransacked for new species, often at the cost of the health – or even the lives – of those who collected them. Enthusiasts spent fortunes on buying the plants and building elaborate green- houses that were kept at tropical temperatures throughout British winters to ensure their delicate inhabitants were comfortable. And yet, unaccountably, the orchids started turning on their owners. The first casualty was a Mr Winter-Wedderburn, whose tale was reported in the Pall Mall Budget in 1894. He was a rather shy, middle-aged bachelor for whom an * School of History, Art History and Philosophy, University of Sussex, Brighton, BN1 9RH, UK. Email: [email protected]. Acknowledgements: Chad Arment, Danielle Clode, Phil Cribb, Martin Evans, Cathy Gere, Yves Le Juen, Jesse Olszynko-Gryn, Christopher D. Preston, Jonathan Smith, Rebecca Shtasel and Pamela Thurschwell. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Open University Library, on 08 May 2019 at 13:33:05, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007087416000352 206 Jim Endersby occasional trip to the London orchid sales was almost his only excitement, until one day he returned with the dried tuber of an unknown species. (Orchids were frequently bought as apparently inert root-like tubers that might prove worthless, or a new, valuable exotic; the uncertainty added some excitement to the potentially dull business of purchasing what others had collected.) When Wedderburn’s orchid finally flowered, it produced an intense scent that overpowered him. He passed out and was found by his housekeeper with the orchid’s aerial roots wrapped around his neck; the vampiric plant was sucking his blood and only the housekeeper’s quick-witted intervention saved his life. Mr Wedderburn was, of course, fictitious, created by Herbert George Wells, whose story ‘The flowering of the strange orchid’ described how the hapless collector almost came to grief in the plant’s clutches.1 Wells’s story was republished often over the next few decades and translated into several languages; its success inspired imitators and a minor genre of ‘killer-orchid’ stories emerged, with new examples being added well into the twentieth century. The murderous orchids were part of a wider group of stories about lethal plants that started appearing in the late nineteenth century; inspired by public interest in the way plants such as the Venus flytrap ate insects (a phenomenon that had only been fully understood in the 1870s), the new fictions presented plants as much more mobile and aggressive than ever before. What gave these tales their emotion- al force was that the plants seemed to sense their surroundings, including the presence of animals or humans upon which they might prey, and then were able to react intelligently to outwit and trap their victims. These features of the ‘man-eating-plant’ genre also appear in the orchid tales (despite the fact that there are no insectivorous orchid species2), but when orchids attacked they were often equipped with additional means of seduction, notably an overpowering scent (as in the Wells story) that seemed to drug their (invariably male) victims, making them easier prey. Orchids became femmes fatales – almost irresistibly alluring but best avoided. Why did orchids turn nasty in the late nineteenth century? The answer lies partly in the ways in which Charles Darwin’s botanical researches were transformed as they became part of late Victorian culture. Between them Darwin and his interpreters managed to re- invent plants, including orchids, so as to make them active agents, equipped with strat- egies and the means to achieve them. This was part of a much wider transformation of botany which, at the beginning of the century, had been popularly considered a feminine science – not least because flowers were the epitome of innocence, a highly suitable (and not too demanding) study for young women, or perfect for engaging their children in nature study.3 By the end of the century, a new, supposedly more manly style of 1 Herbert George Wells, The Short Stories, London: Ernest Benn Ltd, 1927, pp. 231–240; first published in the Pall Mall Budget, 2 August 1894. 2 Only one orchid species, Aracamunia liesneri (Carnevali & Ramírez), is strongly suspected of carnivory, but it was only discovered in the late twentieth century. See Julian A. Steyermark and Bruce K. Holst, ‘Flora of the Venezuelan Guayana–VII contributions to the Flora of the Cerro Aracamuni, Venezuela’, Annals of the Missouri Botanical Garden (1989) 76(4), pp. 962–964. 3 Londa Schiebinger, ‘Gender and natural history’, in Nicholas Jardine, James A. Secord and Emma Spary (eds.), Cultures of Natural History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp. 163–177; Ann B. Shteir, Cultivating Women, Cultivating Science: Flora’s Daughters and Botany in England, 1760 to 1860, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996; Barbara T. Gates, Kindred Nature: Victorian and Edwardian Women Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Open University Library, on 08 May 2019 at 13:33:05, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007087416000352 Deceived by orchids 207 botany was changing the plant kingdom’s public image and at the same time plants were being reimagined in ways that reflected much broader shifts in the relationships between the sexes. Much of the work of reimagining plants happened outside the scientific world – largely in disposable fiction written for cheap, mass-produced magazines – yet it may have had important consequences for the scientific world. Darwin’s botany had helped blur the boundary between plant and animal, and his newly active and unruly plants refused to be confined by the genres of scientific, popular and fictional writing. As a result, early twentieth-century botanists in several countries independently resolved three problems that had mystified Darwin; they were able to see what their predecessors had not, partly because of the way orchids had become active agents. Darwin’s orchids helped blur the boundaries between plants and animals, and contributed to a longer- term blurring of the boundaries between elite and popular understandings of science. Sham nectar producers Darwin’s orchid book On the Various Contrivances by Which British and Foreign Orchids Are Fertilised by Insects, and on the Good Effects of Intercrossing (1862, hence- forth Various Contrivances) was his first major publication after the Origin of Species. Darwin complained that he had been ‘seduced’ into writing it.4 Despite blaming the orchids for leading him astray (which, as we shall see, would become a familiar trope), the book was the first part of a long-term project intended, as its author would later note, ‘to exalt plants in the scale of organised beings’.5 Various Contrivances was a successful start to that campaign, yet Darwin was unable to solve three puzzles: why did some orchids lack nectar, why did some mimic insects, and why should a bee ‘attack’ the flowers of one particular British orchid species? Orchid species without nectar had first been discussed by the German naturalist Christian Konrad Sprengel.6 Darwin found that when many orchid flowers were exam- ined, he could not find under the microscope the smallest bead of nectar. Sprengel calls these flowers ‘Scheinsaftblumen,’ or sham-nectar-producers; that is, he believes, for he well knew that the Embrace the Living World, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998; Samantha George, Botany, Sexuality and Women’s Writing, 1760–1830: From Modest Shoot to Forward Plant, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012.
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