Bilston, Sarah. The Lost Orchid: A Story of Victorian Plunder and Obsession. Harvard University Press, 2025. 400 pp. $29.95, cloth, ISBN 978-0-674-27260-6.

Reviewed by Tim Chamberlain (Birkbeck College, University of London)
Published on H-Environment (October, 2025)
Commissioned by Daniella McCahey (Texas Tech University) 

 Printable Version:  https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=62108

“Today, orchids are among the best-selling potted plants in the world. Over 1.1 billion live plants were traded between 1996 and 2015. Most of these were orchids grown in commercial greenhouses, artificially propagated. Taiwan, Thailand, and the Netherlands are the largest exporters: Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States are among the largest importers.… To many consumers today, orchids are not a hushed, rare prize but a cheap and cheerful gift in plastic wrap from the local supermarket or home-improvement store” (p. 287).

Sarah Bilston’s The Lost Orchid: A Story of Victorian Plunder and Obsession charts both the horticultural and social history of how this industry was first established and how it has been sustained. As the highly engaging title of this book suggests, today’s thriving orchid industry was born out of an aura and mystique which thrived upon the idea of exoticism and rarity. Orchids were a strange and fabulous prize, feverishly sought for by nineteenth-century scientists and collectors. They were status symbols upon which reputations, livelihoods, and commercial fortunes were founded. As with all prizes, the hunt for new orchids became highly contested. Bilston demonstrates that none was more coveted than the orchid Cattleya labiata.

This plant is the “lost orchid” of the book’s title. A “lustrous purple and crimson bloom, it was often termed the ‘Queen of the Orchids’” (p. 4). Cattleya labiata was “first discovered” in Brazil and sent to England in 1818 by William Swainson, who sent it as a parcel of roots to his friend, William Jackson Hooker. A brewer-turned-botanist, it was Hooker who, having managed to propagate the roots, got the plant to flower, and so its significance became apparent. Curiously, Hooker appears not to have sought to give this “new” orchid a name. This happened later, when the orchid was drawn and described by the botanist John Lindley, who named it after William Cattley, a prominent collector and merchant with whom he worked, thereby establishing it as the type species for a new genus. However, Swainson exited from the story soon after this discovery (emigrating to New Zealand). Consequently, the exact origins of Cattleya labiata remained a mystery that endured for some seventy-five years after its scientific naming.

During that time, a number of plant hunters, working for European and American commercial nurseries, were sent out to scour the vast continent of South America in search of the lost orchid. The relationships between these explorers and their patrons, and between the explorers and their local guides, assistants, and informants, as well as the bitter rivalries that flourished between the plant hunters, and between their respective patrons, form the heart of the story that The Lost Orchid sets out to recover.

Bilston does so by utilizing a wide range of published and unpublished materials, ranging from popular horticultural magazines and journals, which were experiencing a boom during the nineteenth century as gardening became an increasingly popular and affordable pastime for the middle classes, to the extensive archives of botanical gardens and commercial nurseries. These sources are also helpfully set within the broader context of the arts and literature of the period, which in turn were responding to contemporary innovations within scientific thinking (not least of which was Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by the process of natural selection, which was influenced in part by Darwin’s close study of orchids), emphasizing that “nineteenth-century science and literature were intimately intertwined” (p. 9).

In this regard, one of the main strengths of Bilston’s book is that while she tells the chronological narrative of the discovery and classification, and the subsequent search for and eventual “rediscovery” of Cattleya labiata, it is not simply a history of science, outlining an all too familiar story of European botanical exploration and scientific discovery. But rather, Bilston recounts this history in the revised contexts of contemporary social and cultural mobilities of the period, thereby painting a larger picture that also highlights the less readily visible dynamics of racial, gender, and class interactions. These are exactly the kind of elements of such histories that were consciously written out of the story at the time of its making. Indeed, the carefully curated elements of shrewd commercial marketing which actively reinforced popular tropes are still unconsciously echoed and propagated in the present, such as the heroic myth of the lone white explorer.

The reality which belies these tropes is often far more complex and interesting, given all the subtle and interlinked nuances such tropes conceal. For example, many of the plant hunters were lower-class individuals, who took up this profession by force of circumstance rather than by vocation. They were often young men, “rootless, working-class, ill-educated, and sometimes managing behavioral or physical disabilities,” seeking to establish themselves while making a living in a highly precarious profession (p. 2). And, once they were sent into the field, they commonly had to fend for themselves with insufficient support from their wealthy yet parsimonious patrons and sponsors back home. These were men such as Swainson himself, as well as subsequent explorers who followed in his footsteps: William Digance, J. D. Osmers, Fritz Arnold, Erich Bungeroth, and Claes Ericsson, many of whom frequently complained of the danger and hardships they regularly had to suffer and endure in their unpolished and semi-literate letters home. As such though, the archives made up of this firsthand correspondence are now a mine of information for historians interested in tracing the social and economic dynamics that underpinned the colonial exploitation of people, places, and natural commodities during a burgeoning age of imperial expansion. Supported by a growing infrastructure of roads, railways, ships, telegraph cables, trade routes, and banking systems, the nineteenth century was a time when the networks of empire flourished in both formal and informal settings around the globe.

As Bilston demonstrates, this reality was the exact opposite of the way in which the plant hunters were commonly portrayed by their patrons in popular publications, where they were characterized as dedicated and high-minded scientific explorers, heroically hacking their way through dense jungle, making marvelous discoveries single-handed—stories that were characteristic of the kind of excitement and derring-do found in the eponymous Boy’s Own Paper. In truth, however, the orchid hunters were frequently assisted by local informants whose knowledge they took full advantage of with little or no credit beyond an occasional passing reference in their unpublished correspondence with their patrons. Such individuals thereby only ever seem to appear as fleeting shadows in the day-to-day business accounting of plant hunters, who were more immediately concerned with explaining and justifying their actions and expenditure in the field to their long-distance, micro-managing employers. In this regard, Bilston does an admirable job of tracing some of these Indigenous agents, giving them names and stories of their own, which helps to better populate the host of subaltern characters who made possible the phenomenon which was known at the time as “orchidomania” or “orchidelirium.”

For the most part, the protagonists in the story of the search for Cattleya labiata and the commercial exploitation of orchids were male. Bilston recounts in detail, for example, the intense rivalry between the two competing horticultural nurseries of Frederick Sander and Lucien Linden. But as she also shows, there were women who took an active role within botanical and horticultural circles too.

In 1840, Louisa Lawrence won the prestigious Silver Knightian medal of the Horticultural Society in London for a Cattleya labiata she had cultivated. Prior to this, she had already won fifty-three medals at Horticultural Society shows and was a Fellow of the Society: “To consult the lists of prizewinners at the Horticultural Society and the Royal Botanic Society from the late 1830s through the late 1840s is to find Mrs. Lawrence lodged, proudly and often at the top. On the same lists, often further down, are leading Victorian nurserymen of the day, influential professionals whose businesses were growing up rapidly to cater to a growing obsession” (p. 116, emphasis in original). The active sourcing, importation, and commercial cultivation of orchids seen from a male perspective was undoubtedly symbolic of the scientific and economic progress of empire, but the involvement of women, such as Louisa Lawrence, served also to reframe the meaning of orchids and orchid mania in the wider public sphere. Orchids were “not just artifacts of a massive capitalist, colonialist machine, they are also presented to the observer as the products of a woman’s care, collection, domestication” (p. 118). In many ways this was a continuation of a process that Bilston describes as a larger, “gradual yet seismic social reordering [which had already helped] men like Hooker, Gardner, and Lindley rise from the provincial margins to positions of cultural and intellectual prominence” (p. 112)—a process of globalization which has shaped the world we live in today and resulted in orchids in plastic wrap being sold cheaply by today’s florists and garden centers around the world.

The Lost Orchid shows how the nineteenth-century scientific and commercial preoccupation with a single flower—or rather, a particular plant species—can be used as a lens for examining broader themes of science and empire, as well as the social, economic, and cultural drivers of global change, and how an early awareness of the detrimental effects of such exploitation, particularly in terms of both unthinking and willful ecological destruction through the deforestation activities of loggers and the plant hunters themselves actively destroying original habitats in order to stymie the efforts of their competitors had a lasting negative impact on the environment, particularly in places such as Brazil. Bilston explores all of these aspects of Cattleya labiata’s multifaceted story with frequent references to contemporary scholarship, helping to tie all of these threads together in a highly engaging and accessible book which will certainly appeal to both academic and popular history readers alike.