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 greenhouses 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 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.Footnote 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 emotional 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 speciesFootnote ²), 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 reinvent plants, including orchids, so as to make them active agents, equipped with strategies 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.Footnote ³ By the end of the century, a new, supposedly more manly style of 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, henceforth Various Contrivances) was his first major publication after the Origin of Species. Darwin complained that he had been ‘seduced’ into writing it.Footnote 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’.Footnote ⁵Various 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.Footnote ⁶ Darwin found that when many orchid flowers were examined, he

However, Darwin felt that anyone who accepted Sprengel's explanation ‘must rank very low the instinctive knowledge’ of insects.Footnote ⁷ Although he managed to detect nectar in some species where Sprengel had not, many orchids clearly lacked it, so Darwin wondered how they persuaded insects to keep pollinating them.

The second puzzle was that most of the nectarless flowers Darwin identified were species of the genus Ophrys, many of which resemble insects sufficiently to have been given common names such as the bee orchid (Ophrys apifera) and the fly orchid (Ophrys insectifera). These mysterious resemblances between orchids and insects had been noted centuries before Darwin, but were still unexplained. Darwin's botanical mentor, Robert Brown, had proposed that bee orchids ‘resembled bees in order to deter insects from visiting them’, but Darwin commented that ‘I cannot think this probable’. Not only was there no apparent reason to ‘deter’ bees, but the fly orchid looked as much like an insect as the bee orchid did (or more so), yet it was regularly pollinated by insects.Footnote ⁸ Yet Darwin had to admit that although the flowers were clearly adapted to enable insect fertilization, ‘I have never seen any insect visit these flowers’. In a footnote added to this sentence he mentioned one final puzzle: ‘Mr. Price has frequently witnessed attacks made upon the Bee Orchis by a bee’, adding, ‘What this sentence means I cannot conjecture’.Footnote ⁹ It would be over half a century before the significance of those ‘attacks’ was explained almost simultaneously by three naturalists: Maurice-Alexandre Pouyanne (an Algerian-born French judge), Masters John Godfery (a British military officer) and Edith Coleman (a British-born Australian schoolteacher). Understanding why it took so long requires examining how Darwin's work was interpreted in the intervening decades.

Darwin's botanical work had three main aspects. He used flowers as models with which to analyse the effects of self-fertilization on animals, including human ones.Footnote ¹⁰ He argued that breeding between close relatives was harmful to their offspring; the orchid book (subtitled on the Good Effects of Intercrossing) was the first of several to explore this topic, which also had a wider importance for evolutionary theory, especially for the origins of variation.Footnote ¹¹ Darwin found clear evidence that cross-fertilized plants were more vigorous than those which were self-fertilized.

The second (and most significant) aspect of Darwin's botanical project is my main concern here: he tried to ‘exalt’ plants in order to show that the gulf that separated plants and animals was not as wide as was usually assumed (making a common evolutionary origin for all living things more plausible).Footnote ¹² To make his case, Darwin needed to demonstrate that plants possessed, at least in a rudimentary form, the same faculties and powers as animals – mobility, sensibility and (therefore) intelligence. When insectivorous plants devoured animals, for example, they demonstrated all three (as well as illustrating a hypothetical origin for carnivory in the animal kingdom).Footnote ¹³ Similarly, his work on climbing plants emphasized not only that such plants were more mobile than had previously been recognized, but also that they appeared to be able to sense the world around them and adjust their movements accordingly; in climbers like the passion flower the plant's ‘tendrils place themselves in the proper position for action’, as if waiting for an opportunity to climb. Such plants demonstrate, he argued, ‘how high in the scale of organisation a plant may rise’ and he explicitly bridged the gap between the higher plants and animals by comparing their ‘admirable’ tendrils to the arms of an octopus.Footnote ¹⁴ In the second edition of Climbing Plants, Darwin made the point even more strongly when he argued, ‘The most interesting point in the natural history of climbing plants is the various kinds of movement which they display in manifest relation to their wants’.Footnote ¹⁵ In similar vein, he concluded his final botanical work, The Power of Movement in Plants, by asserting that since the tip of the plant's embryonic root, the radicle, possessed ‘the power of directing the movements of the adjoining parts’ it was ‘hardly an exaggeration’ to say that it acted ‘like the brain of one of the lower animals … receiving impressions from the sense-organs, and directing the several movements’.Footnote ¹⁶

Of all the plants' abilities, it was evidence that they possessed a rudimentary form of thought that particularly delighted Darwin. While working on climbing plants, he wrote to his son William, ‘My hobby-horse at present is Tendrils; they are more sensitive to a touch than your finger; & wonderfully crafty & sagacious’.Footnote ¹⁷ And he told his friend the Harvard botanist Asa Gray that his ‘beloved Drosera [sundew] is a wonderful plant, or rather a most sagacious animal’.Footnote ¹⁸ The claim that plants were sagacious, exhibiting some evidence of the mental powers that had always been assumed to be an exclusive property of animals, was what was most distinctive about Darwin's botany. And, as we shall see, it was this ‘zoomorphizing’ of plants that caught the attention of the wider public, thanks to a few writers who produced popular works that interpreted Darwin's ideas for a non-specialist public.

The goal of raising the plants up ‘the scale of organised beings’ helps explain a confusion that has arisen over the third use to which Darwin put his plants: providing examples to illustrate and test aspects of his theory of evolution by natural selection. Orchids were particularly important to the rhetorical aspect of Darwin's botany because he used them to provide detailed, adaptive explanations for key features of flowers, which undermined established views. The best-known example of this was the mutual interdependence of flowers and insects, which had traditionally been offered by natural theologians as evidence of the perfection and benevolence of God's design. By contrast, Darwin claimed to show that orchid flowers had been shaped by natural selection, an argument that began with the fact that cross-fertilized plants were more vigorous than self-fertilized ones. As a result, any chance variation that promoted cross-fertilization would become more common in each succeeding generation, gradually leading to a closer and closer ‘fit’ between flower and insect.Footnote ¹⁹ His research explained Sprengel's earlier claim that ‘Nature appears not to have intended that any flower should be fertilized by its own pollen’.Footnote ²⁰ These plant-pollinator studies provided a rich new topic for botanists to study, or – as Darwin had politely put it – ‘the study of organic beings may be as interesting to an observer who is fully convinced that the structure of each is due to secondary laws, as to one who views every trifling detail of structure as the result of the direct interposition of the Creator’.Footnote ²¹

Gray was one of the first to perceive that the orchid book might undermine natural-theological explanations, and he described it as ‘a flank movement on the enemy’.Footnote ²² Darwin welcomed this description, implying that he intended to attack natural theology (although much historical ink has been spilt on debating whether he and Gray had the same ‘enemy’ in mind). However, others found Darwin's intentions harder to perceive, leading to a long-running debate about the roles of design and teleology in Darwin's works.Footnote ²³ The focus of this confusion is Darwin's use of the word ‘contrivance’ (a favourite term for the theologians), often combined with metaphors that explicitly compare organisms to human-made artefacts.

The confusion over the apparent teleology of Various Contrivances arises from viewing evolution in a religious context, yet the book is better understood as part of Darwin's project of closing the apparent gap between plants and animals. Orchids possessed several of the features that Darwin found so compelling in the plant world; as he wrote, ‘An examination of their many beautiful contrivances’ would ‘exalt the whole vegetable kingdom in most persons’ estimation’.Footnote ²⁴ He concluded his detailed analyses of orchids by describing them as ‘wonderful and often beautiful productions, so unlike common flowers’, particularly because of their ‘many adaptations, with parts capable of movement, and other parts endowed with something so like, though no doubt really different from, sensibility’.Footnote ²⁵ Because orchids possessed ‘something so like … sensibility’, they effectively redesigned themselves, turning their flowers into traps for unwary insects. Natural selection was, of course, Darwin's only real ‘designer’; the competition to survive and breed ensured that favourable variations became more common, while unfavourable ones declined. Comparing orchids to artefacts was not, I argue, intended to hint at the possibility of a divine contriver, but to imbue the flowers with agency; in Darwin's writing, apparently for the first time in botanical history, plants have strategies with which to achieve their goals – Darwin's are crafty orchids.

Queer flowers

Although Darwin's botanical books were moderately successful, they were too technical to reach a wide readership. However, we can trace the ways in which Darwinian ideas became widespread by looking at some popular accounts of his work. For example, in 1884, Britain's Cornhill Magazine published ‘Queer flowers’, an article that described various flowers as ‘deceptive and alluring’ because they fool their pollinators with ‘ingenious mimicry’, fake nectar or appetizing smells, while others imprison insects, keeping them trapped ‘until they have duly performed the penal servitude of fertilization enjoined upon them by the inexorable blossom’. The author then turned to carnivorous plants, commenting that ‘there is something too awful and appalling in this contest of the unconscious and insentient with the living and feeling, of a lower vegetative form of life with a higher animated form, that it always makes me shudder slightly to think of it’.Footnote ²⁶ The writer was the popular novelist and writer on science Grant Allen (1848–1899), who, as Jonathan Smith and Bernie Lightman have discussed, wrote regularly and eloquently on the implications of Darwinism.Footnote ²⁷

Carnivorous plants were just one of the examples Allen used to dramatize Darwin's ideas. For example, Allen described Darwin's ‘beloved Drosera’ or sundew (the plant described to Gray as ‘a most sagacious animal’) as possessing ‘a sort of fiendish impersonal cruelty’, because the hair-like spikes on its leaves are surmounted by glistening tips that attract insects, who land to feed on what look like drops of nectar only to find themselves trapped in the sticky droplets. Gradually, the sundew envelops the insect in its tentacle-like leaves and digests it.

In conscious contrast to the earlier tradition of natural theology, Allen argued that plants like the sundew had caught the eyes of poets and artists, as well as Darwin, ‘not because it is beautiful, or good, or modest, or retiring, but simply and solely because it is atrociously and deliberately wicked’. If, as Darwin implied, plants were sufficiently ‘sagacious’ to be considered honorary members of the animal kingdom, should they be held to account for their actions? The vivid adjectives Allen used certainly suggest culpability: ‘murderous propensities’ were embodied in each ‘cruel crawling leaf’, which secreted a digestive juice over the insect that ‘dissolves him alive piecemeal in its hundred clutching suckers’. And if sundews were bad, pitcher plants were worse, ‘abandoned ruffians’ who thrive ‘in virtue of their exceptional ruthlessness’. They were, Allen noted, ‘not flowers, but highly modified and altered leaves, though in many instances they are quite as beautifully colored as the largest and handsomest exotic orchids’.Footnote ²⁸ And he used orchids themselves to explain how the mutual dependence of plant on insect created the flowers' fantastic shapes, ‘apparently out of pure wantonness, but really in order to ensure fertilisation by the oddest and most improbable methods’.Footnote ²⁹

By describing and dramatizing the carnivorous plants alongside the orchids, the two groups of plants became associated in some readers' minds, not least because Allen stressed that both groups possessed something akin to intelligence. Orchids were among ‘the most advanced families' of plants, and such advanced groups ‘really appear to be cleverer and shiftier than all others’.Footnote ³⁰ The revelation that plants could outwit or eat animals was made even more surprising by Allen's vivid prose. Darwin himself wrote to congratulate Allen on one of his books, noting that ‘I quite envy you your power of writing’. By contrast, Darwin had acknowledged that his readers would need ‘a strong taste for Natural History’ to read Various Contrivances, and that ‘the necessary details [would] be too minute and complex’ for most.Footnote ³¹ Making such information accessible necessarily involved a degree of reinterpretation: ‘Some of your statements seemed to me rather too bold’, Darwin wrote to Allen, but added that this might ‘perhaps be an advantage’. In response, Allen acknowledged that he ‘was quite aware that the papers were a little bold’, but justified his style by noting that ‘in writing for a daily paper one is obliged to adapt oneself to a very different audience’.Footnote ³² Intriguingly, Darwin also commented that some of Allen's views in The Evolutionist at Large (1881) were ‘quite new to me & seem extremely probable’.Footnote ³³ Frustratingly, he did not enlarge on which views he had in mind, but the comment raises the possibility that the very process of adapting scientific ideas – even making them ‘rather too bold’ – could inspire new ways of thinking about evolution. An analysis of Allen's botanical writings makes it clear that he (like other writers I discuss below) was doing much more than simply popularizing Darwin's ideas; as Allen and others appropriated Darwin's ideas for their own ends, they helped to create a new language with which to describe plants.

There is no doubt that plants became more exciting (and potentially more popular) subjects to write about when seen through evolutionary eyes. Grant Allen was not the only writer to seize on the remarkable new qualities that Darwin had discovered in them. As Tina Gianquitto has shown, many writers in the USA produced popular works inspired by Darwin's work on carnivorous plants.Footnote ³⁴ While in Britain, John Ellor Taylor, editor of the widely read magazine Hardiwicke's Science Gossip, was inspired by Allen's success to write another popular Darwinian botany book, The Sagacity and Morality of Plants: A Sketch of the Life and Conduct of the Vegetable Kingdom (1884). One newspaper reviewer commented that many ‘would laugh at the notion that trees and flowers possess any sagacity or morality’, yet ‘those who have gone deeper into the matter know that’ something akin to ‘a reasoning faculty … exists among plants’.Footnote ³⁵ According to Taylor, botany ‘no longer consists in merely collecting as many kinds of plants as possible, whose dried and shrivelled remains are too often only the caricatures of their once living beauty’. Instead, it was now ‘a science of Living Things, and not of mechanical automata’.Footnote ³⁶ Contrasting plants with automata suggested they were not governed by mechanical rules, but possessed a hint of intelligence.

The murderous habits of carnivorous plants occupied much of Sagacity and Morality, whose author commented, ‘There is hardly a virtue or a vice which has not its counterpart in the actions of the vegetable kingdom’.Footnote ³⁷ Although the book was a ‘charming and attractive volume’, one reviewer nevertheless concluded that pitcher plants were ‘a tragedy of plant-life’, being a ‘terrible example of vegetable guile in the commission of murder with malice aforethought!’Footnote ³⁸ Alongside the carnivorous plants, Taylor (like Allen) used orchids to exemplify the ‘novel relationships’ that plants established, asserting, ‘Orchids all over the world are of the most ingenious character’. He used them to illustrate the ways in which plants manipulate their pollinators (under the telling title ‘Floral diplomacy’), adding that ‘Darwin's matter-of-fact investigations, as recorded in his Various Contrivances by which Orchids are fertilised by Insects, reads like a romance’.Footnote ³⁹ This blurring of genres, dry treatise crossed with spicy romance, again hints that a new language of flowers was emerging.

The appeal of books like Taylor's rested in part on what he called Darwin's ‘matter-of-fact investigations’, implying that the observations and experiments were reliable, but also not too complex for the average reader to understand (or even repeat). Botany was a popular science in the nineteenth century, and part of its attraction was that it was easy to participate in. Taylor's book hoped to appeal to would-be participants, since he noted that much remained to be discovered about the floral mechanisms for ensuring cross-fertilization:

In similar vein, he described how the pollen-masses (pollinia) of an orchid became attached to an insect, noting that it was ‘a device the reader can experimentally imitate by carefully thrusting the conical point of a black-lead pencil down the throat of an Orchid flower’.Footnote ⁴¹

Taylor also worked to explain Darwin's theoretical views, noting that botanists had only recently realized that cross-fertilized plants were ‘more likely to come off conquerors in that keen and never-ending Battle of Life which is going on in every green lane and field, and along every hillside’.Footnote ⁴² The benefits of cross-fertilization ensured that any variation that promoted it would spread, and he used an analogy with human behaviour to make the wisdom of the plants' adaptations apparent:

However, it was not just in their relations with their insect pollinators that the plants' seeming intelligence was apparent. Taylor noted that quick-growing climbing plants ‘have beaten the tall, strong, woody trees and shrubs in the contest for light’: ‘They have conquered by sheer wit, or the equivalent of it; and there is little doubt if animals had been similarly successful in their endeavours to achieve a certain end, we should have spoken of them as “clever.”’Footnote ⁴⁴

Although Taylor described his book as a ‘parable’, he nevertheless insisted that if any reader were to object to his title he would respond by quoting Darwin on the tip of a radicle acting ‘like the brain of one of the lower animals’ (see above).Footnote ⁴⁵ The key to his argument was that botany has finally been studied ‘from its biological side’ and as a result he credited Darwin and other writers – naming Grant Allen among others – with developing what he explicitly referred to as the ‘new language’ necessary to describe the ‘novel relationships’ between plants and the insects that pollinated them. ‘Whether we believe in the consciousness of plant-life or not, this language almost implies such a belief’. Plants were said to adopt ‘habits and devices’ that benefited them ‘as if they did it of set and intelligent purpose’. Perhaps, he speculated, there could be ‘no life, animal or vegetable, unaccompanied by consciousness!’, and therefore by some form of intelligence.Footnote ⁴⁶

Strange orchids

The ‘new language’ of post-Darwinian botany would spread rapidly well beyond the genre of popular science writing, to inspire a new genre of fiction: the killer-plant story.Footnote ⁴⁷ The genre mostly utilized gigantic examples of real carnivorous plants, of which numerous examples can be found in Chad Arment's edited collections.Footnote ⁴⁸ These collections clearly reveal that the genre of active, predatory plants only came into existence in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, i.e. after Darwin's botanical works had been published and were starting to be reviewed, popularized and adapted to various literary purposes. Prior to this, there are stories of poisonous plants, but none in which the plants are imagined as intelligent or actively preying on animals or people. The killer-plant stories allowed Darwin's animal-like plants to infiltrate public culture much more broadly and rapidly than any kind of science writing could have done. H.G. Wells's ‘The flowering of the strange orchid’ was one of the first and best examples, and the links between Darwin's work and Wells's fiction are explicit in the story. After purchasing his orchid, Wedderburn speculates that it may be an unknown species and tells his housekeeper, ‘There are such queer things about orchids’, adding that ‘Darwin studied their fertilisation, and showed that the whole structure of an ordinary orchid flower was contrived in order that moths might carry the pollen from plant to plant’. He even described some of the unresolved mysteries, including that of plants whose pollinators were unknown, and speculated that ‘my orchid may be something extraordinary in that way. If so, I shall study it. I have often thought of making researches as Darwin did’. As Wells commented soon after ‘Strange orchid’ was published, ‘fiction is widening its territory. It has become a mouthpiece for science, philosophy and art … You cannot blame science for welcoming so popular an expression’.Footnote ⁴⁹ Wells's use of Darwinism is unsurprising, since he had studied biology briefly with Darwin's ally Thomas Henry Huxley.Footnote ⁵⁰ He also knew Grant Allen (the two men were neighbours in later years) and admired his writing. In his autobiography, Wells acknowledged Allen's influence on him, praising the ‘aggressive Darwinism’ that pervaded his popular natural history and acknowledging that Allen ‘had a very pronounced streak of speculative originality’.Footnote ⁵¹

A year after ‘Strange orchid’, Wells had his first major success when The Time Machine was published, creating a sensation that is often seen as marking the birth of science fiction as a distinct genre.Footnote ⁵² In the wake of the novel's success, Wells went on to become a world-famous figure, whose stories were anthologized, translated and reprinted all over the globe. W.T. Stead's Review of Reviews, for example, promoted his work to an international audience.Footnote ⁵³ And ‘Strange orchid’ was translated into several languages, including French, and the story was reprinted in newspapers as far away as Australia.Footnote ⁵⁴ It also appeared in Wells's collection The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents (1895) and an Australian reviewer singled out ‘Strange orchid’ as exemplifying the ‘queer and hitherto unknown developments of animal and vegetable life’ imagined by Wells. The reviewer added that ‘though these incidents are strange enough, they are scarcely any of them actually impossible’.Footnote ⁵⁵ This aura of reasonableness can be argued to mark the arrival of science fiction as a modern genre, rooted in the possibilities of up-to-date science; in Wells's story the romance of tropical orchid collecting and the humdrum details of Wedderburn's life as a typical late nineteenth-century orchid fancier are skilfully combined with references to Darwin's work so as to allow the reader to suspend their disbelief in the possibility of lethal orchids.Footnote ⁵⁶

The success of Wells's fictions led to numerous imitators. In 1896 the Strand magazine (where the Sherlock Holmes stories first appeared) published ‘The purple terror’ by the British author Fred M[errick] White (1859–1935).Footnote ⁵⁷ Killer orchids appear in White's story around the neck of a seductive Cuban dancing girl, and his botanical hero, an American naval officer, is struck by their powerful scent. ‘They exhumed [sic], too, a queer sickly fragrance. Scarlett had smelt something like it before, after the Battle of Manila. The perfume was the perfume of a corpse’. Undaunted, the officer heads off into the jungle in search of what is clearly a new species. Quick reactions and sharp knives are only just enough to save him and his companions from the tree-dwelling flower that is – like Wells's plant – a vampire orchid, whose rapidly coiling tendrils seek blood.

‘The purple terror’ clearly reflects the way in which Darwinian botany was understood by writers like Allen and Taylor. The orchids are described as having ‘a kind of face’ like most orchids, but these ones have ‘expression of ferocity and cunning’, suggesting that they are not merely hostile but also sagacious, combining the qualities Darwin found in orchids and insectivorous plants. Their tendrils move more quickly and intelligently than any real climbing plant could. And the boundaries between plant and animal are explicitly blurred when the attacking orchid's writhing tendrils are compared to ‘the arm of an octopus’ (just as Darwin had done with his climbers).Footnote ⁵⁸

The orchid's strong scent in the ‘The purple terror’ is reminiscent of the perfume in Wells's story; when Wedderburn first enters the greenhouse after his unknown orchid flowers, he registers that there was ‘a new odour in the air – a rich, intensely sweet scent, that overpowered every other in that crowded, steaming little greenhouse’. The enigmatic perfume draws the timid bachelor into the greenhouse and when he sees the stunningly beautiful flower close up he is overpowered by ‘the insufferable scent!’. The narrator continues, ‘How hot the place was! The blossoms swam before his eyes’, and then Wedderburn faints, enabling the orchid to attack him.

Seductively scented orchids also lay at the heart of John Blunt's ‘The orchid horror’, which was also written for the mass-circulation magazines that proliferated in the decades around the turn of the century. It first appeared in one of the Frank A. Munsey company's ten-cent pulp magazines, The Argosy, a title that sold more than half a million copies per month at the time.Footnote ⁵⁹ The story's main character, Loring, is seduced by an unnamed woman (referred to simply as the ‘Goddess of the Orchids’) who sends him off to yet another jungle to find the only flower not in her collection. Loring almost dies in his attempt to retrieve the orchid, whose scent is so powerful (like the ‘fumes of a poisonous sickish-sweet drug’) that it acts like a narcotic. Those who inhale it either die or, if they survive, remain desperately addicted to both orchid and Goddess, unable to break the spell of either. Other pulp orchid stories used scent in similar ways. A 1920 story, ‘An orchid of Asia’, features a hybrid orchid that its creator calls La Revenante (‘the ghost’), whose scent ‘poured over [the hero in] waves of sensual delight which crippled his will’. Under this narcotic influence the hero feels a female presence as if ‘some monster’ were reaching out to him ‘across aeons of time’. The main character finally realizes, ‘He had cultivated a flower beyond the limits of flower life. He had made an orchid-woman … a vampire that sat upon his soul’.Footnote ⁶⁰ And Wyatt Blassingame's ‘Passion flower’ also features an orchid that is both a seductive woman and an irresistible drug.Footnote ⁶¹

The use of an almost overpowering scent as a tool of seduction identifies the orchids in these stories as distinctly feminine, loosely linked to the heavily perfumed prostitutes and other women of ‘loose morals’ who embodied the alluring dangers and freedoms that came with the anonymous life of the great cities or of distant colonies.Footnote ⁶² Such women were frequently depicted as femmes fatales (a French phrase that entered English in the mid-1870s), and these dangerously seductive creatures became a regular feature of various genres of fin de siècle fiction (as female vampires, for example), where they often express contemporary anxieties about race and sex.Footnote ⁶³ The orchid tales were invariably set in or linked to the jungles of the European imagination – cliché-infested spaces inhabited by lethal diseases, dusky temptresses and shifty, untrustworthy natives – that nevertheless fascinated Europeans, not least because so much wealth seemed to be hidden there, often in the form of rare plants with vast commercial potential (such as rubber). The seductive orchid embodied luxury as well as sensuality, and these stories seem to express a fear that the supposedly easy life of the tropics (and the supposedly easy, flower-like women who inhabited them), might tempt white men away from empire-building.

Meanwhile, the women back home were seen to be changing and it is no coincidence that the French also gave English the word ‘feminist’ during this same period. Lucy Bland has shown how the new term reflected a change in campaigns for women's rights, once focused on the vote and similarly respectable causes; by contrast, in the 1890s, some campaigners focused on sexual consent within marriage and similarly ‘unladylike’ topics, including venereal disease and contraception.Footnote ⁶⁴ Some of these shifts were reflected in the genre of New Woman novels, of which one of the most celebrated was Grant Allen's The Woman Who Did (1895). Allen's novel (written in part to improve his income, after the popular botanical books had not), concerned an ‘advanced’ young woman, Herminia Barton, who refused marriage as a ‘system of slavery’.Footnote ⁶⁵ Novels like Allen's capture some of the complexity of male reactions to women's changing roles in the final decades of the century; Herminia is depicted as attractive, intelligent and highly principled, yet she is also portrayed as sexually passive (‘giving’ herself to her lover once he had promised not to marry her) and morally culpable (her daughter rejects her mother's radical principles and Herminia kills herself rather than bring shame on her child). And, given Allen's botanical expertise, his heroine's name may well be a conscious echo of that of the orchid genus Herminium, which includes the British H. monorchis (musk orchid).Footnote ⁶⁶

In the diverse writings of Grant Allen and Wells (who also wrote a New Woman novel, the faintly autobiographical Ann Veronica (1909)), both women and plants were reimagined as more active, sexual and intelligent beings than earlier generations had perceived. That linked reimagining ran through many orchid stories (as well, of course, as many other kinds of fin de siècle writing). Darwin's interpreters included science writers, journalists, novelists and pulp writers, and between them they adopted Darwin's science and used it to re-create orchids anew, as feminine, highly sexualized, aggressive and capable of outwitting animals – notably male ones.Footnote ⁶⁷ And in the early decades of the twentieth century, botanists in several countries detected behaviours in real-life orchids that seem almost to have been predicted by their fictional counterparts.

Biology as public culture

Thanks to these various imaginative appropriations, Darwin's botanical ideas reached a wide audience that extended well beyond the English-speaking world. And as these Darwin-inspired visions of the plant world spread, botanists were finally able to solve Darwin's remaining puzzles. A direct causal link is difficult to establish, but my goal is to show how these new imaginative possibilities had become part of the way people were enabled to think about plants – and about biology more generally.

Like most of Darwin's works, Various Contrivances was translated promptly after publication; the French edition, De la fécondation des orchidées par les insectes et des bons résultats du croisement appeared just seven years later.Footnote ⁶⁸ Among its readers was the Swiss botanist Henry Correvon, who applied Darwin's ideas to his own orchid studies.Footnote ⁶⁹ However, some of the Ophrys species in which Correvon was interested did not grow in Switzerland, so he wrote to one of his many correspondents, Maurice-Alexandre Pouyanne, a French colonial judge in Algiers.Footnote ⁷⁰ Pouyanne had begun studying the pollination of North African Ophrys species and after twenty years of painstaking research came to some startling conclusions.Footnote ⁷¹

Among the species Pouyanne studied was Ophrys speculum, which (like the bee orchid that had baffled Darwin) has a labellum fringed with long, reddish-brown strands that are the modified margins of the petals but look like the hairs found on the abdomens of many insects. Pouyanne found that his orchids were visited regularly by burrowing wasps who searched for neither nectar nor insect grubs inside the flowers (these are carnivorous wasps). Pouyanne described how once the insects appeared they would struggle to gain possession of a bloom, after which the successful individual reverses into the orchid, abdomen first, engaging in ‘les mouvements désordonnés, presque convulsifs’ (‘uncoordinated, almost convulsive, movements’).Footnote ⁷² Following these movements, the insect would emerge with the orchid's pollinia firmly attached to it, so that when it entered the next orchid and repeated the same manoeuvres, pollen would be transferred to the receptive stigma of the next flower, ensuring that cross-pollination occurred.

Pouyanne's investigations revealed that all the wasps were males and ‘les mâles sortent de terre environ un mois avant les femelles’ (‘the males appear above ground about a month before the females’); the characteristic ‘convulsive’ movements only occurred in the early weeks after the males hatched, before there were any female wasps around. Pouyanne could find no trace of nectar in the orchids, so he experimented to try and ascertain what was attracting the wasps. If he removed the orchid's labellum (the part that most resembled an insect), but left the other organs intact, the insects ignored them. That seemed to confirm the importance of the visual similarity; the flowers resembled the female wasps (not very closely, Pouyanne admitted, but argued that insects are very short-sighted). This theory was confirmed when he discovered that flowers placed on the ground attracted insects and that even upside-down flowers worked (although less effectively). However, while his hand-held bouquet attracted males, if the same bouquet were forced on female wasps, they flew off as if repelled. Pouyanne began to suspect that the orchid's scent, almost imperceptible to humans, was the key; he tried concealing flowers under newspapers and discovered that the males still sought them out.Footnote ⁷³

Pouyanne's conclusion was astonishing. When he described his wasps, he put it very plainly: ‘l'insecte tout entier se trémousse; ses mouvements, son attitude paraissent tout à fait semblables à ceux des insectes qui pratiquent des tentatives de copulation’ (‘the entire insect enters a kind of paroxysm; its movements and position seem completely like those of insects engaged in attempting copulation’).Footnote ⁷⁴ The male wasps were so completely fooled by the orchids' mimicry that they attempted to mate with them. Pouyanne discovered that the males hatched up to four weeks before the females; the early hatching and sexual eagerness of the male wasps had been exploited by the orchids, which had developed both visual mimicry and a scent that resembled that of female wasps: ‘Les O. speculum s'offrent à leur procurer quelques distractions, destinées à tromper leur attente, et fort appréciées de ces messieurs’ (‘To shorten their wait O. speculum give themselves over to entertaining them with certain distractions, which are much appreciated by these gentlemen’). Not only does Pouyanne have the orchids ‘giving themselves over’ to the wasps and offering them some much appreciated ‘entertainment’, but he also makes the erotic pleasure of the relationship quite explicit, commenting,

Pouyanne had found clear evidence of the ‘organized system of deception’ whose existence Darwin had doubted.

Pouyanne's first paper was published in 1916.Footnote ⁷⁶ Unsurprisingly, it failed to make much impact at a time when France, like the rest of the world, had more pressing matters than orchid pollination to worry about; it took several years before the significance of Pouyanne's work was fully recognized, particularly in the English-speaking world.

The earliest published reference in English to Pouyanne's discovery (which, as yet, had no name) came in Britain's Orchid Review in 1920, when its founding editor, Robert Allen Rolfe, published a condensed account of ‘a rather long paper’ that recounted ‘a very interesting discovery’.Footnote ⁷⁷ Rolfe's account was rather less graphic than the original. It merely commented on the ‘mysterious attraction’ that the flowers exercised over the wasps, apparently offering the males ‘some distraction during their long wait’. The visual resemblance and the possibility that scent was also involved were discussed but neither the word ‘copulation’ nor any more decorous synonym was used and it would have taken a very astute and perceptive reader to discern why Rolfe felt that Darwin's bafflement over the bee's ‘attacks’ had now been invested ‘with a new significance’.Footnote ⁷⁸ Among the Orchid Review's regular contributors was Colonel Masters John Godfery, a botanist with a particular interest in orchids, particularly in Ophrys (he published an article in the same volume of the journal in which Rolfe's report of the Algerian orchids appeared). Godfery began corresponding with Pouyanne and soon published a clearer account of the discovery.Footnote ⁷⁹

Godfery regularly spent time in Hyères, on the Côte d'Azur, where he was able to confirm Pouyanne's observations and extend them to other Ophrys species. As he noted, the male wasps' ‘imperious and irresistible sex-instinct’ was the key to the orchid's deception; the ill-fated insects ‘in their eager haste to perform the task which is the supreme object of their lives’ were fooled because they ‘have no time for discrimination, and cannot afford to miss any chance of finding a mate’.Footnote ⁸⁰

Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, an Australian naturalist, Edith Coleman, was also puzzling over the fertilization of orchids. Coleman had been born in Britain in 1874, but in 1887 she and her family moved to Melbourne where she became a schoolteacher. In 1922 she joined the Field Naturalists' Club of Victoria and in the same year delivered her first paper, which demonstrated a detailed knowledge of native Australian orchid habitats and flowering seasons.Footnote ⁸¹

A few years later, Coleman had something rather more unexpected to communicate, when she described an ‘interesting, but perplexing problem’ concerning the pollination of the small tongue-orchid, Cryptostylis leptochila. Her daughter Dorothy had observed ‘certain remarkable actions on the part of a wasp’, which

Coleman confirmed her daughter's observations, noting that ‘the insect quivered for a moment, and then became motionless. After a second or two, it freed itself, with an apparent effort which shook the flower’.Footnote ⁸² Although this was another carnivorous wasp species (an ichneumon), it also showed no signs of seeking insect larvae or nectar. The orchid's scent (despite being barely perceptible to humans) seemed to ‘lure the insects to the flowers from quite a distance’.

Coleman observed that pollination was achieved and added that ‘in shape and colouring, the labellum somewhat resembles the body of the insect visitor’ and that its curve ‘so exactly meets the needs of the wasp, that one is easily tempted to hazard a theory’ to explain the nature of ‘the payment exacted by the insects for the service it undoubtedly rendered’. She did not spell out her theory in detail, but to an expert the implications were clear. The ‘apparent effort’ with which the wasp freed itself from the flower was highly suggestive, because these wasps have external genital claspers with which they seize the females during copulation, making post-coital separation difficult.Footnote ⁸³ The fact that insect ‘freed itself with a jerk’ clearly suggested to Coleman that it had been copulating with the orchid and she wrote, ‘The fact that it is not deterred by any slight discomfort, from making subsequent visits, would suggest that it has in some way received payment for its former visits’.Footnote ⁸⁴

Coleman clarified her meaning in a second paper the following year, which announced that further observations ‘support my previous assumption’, and suggested ‘an exclusive partnership between the orchid and the wasp’. She repeated her observations about the reverse entry and lack of egg laying or hidden moth larvae, as a result of which ‘I could only form one conclusion’. She discussed Darwin's bafflement over the bee's mysterious attacks, but explained,

Coleman described her observations in detail, noting how closely they confirmed those of Pouyanne and Godfery, and concluded that the wasps ‘are answering to an irresistible sex-instinct’. Although various flowers had evolved a complex variety of partnerships with insects, she believed that between wasp and orchid was ‘a scheme unrivalled, surely, in the history of entomophilous [insect-pollinated] flowers’. The language in which she described the relationship is striking, in that she refers to the mixture of scent and visual resemblance as ‘a cunning mimicry’. The orchid's scent is such that ‘a single flower will lure an insect from a distance’, and would suggest that ‘even though the perfume is so subtle as to escape our notice, it is very readily conveyed to a wasp’.Footnote ⁸⁶ Coleman noted,

In the same paper Coleman again told her readers, ‘Mark the cunning of the plant’, and concluded that to ‘follow closely the act of pollination increases one's belief in the sagacity of plants’, since such ‘cunning adjustment of its essential organs for the achievement of cross-pollination suggests a plant diplomacy to which the eager instincts of the insect cause it to become a willing victim’.Footnote ⁸⁸ She concluded by noting that the orchid seemed to display a ‘discriminating intelligence’ in its efforts to ensure cross-pollination ‘and so, with a Machiavellian cunning almost beyond belief, the orchid lures the artless insect to its service’.Footnote ⁸⁹

In addition to providing the detailed evidence that fully explained Pouyanne and Godfery's observations (including the first microscopic observation that the wasps left their sperm in the flowers), Coleman's paper vividly illustrates the spread of the ‘new language’ of botany that Taylor ascribed to Darwin and Allen. She referred repeatedly to ‘cunning’ (even ‘Machiavellian cunning’), to the orchid's apparent ‘discriminating intelligence’ and to the ‘sagacity of plants’. Moreover, it was because of the male wasps' ‘irresistible sex-instinct’ that they ‘become a willing victim’ of the cunning orchid, which ‘lures’ them (a word she uses twice) into their ‘service’. Coleman's style and argument seem indebted to Darwin's, but even more to the ways in which Darwin's claims about the cunning of plants were reinterpreted by writers like Allen, Taylor and Wells, all of whom were well known in Australia.Footnote ⁹⁰ That Coleman's ‘plant diplomacy’ closely echoes Taylor's phrase ‘floral diplomacy’ to describe the pollination syndrome is striking (I have not found either phrase in any other contemporary source, other than reviews of Taylor's book). Allen's work was also still being reviewed and discussed in Australia at the time Coleman was writing, not least because the Story of the Plants was republished there in 1927.Footnote ⁹¹ And, as noted above (see note 54), Wells's ‘Strange orchid’ was republished several times in Australia; Coleman's grandson, Peter, remembers that she ‘did read quite a lot of H.G. Wells’.Footnote ⁹²

By contrast with Coleman, it is much harder to establish connections between Pouyanne and the kinds of writing analysed above, mainly because the sources are so limited. However, it may be significant that Wells enjoyed a high reputation in France; he was translated into French before any other language (in 1896) and translated more frequently (fifty-three of his titles appeared in French, compared with only thirty-two in German). He was fortunate to have been championed by Henry Durand-Davray, an influential critic who was a huge admirer of Wells and promoted him enthusiastically, ensuring his works were both published and reviewed in the influential bimonthly La Mercure de France, widely read by intellectuals in both France and Algeria.Footnote ⁹³La Mercure published ‘Strange orchid’ (as ‘Une orchidée extraordinaire’ (1899)) alongside Davray's translation of ‘The man who could work miracles’. The two tales were intended by Davray to demonstrate to the French public that Wells was a superb short-story writer as well as an accomplished novelist.Footnote ⁹⁴ So it would be surprising if an educated orchid enthusiast like Pouyanne did not read it. In Godfery's case, there is even less evidence, but modern orchid fanciers seem to know Wells's story, and he was a much more famous writer in Godfery's day, widely read and reviewed in the scientific press (Wells's work was published and reviewed in Nature, for example, as was Godfery's). Thus it is possible that Godfery may have known the story too.Footnote ⁹⁵