About Orchids, a Chat

The year is 1892. Somewhere in the misty highlands of Burma or the sweltering jungles of Borneo, a man in a pith helmet crouches before a vine, heart pounding. He has found a flower no European has ever seen - a thing of impossible colors, alien shape, and devastating beauty. This is orchid hunting, and in Victorian England it was madness. Frederick Boyle was not a botanist. He was a gentleman amateur with a glasshouse full of orchids and an itch for adventure. In these charming, discursive essays, he takes us into the seductive world of orchid cultivation and discovery, from the terrifyingly beautiful accounts of collectors braving tropical fevers in search of species unknown to science, to the quiet satisfactions of watching a bud finally unfurl in an English greenhouse. He writes of the orchid's strange ways - its cunning pollination tricks, its bizarre relationships with insects, its capacity for both brutality and delicacy. Here is a vanished world of botanical obsession, when a new orchid could make a man's fortune, when the greenhouse was a temple, and when the natural world still harbored secrets capable of stopping a man's breath.