Orchid

The orchid takes its name from the Greek orchis, testicle, for the paired rounded tubers of the Mediterranean species known to the ancients; Theophrastus described the plant under that name, and by the doctrine of signatures its twin roots gave it a lasting reputation as a plant of virility, fertility and desire, a folk reputation recorded here as history. The orchid family is one of the largest of all flowering plants, of extraordinary diversity, and includes the vanilla vine, whose cured pod is the source of the flavour. Across cultures the orchid's exotic, intricate and long-lasting bloom made it an emblem of luxury, refinement and rare beauty.

Vanilla, the orchid family's one major food crop, was first cultivated by the Totonac people of Mexico's Gulf coast, who prized the cured pod as a sacred and medicinal substance long before the Aztecs, who conquered the Totonac in the fifteenth century, adopted it to flavour xocolatl, the bitter chocolate drink later brought to the Spanish court, so that the modern flavouring reached Europe by way of two successive Mesoamerican civilisations rather than directly from a single source. Orchid seed is famously among the smallest of all flowering-plant seeds, containing almost no stored food of its own, so that in the wild almost every orchid depends on a specific symbiotic fungus simply to germinate at all, a genuine botanical fragility behind the family's reputation for rarity and difficulty.

In China the orchid carries a quite different and elevated symbolism. It is one of the Four Gentlemen of painting, standing for spring, and it is above all the emblem of the junzi, the cultivated and virtuous person, whose quiet integrity is likened to the orchid that gives its fragrance unseen in a lonely valley. Confucius is credited with the saying that the words of the good are fragrant as an orchid, and orchid came to signify refined friendship, moral nobility and hidden virtue. The same flower thus holds two symbolic lives, the Western emblem of fertility, luxury and exotic beauty, and the Chinese emblem of the noble and self-effacing character.

In nineteenth-century Britain a genuine collecting mania, nicknamed orchidelirium, sent professional plant-hunters to remote and dangerous parts of the tropics in search of new orchid species for wealthy collectors, with single rare specimens fetching prices that could exceed a labourer's annual wage at auction, a real and well-documented episode of botanical fashion running in parallel with, and largely ignorant of, the flower's much older Chinese symbolism of humble, unseen virtue. That same tension between costly rarity and modest hidden fragrance runs through the flower's whole history, whether read as an emblem of the Confucian gentleman or as a Victorian status symbol.