Welcome to Litsy!

This lavishly illustrated book about humanity‘s obsession with orchids is full of fascinating and entertaining information about plants and people. Readers who are similarly obsessed, or newly tempted, may be thrilled with the detailed growing instructions for specific orchids at the end of each chapter, which I skipped.

Orchids may have caught on with queer people at this point in history because the flowers so often confound our expectations […]. Gay men might have taken to orchids because of their erotic flower structures, or perhaps because orchis is Greek for testicle. Orchids, along with carnivorous plants and a few other shocking tropical flowers, were often described as “queer” in fiction and nonfiction by the late 19th century.

One of the most ridiculous examples of her forced anonymity was her 1838 The Young Lady‘s Book of Botany: A Popular Introduction to That Delightful Science. [Jane Loudon] had to publish anonymously, yet use the persona of a male narrator in her text, to launch the idea that botany could be an acceptable pastime for women.

If we back up—back way up to 78 million years ago—we find vanilla in the late Cretaceous period among the dinosaurs. Vanilla made it through the extinction event that killed 75% of life on earth, and eventually diversified into more than 120 species.

Unlike in much of the West, in Japan, the orchid‘s shape, root tips, variegation, connection point between the axis and leaves, as well as presentation of the plant upon its moss mound, are all more important in defining a valuable variety than its blooms. Root tips are especially important because they come in many surprising colors: red-brown, yellow, shades of green, and ruby/hot pink.

When aficionados would scrutinize the orchids up close, they were expected to place a piece of paper in or across their mouths to avoid breathing on the plant—exactly the practice one would follow if inspecting a shogun‘s heirloom sword.

The fashion for gardening easily transferred to something as far afield as women‘s dresses and extravagant hairstyles of the late 1700s.

Linnaeus himself had written of male and female flower parts decades before, assigning them the roles of husbands and wives, with flower petals serving as their marriage beds.

Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of Charles, proposed a project to “modify continental weather patterns by advocating that European navies tow icebergs to the equator to moderate northern winters and cool the tropics.”