A Victorian Flower Dictionary - Mandy Kirkby [24]
ORCHID
Refined Beauty
Flowers of unparalleled elegance and grace, orchids are one of the world’s great floral pleasures. Their delicate form and colour lend the plant a rarefied quality, but their impact is immense. Possessed of an almost hypnotic beauty, they draw in our gaze, which lingers but never tires, so exquisite is their presence.
Spotted orchid, lady’s slipper, early purple and lady orchid (the latter named for the resemblance its petals bear to a crinoline gown) are some of the native orchids of woodland, marsh and meadow, and were well known and abundant in the Victorian era. But few of them excited the imagination as much as the tropical varieties that began to arrive in Europe from Central America, Africa, India and the Far East as empires grew and their floral wealth was plundered. By 1885, nearly two thousand species were in cultivation.
The Victorians were in thrall to the orchid: everyone wanted to possess a little of its elegant and exotic beauty. An orchid worn in the hair, an arrangement in a vase, an entire orchid house even – the flower never failed to impress, not least because it was so costly to buy. A favourite variety was Dendrobium nobile from the Far East: it was the easiest to grow and the most affordable, and its large pink and white flowers with velvety crimson splashes at the throat were said to have the scent of grass in the morning, honey at noon and primrose in the evening.
For those who found orchid-growing beyond their purse, a trip to Veitch’s nursery in Chelsea, London, to walk amongst their vast collection would have to suffice. Veitch’s was one of the largest growers in Britain, and one of the most influential, employing their own plant hunters to collect exclusively for them in the tropics and the Americas. A visit to their premises could be quite an experience: a uniformed doorman would greet visitors, and frock-coated and white-gloved assistants were on hand at all times.
As a gentleman’s buttonhole flower, the orchid was perfect: it had the virtue of simplicity and its beauty ensured that the wearer stood out from the crowd. In Jacques-Emile Blanche’s famous portrait of Marcel Proust, the young writer, pale and dandyish, sports a white orchid on his lapel. In Swann’s Way, Proust uses the flower, the lovely purple-pink cattleya orchid in particular, to symbolize love-making.
from ORCHIDS
Exotic flowers! How great is my delight
To watch your petals curiously wrought,
To lie among your splendours day and night
Lost in a subtle dream of subtler thought.
THEODORE WRATISLAW
PANSY
Think of Me
Take all the sweetness of a gift unsought,
And for the pansies send me back a thought.
ANON.
The pansy is not a brash flower; it does not stand tall and proud, demanding attention. Instead, its gentle upturned face and petals the texture of the softest, richest velvet seem to ask only one thing: think of me, keep me in your thoughts. The French name for the flower, pensée, means ‘thought’ and reflects this flower’s modest request.
In its wild form, the Viola tricolor, sometimes known as ‘heartsease’, is a small, scrambling plant of grassland and sandy soils, with three shades of colour on every heart-shaped flower, most commonly violet, yellow and blue. For centuries it remained unchanged in form, until in 1813 it caught the eye of Mr T. Thompson (his forename is unknown), gardener to a Buckinghamshire admiral. He crossed several wild varieties and developed the garden pansy with its much larger petals and a greater assortment of rich, blended colours. ‘Fancy’ pansies from Europe later added to the mix and the flower’s popularity was sealed.
The pansy and the emblem assigned to it were of great appeal to the Victorians, who saw the flower as embodying the virtues of tender attachment, concern and compassion – the natural