Snapshots: Orchids

Like tulips, orchids are plants that bring out strange relationships between the natural world and class consciousness in Britain and Europe. During the height of orchidmania in the nineteenth century they became exoticised objects of desire, explicitly associated with both male and female anatomy and their exorbitant auction prices and subsequent commercialisation entangled with ideas of status, sexuality, and power. They also contributed to evolving scientific debates, shaping theories not only of natural selection but of sexual selection. Elaine Ayers writes about how in order to make plants “speak” within these systems, material objects - illustrations, specimens, diagrams, collections - were necessary. These were often produced in vast numbers by unnamed labourers, including women, indigenous people, and middle-class men working multiple jobs. These unauthored objects formed the backbone of Victorian botanical knowledge, capturing the botanical imagination in ways that were strikingly anti-utilitarian. Today, emerging technologies continue to reshape how we understand art, representation, and perception, contributing to a loss of trust in images and fostering new ways of experiencing the world as indeterminate and fragmentary. Some historians of science have argued that nineteenth-century systems of order often operated along circular spectrums in which simplicity leads into complexity and perfection into monstrosity. This instability is embodied by orchids themselves, which resist neat classification and remain persistently unruly within taxonomic systems, and therefore also lovely plants to make art with.