Val Bourne on a plant that’s much better understood

As a young thing I shared a house with another girl and her upper-class back-ground made her disinclined to tackle any housework, and that included washing up!

One weekend, while she was away, I set to with the vacuum cleaner and moved several leathery-leafed houseplants from a cluttered corner. To my consternation every leaf fell off and it was mind-shattering.

However, as I bent to pick them up, I noticed a dressmaker’s pin in each stem. My flatmate had pinned the leaves back on to her sick plants because our freezing flat, heated only by a one-bar electric fire, was too cold for them. That experience put me off house plants for many a year.

In those days — and we’re talking the early 1970s — exotic orchids were very expensive and in short supply. They were grown by the affluent or very keen. The first to be imported, Cattleya labiata, arrived from Brazil in 1822 as packing material round some plants sent to England by William Cattley. It revived and flowered, producing exotic bright-pink blooms, and the Victorian passion for orchids took flight from that moment on.

Soon rich landowners were employing their own plant hunters to collect. As a result whole areas were systematically stripped and the plants almost certainly perished on the journey home. If they did survive, being placed in a bright glasshouse or conservatory soon killed them off. Orchids are epiphytes and many grow at high altitude in cool shade in tropical areas of the world. I’ve seen them in Thailand, wreathed in mist and fine drizzle in chilly temperatures that made you shiver in your wet clothing.

One estate, Chatsworth in Derbyshire, managed to keep them and they held the largest collection in the country under the care of Sir Joseph Paxton, head gardener of the 6th Duke of Devonshire — William Spencer Cavendish. New introductions were sometimes christened cavendishianum or devonium to reflect their upper crust provenance. Not far away, at Biddulph Grange in Staffordshire, James Bateman was sponsoring collections from Central America. The famous London plant nursery, Loddiges of Hackney, also paid their own collectors and the species name loddigesii was added to some he introduced. When Loddiges closed in 1852, Veitch & Sons of Exeter opened a London branch specialising in hot house plants including orchids.

The nursery was in King’s Road in Chelsea and Sir Harry Veitch, who ran the shop, then helped to set up the Great International Horticultural Exhibition in 1866.

The proceeds from the exhibition funded the Lindley Library, vested to the Royal Horticultural Society. Sir Henry Veitch though, is best known for bringing the annual spring show to the Royal Hospital at Chelsea. Its success (and the money made from selling orchids) spawned the yearly Chelsea Flower Show we still enjoy.

Those early hybridisers struggled to propagate orchids, because they didn’t understand that orchids need mycorrhizal fungi. The fine, dust-like seed contains no nutrition of its own and it refuses to germinate in ordinary compost. Early hybridisers got round the problem by sowing their seeds round a mother plant. The problem was finally solved by a French scientist called Noel Barnard, who explained the symbiotic process in 1899.

In the 1970s I was working in micro-propagation, a technique of growing plants in growing media under lights. This method has revolutionised orchid production. Seeds can be germinated in media that has the correct mycorrhizal fungi added. Pieces of orchid can also be bulked up in growing media. Many of those orchids in our supermarkets and garden centres are raised in Holland and sold for a few pounds.

Quite what Veitch, Loddiges and their aristocratic clientele would think I don’t quite know.