EXTRAORDINARY ORCHIDS

With over 30,000 species, orchids fascinate. Orchids have shapes unlike any other flowering plant, with an ability to interbreed and create ever more fantastical forms. This extraordinary book reveals some of the bizarre lifestyles and interactions that botanists have uncovered - the epiphytic orchids, the ground-dwelling ones, the insect-mimicking ones, and those whose lifestyles are closely bound with insects and birds. Here a botanist and writer has collaborated with the Natural History Museum to produce a superb showcase in glowing colour with hundreds of examples in a large, oversized volume. The exotic species include the showy red of Dracula and Masdevallia, pollinated by hummingbirds seeking rich nectar rewards. In Arthur Harry Church's cross-section, you can see the tiny, hinged labellum, which lacks nectar and actually in Columbia these flowers are visited by female drosophilid fruit flies. There are beautiful botanical illustrations including those of Carl Linnaeus (1745) reproduced at large scale across two pages, and botanical drawings all in colour such as for the tiny delicate plants of the heart-leaved twayblade and by the great Victorian orchidologist John Lindley who named his orchid Coelia baueriana in honour of his close friend and fellow orchid-lover Franz Bauer. His detailed paintings brought the world of orchid structure to life. There is the realistic looking crane-fly orchid, the flowers of the bucket orchids with long stems, the comely lady's slipper, and Chinese orchids in vibrant magentas and reds, clamshell or cockleshell orchids with variegated and speckled flowers and the very dark colours of the fly orchid thought to mimic the eyes and wings of a female black wasp. Includes stunning artwork from Ferdinand and Franz Bauer, Sydney Parkinson, Henry Fletcher Hance, John Russell Reeves and others and images taken from James Bateman's The Orchids of Mexico and Guatemala. 160 large pages, 32.6 x 25cm, this was named European Garden Book of the Year 2023, and deservedly so.
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