Orchidelirium

The lady’s slipper orchid, Cypripedium calceolus, is both a beautiful and silly–looking plant. It is the strangest of our native orchids, with a fat yellow pouch and burgundy twisting petals. It doesn’t quite look as though it belongs in the gentle English countryside and, for a while, it didn’t belong at all. Why did I drive for two hours just to see one flower? In part because of its strange backstory. It’s not just a fabulous flower; it’s a plant that tells us about our society and the madness of all human nature.

This flower sent Victorian botanists bonkers. They were so gripped by what was known as Orchidelirium that they couldn’t stop digging up the poor Cypripedium or picking its flowers. Orchid mania meant that by 1917, the plant was declared extinct in the United Kingdom — and that would have been that, were it not for just one lady’s slipper which managed to cling on, out of sight, until the 1930s, when a botanist found it in bloom in the Yorkshire Dales.