Sarah Bilston unfolds the story of orchid mania, the nineteenth-century craze among European and North American collectors vying to own the world's most coveted flowers. Focusing the hunt for the so-called lost orchid, an especially vaunted flower native to Brazil, Bilston reveals the human and environmental cost of a colonial obsession.
It can take centuries for mass infatuations, their causes and consequences, to come into focus. When they finally do, we get such books as The Lost Orchid: A Story of Victorian Plunder and Obsession ... Like bottles of champagne recovered from old shipwrecks, [the flowers] invited connoisseurship.
A fascinating history ... Enthralling, authoritative, and discerning, The Lost Orchid is a brilliant account of the Victorian obsession over an exotic flower and the environmental destruction that resulted from Western imperialism.
A vibrant natural history ... Drawing on abundant archival sources in the Royal Botanical Gardens, Bilston conveys in colorful detail the 'chaotic urgency' of the feverish pursuit of a remarkable epiphyte.
