Why Is Everything an Orchid?
After investigating the origin of the species, Charles Darwin lunged into an exploration of something that seemed, by comparison, terribly minute: orchids. By 1862, he’d traveled the world wide and far, encountering incredible organisms like giant tortoises, seafaring iguanas, and fossils of giant ground sloths. But he couldn’t stop thinking about a delicate, white star-shaped flower he’d been sent as a gift by his acquaintance James Bateman, an English horticulturalist with a penchant for rare flora from Madagascar. The flower’s odd shape—with an extremely long nectar pouch hanging under its crown—stirred in him a deep, almost inexplicable fascination.
“Orchids have interested me as much as almost anything in my life,” Darwin wrote. In their forms, he saw a vast landscape of the forces of selective evolution, a dance they played with their environment and their pollinators. “My little darlings,” as he sometimes referred to orchids, became his model for further exploring the forces he so broadly described in The Origin of Species. Just three years after the publication of that shattering work, he had produced his tome puzzling over the multitudinous, striking habits of orchids: On the Various Contrivances by Which British and Foreign Orchids Are Fertilised by Insects, and On the Good Effects of Intercrossing.
How a single family of flowers could vary so widely—from small and frilly, almost invisible to see, to large, gaudy and with a front pouch—left Darwin baffled. He called this, and flower diversity as a whole, an “abominable mystery.” Indeed, there are upward of. They have made their homes on all contemporary continents save for Antarctica—from the Arctic north, across the equator, and reaching south through all but the tip of South America.
