Orchid: A Cultural History

Some flowers make us think of love or heaven, of political causes or drug cravings, while others are food, medicine, or decoration; almost every plant that humans have ever taken an interest in has acquired a rich web of associations. So it is not surprising that flowers as alluring as orchids are associated with a very specific set of images, ideas, and symbols. Yet the precise significances we attach to orchids may be, Jim Endersby argues, the weirdest ever to have become linked to a plant. By following orchids through history, Endersby discovers unexpected connections that lead us into myriad other histories. Everything from the European conquest of the Americas to Charles Darwin s theory of evolution became intimately entangled with the story of the orchid. Whether it s in films, novels, plays, or poems, orchids feature everywhere from Shakespeare to science fiction, from hard-boiled thrillers to elaborate modernist novels. Orchid: A Cultural History tells, for the first time, the full story of our fascination with orchids. "