When a vagabond plant collector named William Swainson sent a bundle of strange lavender-flowered plants thought to be parasitic to the Glasgow Botanic Garden in 1817, he opened the door to a flood of excitement that would engulf the horticultural world for the rest of the century.

Swainson had discovered the plants while he was exploring the steaming jungles of the province of Pernambuco in northern Brazil. He had seen them in full bloom when he arrived there in December 1816, and he couldn’t wait to collect some and send them back to Scotland.

At Swainson’s request, the Glasgow Botanic Garden gave some of the plants to a tropical plant enthusiast named William Cattley, who flowered one in his stove house in Barnet, England in November 1818. Swainson knew Cattley would like the just-discovered plants from Pernambuco because Cattley was addicted to collecting every new tropical plant he could find. The Pernambuco plants had flowers that were nothing short of spectacular in size, shape and color. They even had a sweet fragrance. Cattley was pleased beyond measure, and the new plants soon became the favorites in his collection.

In an effort to organize and describe his tropical plants, Cattley hired a young botanist, John Lindley, to catalog and illustrate his collection. Lindley did a yeoman’s service for Cattley and, when Lindley published his book Collectanea Botanica in 1821, he even thanked his boss for his several years’ employment by naming Swainson’s Brazilian discovery in Cattley’s honor. On tab 33 of Collectanea Botanica an appreciative Lindley established a new genus of orchids for Swainson’s plant and he called the plant Cattleya labiata. The publication of Collectanea Botanica was a great day for orchids because the new genus, Cattleya, would become one of the most sought-after and treasured members of the orchid family for years to come.

Most plant collectors who went to Brazil in the early 1800s landed at the civilized port of Rio de Janeiro midway down the coast, so when early writers on orchids described the discovery of C. labiata, they assumed Swainson had done the same thing. Swainson had sent a large shipment of plants from Rio de Janeiro before he left Brazil, so it seemed to follow that he found the orchids there. What these writers did not know was that Swainson started his trip in Pernambuco and shipped his C. labiata plants from Pernambuco before traveling south toward Rio de Janeiro. By the time C. labiata became the buzz of the horticultural world, Swainson had moved on to exploring the wilds of New Zealand where no one could talk with him or even find him to clarify the matter.

In 1836, when another British naturalist, George Gardner, traveled to Brazil, the myth about where C. labiata had been discovered became more embedded than ever. Gardner managed to misidentify the orchid Laelia lobata, calling it C. labiata instead, and the native habitat of Laelia lobata in the Organ Mountains of Rio de Janeiro suddenly became the “original home” of Cattleya labiata.

Pernambuco is more than a thousand miles from Rio de Janero, so the myth that C. labiata had been discovered in the Organ Mountains created a trauma in the orchid world. Exhausted plant hunters fought their way through the jungles of Rio de Janeiro and the adajacent province of Minas Gerais for 70 years looking for C. labiata without finding a single plant. Cattleya labiata became a lost orchid and the few plants that still existed in cultivation tantalized European orchid hunters, who set a determined course to find new species to add to Lindley’s genus Cattleya.

Cattleya labiata was the first of 17 large-flowered Cattleya species discovered by European collectors during the 1800s. It was not an easy job to find these species because they were usually hidden in the high cloud forests of the giant Andes Mountains, sometimes in impenetrable jungles, often teaming with deadly diseases and unfriendly natives. More than one collector died in the effort.

Ironically, the second large-flowered Cattleya species to appear on the orchid scene in Europe in the 1800s was not discovered in the 1800s. It had been found 44 years before C. labiata by two Spanish botanists, Ruiz and Pavon. The dried specimens this pair had sent from Peru to Spain in 1777 did not see the light of day until 1831, when John Lindley acquired them and described them as a new species, Cattleya maxima. The problem was, in 1831, no one had seen a live plant of C. maxima and no one even knew where to find one. There were now two large-flowered Cattleya species that were lost, and frustration reached new heights in the horticultural world of the 1830s.

(Continued)

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