Within this Kingdom

1

Last summer I repotted several cymbidium orchids. “Orchid” likely conjures up the loveliest of flowers, something too delicate to mess with, but the cymbidiums needed a firm hand. Over time they had migrated to the edge of their pots, as though trying to glacially ooze their way out and back to the wild. A ring of healthy lance-like leaves stood sentinel at the edge of the terracotta, and in the center was a mass of bloomed-out remnants, a cluster of moldering knobs in various forms of decay. Some of the knobs, when I picked away at them, revealed the subtlest hint of white material—promise that they might sprout again. I turned each pot on its side, tucked it between my knees, and pulled until the mass of roots slid out along with the fir bark chips they’d been nestled in. I laid the plant across the greenhouse floor, took a small pruning saw and made an incision down the center of the plant, stuck my fingers in and pried it open. Then I made smaller incisions with the saw, grinding away the decayed material, and when the cuts became too small for the saw, I took a pair of pruners and snipped until I was left with just a small pile of fresh, promising shoots.

If all went well, by winter, the larger sprouts would shoot out racemes loaded with butter-colored flowers. The inner petals would have magenta freckles, and a central petal—a labellum—would protrude tongue-like, almost rudely, with a small hood cupped over the top. Two yellow pollen bumps rest on top of the labellum, ridged just the right way to capture pollen off the legs of an insect going in. Cymbidiums flower for weeks on end, each plant having maybe five to ten racemes, each raceme over a foot tall and holding dozens of the mesmerizingly asymmetrical blossoms.

Cymbidium comes from the Greek kumbe, cup, the flowers being filled with the slightest drop of nectar that keeps bees nuzzling after it, like drunkards after dregs of mead. “The King of Fragrance,” Confucius is said to have called them, although he may have meant they emit their fragrance for kings. The cymbidiums I have known are scentless. Our minds are quick to compare the flowers with female genitalia—yet “orchid” comes from the Greek órkhis, meaning testicle, because of the shape of the pseudobulbs, “pseudo” because this bulb doesn’t actually go underground, but lodges itself on surfaces above ground and functions more like a stem, the leaves of the orchid growing directly out of it.

I’ve often wondered what it would be like to stumble upon a bunch of flowering cymbidiums in the wild, the way the naturalist Alexander von Humboldt saw them as he traveled through the tropical regions of South America at the turn of the nineteenth century. He observed them at a roaring cataract on his way to the Orinoco River, where the plunging torrents cast the area in a “perpetual verdure.” More than the flower, it’s the experience I’ve craved—to discover such beauty. Not to be the one here, trapped with such rote duties, but to be out in the world. The epiphytic orchids von Humboldt found grew up the trunks of giant fig trees along with begonias, vines, and vanilla orchids. A single trunk along the Atures Rapids on the Orinico, von Humboldt said, had more plants than an extensive plot of land in Europe.

Often, staring at my greenhouse cymbidiums, I’ve tried to locate the tropical mountainside, the perpetual verdure, within the plant, to understand how people succeeded in domesticating all these pieces from so many remote corners of the world. I look for the setting, the home of the orchids—or rather, of these greenhouse orchids’ distant ancestors—that they left behind when they were uprooted and tucked into a naturalist’s satchel. I envision a piece of root, a pseudobulb, kept moist enough not to dry out, dry enough not to mold, cared for and brought back to Europe, coaxed back to life in a greenhouse. I...