Medusa's orchid

About the plant

Bulbophyllum is the biggest genus of orchids, two thousand species and counting, and it specialises in the bizarre: flowers that rock in the wind to attract flies, flowers that smell of carrion, flowers with hairs that twitch. Bulbophyllum medusae is the beautiful oddity among them. From a pseudobulb the size of a thumb a stem rises and bursts into a mop of up to a hundred small cream flowers, each with its side sepals pulled out into pale threads a hand's length long, so that the whole head looks like a tangle of straw-coloured hair. The Gorgon Medusa, with her head of snakes, gave it its name.

It grows on trees in the steamy lowlands of Thailand, Malaysia and the islands of Sumatra and Borneo, and it reached English stove houses in the 1840s; John Lindley named it in 1842 in the genus Cirrhopetalum, 'tendril-petal', where many botanists still keep it. In cultivation it flowers in autumn, each head lasting a week or so, and smells faintly of fruit.

Walter Hood Fitch drew the plant for this plate in 1857, when the Veitch nurseries and the great private collections were competing to flower every strange orchid the Far East could send.