Veitch's calanthe

About the plant

Until the 1850s nobody was sure that orchids could be bred at all. Their pollination was a mystery, the seed was dust and refused to germinate, and the plants were too valuable to experiment with. Then John Harris, a surgeon in Exeter, explained the flower's mechanism to John Dominy, foreman at the Veitch nursery in the city, and Dominy began transferring pollen with a pencil. His first cross, Calanthe × dominyi, flowered in October 1856, the first artificial orchid hybrid in the world. When the botanist John Lindley saw it he said: 'You will drive the botanists mad.'

Calanthe × veitchii, a cross between the Burmese Calanthe rosea and the South-east Asian Calanthe vestita, flowered three years later and proved the better plant: a deciduous orchid with silvery egg-shaped pseudobulbs that, in the dead of winter, send up arching sprays of rose-pink flowers lasting for weeks. It became a staple of the Victorian cut-flower trade and of the conservatory at Christmas, and it is still grown.

Hooker published it in the Magazine in 1863 with this plate by Walter Hood Fitch, in the same volume as Welwitschia: a wonder of nature and a wonder of the nursery side by side.