Lawrence's slipper orchid

About the plant

Benjamin Samuel Williams ran the Victoria and Paradise Nurseries at Holloway and wrote The Orchid-Grower's Manual, the book every Victorian orchid house kept on its shelf. In 1882 he began the Orchid Album, a monthly of four plates lithographed by John Nugent Fitch, nephew of the great Walter Fitch and the hand behind most of the orchid plates in Curtis's Botanical Magazine, with notes by Robert Warner and Williams himself on how to grow each plant. It ran for eleven volumes and 528 plates, and its plates were coloured by hand to the end, when every other magazine had gone over to the printing press.

Lawrence's slipper orchid came from Mount Kinabalu in Borneo, where Frederick Burbidge found it in 1878 collecting for the Veitch nursery, growing in leaf litter on the forest floor. Reichenbach named it for Sir Trevor Lawrence, the president of the Royal Horticultural Society and the owner of the finest private orchid collection in England. It is a plant of two beauties: the leaves, marbled in two greens like tortoiseshell, and the flower, whose upright dorsal sepal is white striped with purple above a greenish pouch, the petals edged with rows of black warts. Easy, warm-growing and willing to cross, it became one of the foundation parents of the slipper orchid hybrids.