Butterfly orchid

About the plant

This is the flower that launched a craze. A single bloom, 12 cm across, opens at the top of a wiry stem a metre long: three narrow chocolate-and-yellow segments stand up like antennae, two broader ones spread like wings, and a yellow lip with a brown border makes the body. It sways in the slightest draught and looks for all the world like a butterfly resting on a stalk. The 6th Duke of Devonshire saw one at a London exhibition in 1833, bought it on the spot, and set his young gardener Joseph Paxton to building the orchid houses at Chatsworth that made orchid collecting the obsession of the Victorian rich.

The species grows on trees in Trinidad and the forests of northern South America. Each stem produces its flowers one after another over several years, so experienced growers never cut a spike that has finished. John Lindley named it Oncidium papilio in 1825, and it kept that name until the 1970s, when it and a handful of relatives were given their own genus, Psychopsis, 'butterfly-like'.

William Jackson Hooker, then professor at Glasgow and soon to be Kew's first director, drew the plate himself in 1828 for the Magazine he had just taken over, and Joseph Swan engraved it.