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Orchid picture, orchid photo, plant hunter, jungle, Thai royal orchid , orchid culture, poacher, wild plants.

- At the height of the Victorian frenzy for 

orchid collecting, an display of the rarest, most valuable species was a mark of social cachet. No grand establishment was complete without an orchid greenhouse, and rival nurseries competed to send plant-hunters round the world to seek out fresh novelties.

Many of these explorers, trekking through the uncharted jungles of South America and Asia for the hunt of orchid, came to sticky ends in the service of "orchidelirium", as the passion for orchids was known.

The sheer extravagance of orchid culture on this scale meant that the fever had burnt itself out by the First World War. Collections fell into decline, greenhouses fell into disrepair. These days, rare specimens can still fetch high prices. 

Poachers of wild orchid plants can still find themselves in trouble, though more probably from customs officials and environmentalists than wild animals or unfriendly natives. But this rarefied end of the market is a far cry from the orchid's latest incarnation as a cheap-and- cheerful pot plant, available for a tenner, to stick on the kitchen windowsill.

pink to yellows and peachy shades; sometimes it's mottled or striped. It's the one you'll have seen in department  stores and garden centers; on reception desks of hotels, hairdressers and restaurants; as table centerpieces at the last wedding or wedding orchid bouquet you went to; in the background in television studios. It's also quite possibly the one you gave your mum for her birthday this year.

The flower orchids in the van der Weijden greenhouses come in all the colors and sizes possible for Phalaenopsis. But the trays waiting to be shipped off for sale contain individual plants that look eerily identical: same size, same patterning, same number of blooms per stem, they are clones or also called orchid hybrid. These days you don't have to clamber into the jungle canopy and risk life and limb to gather specimens. Nor do you have to painstakingly nurture the plants along from seed. You simply ring the lab and place your order. "We buy over half of our orchid stock from laboratory, a little from Belgium and some from Germany," explains van der Weijden.

At the orchid lab they take a clump of cells and put them in a nutrient- rich medium. They can cut the orchid clump and then cut it again, so you can get a few thousand plants from one cell, all the same height, the same pattern, the same flowering period.There's no season to orchid cloning, so a plentiful supply of lab-hatched orchids can be on sale for key orchid flower-buying dates such as Mother's Day, Easter and Christmas, plus all points in between.

- The Victorian orchid growers

would have marveled at this high-tech process. The van der Weijdens' baby plants spend the first two years of their lives in flasks at the lab. After that, they are big enough to be transplanted into trays of bark, and specialized greenhouses nurture them until they are three years old and big enough to pot.

Growing orchids in bark allows plenty of air to reach their roots. "Almost every orchid is an epiphyte, so their roots would be stuck to the trunk of a tree, which is why they need air," explains van der Weijden. "Another company buys the plants and pots them for us, then we grow them on until they are big enough to flower - about another 30 weeks."

At the moment pink orchid are in fashion.The van der Weijdens' premises are arranged with every mod con to keep an orchid comfortable.

 
Pink Orchid

rooms and windows are festooned with orchids, great swathes of blooms. He doesn't get sick of orchids, working with them every day? No, he loves them too.

- Loved or not, orchids are big business.

The world orchid retail value is about pounds 7bn, and large-scale Dutch growers have cornered the European market. The van der Weijdens sell a Phalaenopsis for around EUR6 to EUR8 (pounds 4 to pounds 5.50); it will eventually retail at around EUR15 (pounds 10). A "Vanda" sells for EUR15 wholesale and fetches around EUR50 (pounds 35) in a shop.

British orchid growers can't achieve the Dutch-style economies of  scale that would allow them to match these prices. Some even buy blooms from Holland to sell on. "We can't compete, so though we grow a few Phalaenopsis, we buy in most of what we need from Europe," says Liz Johnson, owner of McBean's Orchids, a nursery near Lewes in East Sussex.

couldn't let the plants and history go," she says. "There are so few of the old nurseries left."

Johnson grows rare orchid varieties, and specializes in types that don't clone readily and have to be coaxed from seed. One of her greenhouses is full of Odontoglossum, which has delicately frilled, beautifully marked blossoms. Odontoglossum can only rarely be cloned, because the plant's own tissues produce toxins that are fatal to the new plantlets. "You won't see a houseful anywhere else in Europe," she says proudly.

McBean's, which is one of only two orchid nurseries to have exhibited at every Chelsea Flower Show since the first in 1912, is most famous for its Cymbidiums, which produce graceful sprays of as many as 20 long-living blooms at a time. Johnson and her team grow Cymbidiums from seed, and then select the best specimens for cloning, in the on-site laboratory. The `Phalaenopsis' orchids currently flooding the market often leave something to be desired in terms of quality, says Johnson. "If you count the buds on the spikes, many of the plants sold in mass outlets only have five orchid flowers.

- The best orchid quality is nine-plus."

And, she says, when buyers are conditioned to the hardy, long-lasting Phalaenopsis, whose flowers last for months and which will speedily flower again, they get upset when a more expensive type only blooms for a few weeks. "They say, `But it's an orchid!' when the flowers die on their Paphiopedilum," she sighs. In general, though, she welcomes the current upsurge in buy orchid. "Orchid buyers divide into hobbyists and pot-plant people, and why shouldn't the pot-plant people have more choice?

critics falling over themselves to praise the excitement of the tale.

Today orchid enthusiasts and other can get the their flowers from the orchid nursery.. Hansen spoke to a Japanese property developer called Hiroshi Ikarashi, whose home was devastated in the 1994 Kobe earthquake. Ikarashi rushed naked from the wreckage of his house to check on his orchid greenhouse. "Thanks to God," he told Hansen, "the greenhouse all broken, but plants only knocked on their side. I tell you, I am astonish. But then I begin to wonder: where 

my wife in the rubble of our house?"

Just before Christmas 2000, two young orchid hunters, Tom Hart Dyke and Paul Winder, then aged 24 and 29, were freed after being held for nine months by rebels in Colombia. Hart Dyke, known as the Indiana Jones of the orchid world, became hooked on orchids while at primary school, and has searched for specimens in Thailand, Sumatra, Japan, Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala, Panama and Belize. Interviewed shortly after his release, he said: "I guess you could say it was an orchid too far. I thought we were going to die but it was worth it. When you see orchids flowering they are extraordinary. Seeing something like a slipper orchid bloom can make you feel faint."
It's unlikely that Cage or Streep will ever star in a film about Phalaenopsis cloning. The romance of orchidelirium has suffered from the Phalaenopsis pile-'em-high-sell-'em-cheap philosophy. Liz Johnson has heard the story of how one particularly enterprising Sussex grower used to take his orchids to London every Friday night, and hawk them outside the Bank of England. "The rich people coming out of the Stock Exchange would usually buy an orchid for their wife - or their mistress," she says. "If it had been a good day for the financial markets, that grower must have made a lot of money." He wouldn't do so well now. All those stockbrokers could simply nip into Marks and Spencer in their lunch hour and grab a Phalaenopsis off the shelves. Lvd Weijden tel: 00 31 65 472 6861. McBean's Orchids, Cooksbridge, East Sussex, tel: 01273 400 228, www. mcbeansorchids.co.uk. McBean's offers free Open House Weekends. The next are 22-23 November, 13-14 December and 24-25 January

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Orchid picture, orchid photo, plant hunter, jungle, Thai royal orchid , orchid culture, orchid poacher, wild plants.