The Glamor and Tragedy of Orchids

Beyond the gates at Garden Place, visitors must have marveled at the great glass dome of the conservatory as it rose two and a half stories before them, glittering in the sun. Flanked, neoclassical style, with the marble statues of its founders, the central palm house unfurled two vast, shining wings spanning 240 feet. These sheltered the botanical sensations within and received the masses of expectant visitors who flocked there daily to behold them — according to one report, up to ten thousand souls a day.

Everyone who was anyone in Liverpool patronized the botanic garden. In 1847, 250,000 people came to call. Visitors were down-at-the-heel and well-heeled alike, even royal: Queen Victoria opened an exhibition next door, and Czar Alexander II presented the curator with a diamond ring of appreciation. Families with young children attended, as did courting couples, out-of-town friends, and, sometimes, single gentlemen.

Inside, diverse specimens of the plant kingdom awaited to edify and delight: scarlet Heliconia from the West Indies, purple Passiflora from the Americas, white calla lilies from South Africa. There were gladioli, lobelias, wood sorrels, sages, agaves, aloes, and lotus. At world expositions from Paris to Cologne, Vienna to Amsterdam, Liverpool’s botanic curators earned medals for magnificent displays showcasing tropical flowers as they might appear in their native wilds: gorgeous marquees of foliage plants, waterfalls, and rocks spangled with thousands of orchids — the flowers everybody thronged to see. The botanic garden at Mount Pleasant, and later at Wavertree, put Liverpool on the map of the British Empire as a horticultural center of excellence during the height of England’s global imperial expansion in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Thousands-strong crowds at the garden were a mark of “orchidelirium,” the Victorian “orchid craze,” a frenzy of orchid hunting that ripped these plants from their native lands. Transported across oceans, Liverpool’s tropical plants became a spectacle in cold foreign climes — then were made to weather centuries of shifting political winds, budget cuts, and the wounds of war. My hope, two hundred and twenty years after the garden’s founding, was to find them.

~~

On a bright spring day in May 2023, I followed a country lane through the dappled woods of West Derby to arrive at the rear courtyard of Croxteth Hall, an Edwardian brick mansion standing three stories tall and streaked with age.

“You’re looking for Ged?” asked the guard as I approached. He pointed up the lane to where a high brick wall receded into hedgerows and turned out of sight under a veil of trees.

From my home in Athens, Georgia, I had traveled four thousand miles in search of the remnants of the historic Liverpool botanic garden, known for its tropicals and renowned for its orchids. So much world history sits desiccated in museums, but I wanted to know if, across all that time and distance, I could sleuth out a living piece that had survived despite generations of antagonistic conditions.

An arched wooden door stood open in the garden wall, and a smiling man beckoned me within. Lead gardener Gerard Weaver greeted me with the rolling nasals of the native Scouser, “Alright, then?” He seemed the genie of the place, already 34 years in service to the Liverpool botanics and still young. Indeed, Ged is one in a long line of conservators who shield the gardens from the ravages of the wintry north and ill-favored political winds. He led me through a trellis tunnel of braided vines glowing emerald in the early afternoon sun, and I felt sure we’d emerge on the other side in our finest frocks, transported back in time to an era of Victorian splendor.

~~

In 1796, the accomplished Liverpool author, banker, and solicitor William Roscoe longed to retire. At 43, he had grown weary of practicing law and wanted to focus on more personal causes: his wife and children, the Unitarian church and abolition of the transatlantic slave trade, the study of Romance languages, his library of Italian renaissance books and art — and his cherished tropical plants.

Born to a humble market gardener and innkeeper, Roscoe had grown up working the soil with his father and took an early interest in tropicals — those tokens of imperial outreach from wherever colonial ships touched equatorial shores. At long last in retirement, Roscoe had occasion to build up his own botanical collection with a shipment of plants from Vienna.

At the same time he was building out his private tropical collection, five local plant enthusiasts were rallying support for a botanic garden in town. When Roscoe learned of the venture, he seized the chance at his dream of transforming Liverpool into a nexus of art, science, and humanist character beyond mere mercantilism. He joined his fellow botanics champions in issuing an impassioned prospectus on the garden’s behalf. A botanic garden in Liverpool, they argued, would provide a permanent, local venue for the study of living specimens as a counterpoint to the private collections and commercial nurseries in faraway London.

The city embraced the vision and endorsed the plan. For the site, Roscoe and his co-founders, known as proprietors, acquired a triangular plot near Mount Pleasant. It turned out to be a temporary location, and its botanical marvels would soon find themselves packed up in carriages and carried away, over and over again.

~~

So much world history sits desiccated in museums, but I wanted to know if, across all that time and distance, I could sleuth out a living piece that had survived despite generations of antagonistic conditions.

As we stepped from the trellis tunnel, Ged and I entered a paradise of plants. Everything was fragrant or brilliant: tiny, five-petaled strawberry blossoms and the winecups of wild purple geranium perfumed the air, and espaliered pear and apple grew up hollow flue walls originally built for small furnaces that warmed fruit trees in colder months. Fireglow in spiky neon-orange trefoils and the leaves of goldflame spirea now did with color what the flues had once done with heat.

Waved on like honored guests by feather dusters of pampas grass, Ged and I crossed into another broad enclosure, this one geometric with the intersecting paths and close-cropped ground cover of the French formal garden popularized in the Baroque era. We made our way to the far side where another brick wall divided us from a group of structures beaming white in the sun, accessible at the perimeter by a wooden gate.

Here, Ged tried to temper my enthusiasm. “We don’t really have orchid glasshouses as such anymore,” he warned. “It’s more of a tropical plant collection in six glasshouses. Apologies for their state of disrepair.”

I surveyed the assembled buildings. Despite their construction from teak and cedar, oily hardwoods that resist weathering, every visible crossbeam and spar had cracked and flaked with exposure to the northern elements. For a garden warehouse, some degree of dilapidation seemed reasonable. For a world-class botanical garden, the place looked rundown.

“We’re currently operating on a zero budget,” Ged lamented. While he and his fellow gardeners were salaried at Croxteth Hall, the city council had allocated no funds for upkeep of the tropical collection itself. The contemporary garden might, like the original garden, generate revenue by selling surplus plants to the public. However, the council had nixed that option on the grounds that the gardens didn’t have staff enough for such a production, regardless of any volunteer hours they could muster.

We stopped in front of a rough board nailed with a laminated printout: “Liverpool Botanic Collection,” it read, “one of the oldest botanical collections in the world and an important part of Liverpool’s heritage. [C]losed to the public at present.” Also on the printout was a single photo of an exquisite Javanese orchid, Vanda tricolor, white with purple splotches like an upside-down fleur-de-lis with a bright pink lip, meant, it seemed, to pacify the disappointed visitor.

So the botanics had slipped through the cracks into a state of exclusivity Roscoe never intended. Ged, the protector of these rare beauties only a chosen few are permitted to admire, regarded me soberly and lifted the barrier.

~~

Roscoe’s Mount Pleasant garden soon spilled over with far more plants brought from outlying expeditions than the space could accommodate. Two thousand dried specimens arrived from the South Seas for the herbarium; birds-of-paradise from South Africa, Cattleya orchids from Brazil, and prayer plants from the West Indies. The universities at Oxford, Cambridge, and Dublin contributed plants, as did the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew.

As the port city of Liverpool grew, neighborhoods and industrial pollutants bore down on the fragile botanics. In 1831, the proprietors voted to relocate the garden to the countryside where it would be safe from urban hazards. They purchased six acres in Wavertree with a garden plot four times the size of the original. Over the next five years, they moved every last tree, shrub, and plant by wagon caravan to the new site, along with Roscoe’s library and herbarium.

The botanic garden suffered for revenue. To cover the relocation, the proprietors applied for a loan from the city council; they had petitioned for donations before and would do so again. From its inception, the botanic garden has struggled to stay solvent.

~~

At the doorway of the first glasshouse, Ged and I stepped out of the cool May day into a wall of tropical humidity, teleported from our northern latitude directly to the rainforest. Inside it was a wonder, a new hanging garden of the Western world. The space was lush with Tillandsia usneoides, silvery Spanish moss which cascaded down like dryad tresses from dried tree branches hung in the rafters above as if we had passed beyond the veil. Nepenthes pitcher plants suspended in baskets offered tall cups of deadly insect-trapping nectar to our lips. Dozens of bromeliads, blushing magenta at the core of their vase-like rosettes, splashed the shelves with jungle hues. 

Indeed, the assortment was mostly not orchids and mostly not in season. At one point, the collection boasted a total of 5,000 orchids. Now, the collection sits at around 400. Ged and I stopped in front of just three. Brassia caudata, spider orchid, sprouted spindly with brown-flecked sepals like a brittle star and a lip like a ruffled shirt collar. It must have been the citrus notes of the night-blooming Epidendrum parkinsonianum that smelled so seductive in the air. It flowed in white rivulets of filamentous sepals with petals like two lobes of a fried egg, and a yolky lip to match. Vanilla planifolia, the vanilla orchid, bloomless on wavy jade stems with thick waxy leaves, revealed none of the delicious seed pods by which we know it and yet somehow have come to think of as plain — “the water of ice cream,” I heard a child describe it. 

~~

In response to the garden’s financial straits, the town council began paying the gardens £100 per year in 1840 to provide the public free access two days a week. In 1846, the council paid off the garden’s bank loan. The tides of opinion had lately shifted toward access for everyone, not just the upper crust. With the influx of the public, many of the wealthiest proprietors continued to abandon the gardens for the insularity of their own private collections. In dozens of glasshouses each, these collectors sometimes kept a hundred thousand orchids of numerous species, solidifying the city’s reputation for “orchidelirium.”

Transported across oceans, Liverpool’s tropical plants became a spectacle in cold foreign climes — then were made to weather centuries of shifting political winds, budget cuts, and the wounds of war.

Liverpool’s orchid obsession likely traces back to the impassioned acquisitions of Elizabeth and Richard Harrison, a local sibling duo who introduced hundreds of new orchid species to the United Kingdom from the Serra dos Órgãos (Organ Mountains) via Rio de Janeiro.

However fanatically the Harrisons collected, they did so conscientiously, unlike the majority of hack-and-slash hunters during the orchid craze. In Brazil, Richard and plant hunter George Gardner would follow in the wake of Portuguese colonizers as they mercilessly clear-cut the rainforest for coffee fields. Once felled, a tree high on a slope would thunder down and take out surrounding trees like dominoes. “[O]rchids and bromeliads cradled high in the canopy would thus rain down like manna from heaven,” says Jyll Bradley in her history of the Liverpool botanics. Gardner and Harrison would scramble through the downed branches to rescue what flowers they could before the coffee barons burned through the wreckage.

Like many Liverpool orchid enthusiasts of the day, the Harrisons are immortalized in the scientific names of species they brought back from Brazil: the aromatic Cattleya harrisoniana in a crowd-pleasing fuchsia with watercolor “splash petal” edges, and the fruity Bifrenaria harrisoniae, pansy-esque in white with a sweet violet lip. 

But in this century, eponyms in biological nomenclature have fallen out of favor across science and medicine in the spirit of objectivity and representation. I asked Ged how he felt about the issue.

He shrugged. “Those were the men in power at the time.”

On one hand, eponyms record the historical moment of a plant’s identification by Western taxonomy, an event in the history of science. On the other hand, they obscure the geography of the flowers’ origin, the more salient point for botany. 

There are, however, orchids “from” Liverpool — hybrids first crossed in town and found naturally nowhere on earth. After the Second World War, botanics curator Percy Conn bought an unnamed hybrid of Paphiopedilum, lady slipper orchid, from the local Keeling Nursery and named it after Stanley Park in Liverpool. Soon after, four more unchristened Keeling hybrids took on park monikers: Sudley, Sefton, Wavertree, and Calderstones. Despite the garden’s renown for wild species, it was these hybrids that came to be known as “the Liverpool orchids,” in part because Paphiopedilums are thought to be stouter against northern chill and industrial pollutants. 

Not stout enough. By the time I visited, the Liverpool orchids had likely been lost for nearly half a century.

~~

In their new haven at Wavertree, the gardens enjoyed a brief period of prosperity until the difficult years of the mid-20th century. At the start of World War II, the iron railings of the glasshouses were melted down for scrap metal and the mirror pools, some say, were filled in so that German aircraft could not navigate by their reflections at night.

One freezing winter evening, for lack of firewood, a troop of air raid wardens bunking at the curator’s lodge burned the garden’s old ledgers for heat. These records went back to the garden’s earliest days at Mount Pleasant and contained the garden biography, hunting logs by orchid collectors, schedules of plants delivered, dispatched, and in bloom, and all the registers of employee names and wages. Overnight, 140 years of the garden’s written history went up in smoke.

Then, on the evening of November 29, 1940, three months into the Blitz, a Luftwaffe missile meant for the neighboring gas works and marshaling yard fell astray and shattered the dome of the palm house. A hail of glass shards came down on the bananas and ferns, shredding their soft leaves, and the gash in the ceiling exposed the whole greenhouse to the frigid northern season. Many plants succumbed to the cold.

The next morning, gardeners rushed to move the survivors to safety at hundreds of private glasshouses around town — the very glasshouses the less egalitarian proprietors had retreated into some 100 years prior. The plutocracy that had first funded the botanics only to withdraw its support now crawled out of the woodwork to save them. Whatever the aristocracy’s feelings on public access, they were devoted to the plants.

Only the palms remained standing at Wavertree.

~~

It took thirteen years to rebuild the botanic collection, this time even farther from the city center in Calderstones Park on the Harthill Estate. They reopened to the public in 1964, resplendent with rhododendrons — the new curator’s favorite shrub — brought from Burma. Buoyed by renovations over the next 20 years, Calderstones ushered in a second era of prize-winning distinction for the botanics at regional horticultural shows, echoing their halcyon days of the 19th century.

But by the early 1980s, recession blanketed Liverpool. The state-sponsored International Garden Festival of 1984 was meant to revitalize the city by drawing visitors from around the world to a six-month horticultural pageant of gardens and gardening. Two months before the festival commenced, the central Department of the Environment informed the city council that, while they recognized the botanic collection’s cultural significance, “it did not contribute to the alleviation of social need in the inner city.” Without much ado, the glasshouses closed, barring Liverpool’s rich and poor alike from access to their prized tropicals.

At the time of closure, the Liverpool botanical garden housed the largest collection of orchids, bromeliads, and marantas, the second largest of begonias and cacti, and the third largest of ferns under municipal ownership in the United Kingdom. This amounted to a total of 4,500 plants, among them 950 bromeliads. Once again, everything was crated up and relocated by wagon, this time to Greenhill Nursery in Garston. There would be no third dawn for the flowers here.

~~

What happened next Ged calls the worst criminal act in the two hundred-plus years of Liverpool botanics history. In the aughts, under the banner of austerity in tough economic times, the ruling Liberal council dumped two thirds of the collection “in the skips,” as Ged puts it — a garbage load valued at half a million British pounds. So ruthless was the council’s decision that they hired a private security firm to search staff vehicles exiting the botanic garden so nobody could rescue any plants on the way out. They meant to destroy morale along with the tropicals. The orchid collection shrunk from 5,000 to 500 plants.

In 2012, when the remaining collection moved to its current location at Croxteth Hall, about 1,000 plants were given away, and many ended up at the zoo in Chester, an hour south of Liverpool. I witnessed the few survivors, which linger beyond the laminated printout on the wooden gate barring the way to the Croxteth glasshouses.

~~

Overnight, 140 years of the garden’s written history went up in smoke.

A year after my visit, the wheel of fortune began to turn once again for the Liverpool botanic garden. The city council, so often the botanics’ antagonist since the 1990s, submitted a bid to the National Lottery Heritage Fund for the garden’s refurbishment. They were awarded £245,000 in February 2024 to create a permanent home at Croxteth Hall for the historic collection. The council intends to recapture the glory of the orchids’ 19th-century heyday and return the entire garden to the center of horticultural excellence it once was.

In the words of Harry Doyle, city council cabinet member for health, wellbeing, and culture, “It’s not good enough that it’s a hidden gem. We want this vital asset to bloom in every sense.” Finally, the council sees the Liverpool tropicals’ value as more than ornament: as a repository of natural history, though much of that history has already been lost.

~~

Ged and I concluded our tour in a much bigger, cooler greenhouse called the polytunnel: a spacious, shade-painted glass warehouse with flowering trees, shrubs, and bushes. It is the opposite of the cramped rows of delicate tropicals we had filed through in the last two hours. 

We approached a loquat tree, the Japanese plum Eriobotrya japonica, endemic to central-eastern China. The evergreen shrub grows bouquets of fat, leathery, feathery leaves encircling walnut-sized fruits clustered in the center. Ged picked one from a low-hanging branch and gave it to me. The loquat was perfectly ripe — a smaller, tarter apricot that melted like marmalade on the tongue. Unless I visit Liverpool again, I’m sure I’ll never taste its equal.

I asked Ged if being surrounded by all these incredible plants made him want to travel to all their far-flung places of origin: Mexico, Cameroon, New Zealand. 

He shook his head. “I have it all right here.” 

And he does. Of course, these acquisitions came at a cost. Today, we acknowledge the dark sides of a venture begun in colonial times: the territories stripped of native flora in the name of imperial expansion and dominion over nature. We celebrate the nations where these specimens originate and the sacred roles the plants play in their home cultures. And we preserve public access to the gardens for the enrichment of all, as Roscoe laid out in his inaugural address: “the very end and object of our establishment is to render it as extensively useful as possible.”

He led me through a trellis tunnel of braided vines glowing emerald in the early afternoon sun, and I felt sure we’d emerge on the other side in our finest frocks, transported back in time to an era of Victorian splendor.

Over a cup of tea in the gardener’s lodge, Ged and I pored over scrapbooks of newspaper cuttings chronicling the garden’s triumphs and tribulations since the 1950s. As I turned the yellowed pages, I marveled that such an opulent legacy could ever have fallen out of fashion. 

I had set out to find the Liverpool botanics but had not anticipated their effect: the dizzying spell living history casts when we succeed in making contact with the past, the vertigo of that time travel. Even as we emerged from the trellis tunnel into the late afternoon sun of the Croxteth walled garden, the spell did not break. I remain under it still.