Orchids — Like sex dolls for bees

 

     In March, I visited the Orchid Show at the Chicago Botanic Garden. Three times. Quite a lot, really, a sufficient number of visits to make an outside observer, such as you, suspect that I really like orchids a lot. Which I do not, particularly.
      Don't get me wrong. I don't mind orchids. They're a fine flower, even though they tend to look like colorful alien insects or the faces of screaming babies. There's certainly enough of them — 25,000 species of orchid scattered all over the world. They seem rare, and often are as individuals. But taken together, orchids are the most prevalent flower. And also the oldest, which makes sense, because they seem like something a brontosaurus would munch on under a purple Jurassic sky. 

     I just happen to prefer, aesthetically oh, zinnias, or daisies or irises, or roses, or just about any other bloomin' bloom. Flowers that are round, and less, umm, weird-looking, flowers without, as the Oxford English Dictionary demurely puts it, such notable "grotesqueness of form."*

     So how did I end up going to the Botanic Garden show three times? Quite organically. The first was with my wife, who wanted to see the show. I of course went along because where she goes I go. And the second with my sister, visiting from Dallas. I thought would like the show, and she did. And the third, last Sunday, with friends, scheduled by my wife.  

     The show ended Sunday, so I'm safe, for another year.
     "Orchid," incidentally, is a rather new word — the OED traces it only back to 1845. Though the word made up for lost time. No lesser scientist than Charles Darwin turned his attention to orchids, following up on his 1859 On the Origin of Species in 1862 with On the Various Contrivances by Which British and Foreign Orchids Are Fertilised by Insects, not as well known, yet continuing his evolutionary theme by noting that orchids that are pollinated by the wind have pale, unscented petals, while those requiring insects to do the deed are equipped with bright petals and fragrant nectar to lure them in. 

     Better suited to the task at hand, though I suppose you could argue that this was due to intelligent design— there must be a God, because how else could certain species of orchid offer almost perfect approximations of female bee anatomy, so as to collect the pollen that scrapes off male bees as they try to fuck them. I wish religious sorts would. That's cosmology I would be tempted to admire, if not consider.

    Speaking of religion and other commercial endeavors, orchids do not have a lot of practical applications, beyond the horticultural display of the plants themselves. There's only one I know of, but it's a good one: the fruit of an orchid known as the vanilla planifolia, or as it is more generally called, vanilla.
    Anyway, while I don't have anything special to say about orchids,  I did take these photos of them that I thought I would pass along. If this all seems out-of-left field, the truth is, I had something else I wrote ready to go Wednesday night, regarding dead friends. But I want to hold it, and think about it a bit. We are allowed to think about things. Right? If only as a change of pace. Such as flowers. We can think about them. Not for long, true, particularly orchids. But they will have to do for today.

* On Twitter, my friend Bill Savage provides some literary backup for my lack of enthusiasm for orchids. "General Sternwood, in The Big Sleep, to Philip Marlowe re: orchids: 'They are nasty things. Their flesh is too much like the flesh of men. And their perfume has the rotten sweetness of a prostitute.'"