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A?New Yorker?Best Book of the Year

An?Economist?Best Book of the Year

The forgotten story of a decades-long international quest for a rare and coveted orchid, chronicling the botanists, plant hunters, and collectors who relentlessly pursued it at great human and environmental cost.

In 1818, a curious root arrived in a small English village. The amateur botanist who cultivated it soon realized that he had something remarkable on his hands: a rare Brazilian orchid never before seen on British shores. It arrived just as "orchid mania" swept across Europe and North America, driving a vast plant trade that catered to wealthy private patrons as well as the fast-growing middle classes. Dubbed Cattleya labiata, the purple-and-crimson bloom quickly became one of the world's most coveted flowers.

As tales of the flower's beauty spread, orchid dealers and enthusiasts initiated an exhaustive search to recover it in its natural habitat. Sarah Bilston follows the collectors and nurserymen who funded expeditions, the working-class plant hunters who set out to find the flower, the South American laborers and specialists with whom they contracted, the botanists who studied orchids in all their varieties, and the writers and artists who established the near-mythic status of the "lost orchid." The dark side of this global frenzy was the damage that it caused to fragile ecologies on which both humans and plants depended.

Chronicling the human ambitions that drove an international obsession, The Lost Orchid is a story of consumer desire, scientific curiosity, and the devastation of colonial overreach.