Scribere Decisis

One thing about me is that my hobbies often belong to someone 50 years my senior. I’m no oracle, but I’ll call the shots now: someday in the near future I’ll be minding my business, all jolly and ignorant until the person those hobbies rightfully belong to knock on my door and say excuse me, I know this is all confusing, but I’ve had a missing hobby for about eight months, I opened the door and he just ran out and I haven’t seen him since, he looks remarkably like the ones in your hands right there, have you ever checked his microchip? And that is the day I will sheepishly hand them over and roll over to the hypnotic abyss of the internet and rot my brain to bits. But before then, my orchid keeping hobby led me to be the youngest attendee at an orchid fair on a Surrey Saturday. 

Orchids are a funny obsession to have. There’s over 50,000 of the lot – at least, we think that’s the least amount of orchid species out there, in the world – not to mention all these buggers live everywhere except the Antarctic (because nothing wants to live there. Not even bears, it’s in the name. Ant-arktos. No bears). They look like anything and everything, and it’s very hard not to love them for that. And anything and everything was a 20 minute drive from where I lived; limited time only I could be a nosey bastard and see what everyone else was doing with their orchids. Envy is not a sin if you repackage it as motivation, and I was motivated enough to spin on my heel and flee the slothly Saturday I had planned to go to this event. 

It took enough roundabouts to feel a bit queasy to drive into this Squire’s. Not your regular, miserable Squires squatting in greenbelt land. No, you could hardly stare and feel sorry for the neglect it did not go through. It stood proudly. It looked like it actually did break even! The cars were bunged up in the nostrils of the parking lot like a dreadful cold. The weather helped my impatience immensely; it had finally quit its hysterical oscillation between sun and hail to sit quiet for a few hours. I desperately wedged my little golf in between two 4×4’s (the way God intended normalcy should look like in Surrey), and waddled over to my monthly fix of orchid mania. By god I was not disappointed. 

Orchids look like anything and everything, and I was prepared for that. Cymbidiums, Bee Orchids, Monkey Orchids, Naked Man Orchids (yes, they look like naked men). What I was not prepared for was that they could also look like naked orchids. The correct way of saying it is leafless. My correct way of saying it was that they were as bare as God intended our buttocks to be in the bible. Because where were their leaves? Plants have leaves. That is the first thing you are taught in biology. There. Look into the microscope. That is a PLANT CELL from a LEAF. This one just had its roots out, floating free into the wind. I dare say these outrageous orchids were root-waving; modesty be damned. There were trophies on the line, and dignity was apparently just a botanical construct.

The salesperson noticed that I was evidently startled by this show of public indecency. She helpfully explained that this was a Chilochista. The flower grows in Laos, Thailand, India, Myanmar, and parts of Australia. It does actually have leaves until it reaches maturity, and then they fall away to reveal nothing but roots. 

But, I complained silently in my head, (as all British people are guilty of doing), and began comparing cousins to one another like an insufferable aunty at Christmas. The Vanda knows to keep her leaves, she knows better. She is earning a six-petal salary over there in New Guinea. Did the Chilochista not follow her example? Is he choosing the life of a vandal over the exemplary epiphyte? 

I did quite like the gorgeous Chilachista Viridiflava by my right. Growing in North Thailand, its real name is Phaya Rai Bai (flower without leaves), but was ‘identified’ in 1988 by the Danish Diplomat and Botanist Dr Gunnar Seidenfaden. It is a threatened species as per Steven Bachman’s article in 2018; but most of all, it is a little darling. All the while I kept glancing as it sat on its mount patiently like a tarantula on a pile of tangled yarn. Any sort of surprise I had melted away into adoration; I have never seen such a sweetheart. Leaflessness be damned, my stubbornness was preventing me from enjoying the simple fact that orchids look like anything and everything, and that was the fun of it all. ‘Ten people, ten colours’ as the Japanese proverb goes. I should drop the elderly resistance to novelty before my joints stiffen with my mind. 

I am now writing about this adventure in the comfort of my house. I may be a hypocrite in my judgment of the Chilochista – I am sheepishly waiting for mine to arrive in a week or so. I am enamoured by their deviance from convention. It is a far cry from the botanical ‘janteloven’ that I expected in the world of orchid keeping. Every now and then, I am a little happy to know that rather soon a Chilochista will hang over my head, clinging to its mount like an anxious clingy husband. At the end of the day, it was accepting its differences that created the most joy in my weekend. I am staunchly drawing the line, however, at accepting a miltonia into my house again. I am traumatised by the last one’s untimely death.