One winter several years ago

I made plans with two friends to go to an orchid show in my hometown of Madison, Wis. It was freezing cold outside, with a minus 25-degree chill factor, on the day of our planned outing. Because of my MS, extreme temperatures affect how I feel and I was afraid to leave the house on this rather frigid day. So, my friends went to the show without me.

Two hours later, my wonderful friends appeared at my door with a gorgeous gift for me: the most beautiful flowering orchid I'd ever seen! It was a delicate phalaenopsis with a dozen white butterfly shaped flowers with purple centers. 

For more than 4 months, the flowers bloomed and remained frozen in time, as perfect as the day I received them. Looking at that magnificent plant during those long winter months gave me hope that spring would return.

In May, when the flowers finally died,

I was shocked at how ugly the plant had become. Its funny. While it was blooming, I never noticed that the other parts of the plant were unattractive. My phalaenopsis had only a few leaves: some were a deep, intense, forest green; others were faded and washed out.

The roots-long silver-gray nubby tendrils-crawled out of the pot looking like strange worms trying to escape confinement.

I didn't know where to put the cattleya orchid plant. It didn't look pretty like my other houseplants. It just didn't fit in. I thought about throwing it away.

I'm so glad I didn't because 6 months later, I saw a new green shoot emerge. Each day I watched that orchid spike grow. Within 3 weeks, it was 18 inches long and had 16 tiny buds about to pop open. Day after day, I watched the orchid buds open like butterflies emerging from their cocoons. I marveled at the beauty, grace, and delicate features of each orchid flower.

A peaceful, almost holy, feeling came over me. Who or what could have created such an exquisite orchid flower? I couldn't believe that it was an accident of nature or a random act of the universe. To me, it reinforced my belief in a higher power. Perhaps this higher power created the orchid to remind us that were not alone. The orchid became my beacon, my hope for a better tomorrow.

Siam orchids are probably the best.

Pink Orchid

A month after the orchid was in full bloom, I showed it to a visiting friend.

She reported that she had an orchid plant at home that hadn't rebloomed since she bought it years earlier. She wanted to bring it over to see if I could work my magic on her plant.

As I placed her non-blooming plant next to my gorgeous, flowering orchid, I felt a spark, an instant connection.

Her ugly orchid reminded me of my body with its limitations, awkward movements, and tremors. I didn't like the way my body looked, just like I didn't like the way the no blooming orchid looked.

Just as the non-blooming orchid didn't fit in with all the other (pretty) household plants, I felt different and sometimes out of place with my "normal, able-bodied" friends.

Yet, when I looked at the magnificent orchid blossoms on the flowering plant, I felt a sense of

peace, love, beauty, and grace. In a way, I saw my soul, my inner being. That's when it dawned on me! These two simple orchid flower plants, side by side, had made my world a little clearer. MS was the plant and the flowers were my soul.

If that kind of beauty could come out of something so ugly, then maybe I, too, could make something beautiful come out of my illness. MS may have a hold on my body but I wont let it have the power to touch my soul.

I decided that day to keep "blooming where I am planted," and to continue to create orchid flowers out of my life.

Oh! And, by the way, I always keep a blooming orchid flower  in my home-especially when the temperature falls to 25 below zero!

We are planning a free monthly e-zine (an electronic magazine delivered through e-mail) for people living with chronic illness.

The e-zine will be filled with "Making Life Easier" tips, stories, and insights into making the best of living with a chronic illness.

Would you be interested in receiving more information about the e-zine. If you would, please send an e-mail to: Help@Meeting LifesChallenges.com and type e-zine in the subject field. We will not share your e-mail address.

Shelley Peterman Schwarz, is President of Meeting Lifes Challenges, LLC, 9042 Aspen Grove Lane, Madison, WI 53717-2700; phone: 608.824.0402; fax: 608.824.0403.

Orchid Obsession

Its impossible to separate sex from the orchid. Its embedded in its name. Its embodied in its structure. Sex has dictated the extraordinary modifications of lip and mouth that lure insects into the voluptuous centre of these terrifying creatures. From the beginning (the Greek philosopher Theophrastus in c250BC), the flower was described in terms of the male genitalia. And so from the Greek word for testicle (orkhis), the orchid gets its name.

Its a Orchid of Siam flower for obsessive, a theme that Proust explores in Swanns Way, where the tropical cattleya, an orchid of archetypal pinkness and feminine frills, becomes a perverse fixation. Nero Wolfe, the detective hero of Rex Stouts stories shows a similar fetish and you can imagine Inspector Morse going the same way, if he had not found music first. Susan Orlean explores another aspect of obsession in The Orchid Thief. The book (which in turn mutated into Spike Jonze and Charlie Kauffmans film Adaptation) grew out of a brief newspaper report of a lawsuit involving an orchid buff called John Laroche, three Seminole Indians and the theft of plants,

If you dont share that obsession, you will almost certainly find orchids intimidating.

They seem to look at you in the supercilious way that camels do, noting imperfections of dress and appearance and comparing them unfavorably with their own statuesque flawlessness. Botanically, too, they are a daunting family; between 25-30,000 species, terrestrial and epiphytic, are scattered

through Central America, Africa, India and the Far East. Where do you start with a family as massive as that? "With cymbidiums," I say, because they are as easy to grow as mustard and cress, requiring none of the expensive housing, heating and humidity that "proper" orchids demand. At the Columbia Rd street market in east London, vast cymbidiums, with sheaves of leaves big enough to hide a baby in, sell for the price of a bottle of wine.

And moth orchids (Phalaenopsis) with wide white wings spread either side of their enigmatic faces, have become as iconic a piece of decoration, perched either side of a stripped down mantelpiece, as flights of plaster ducks were in the mock-Tudor semis of the Thirties.

Orchids, now micro-propagated in their trillions, have become Everyman's flower.

But when they first started coming into this country from the East, they were great rarities, grown (and at the beginning, often killed) by a small band of obsessive collectors such as the wine merchant John Day (1824-1888) who built up an extraordinary hoard of orchids at his home at High Cross, Tottenham in North London.

He bought his first collection in 1852 from the nursery run by Conrad Loddiges in Hackney. Loddiges was a pioneer, one of the first nurserymen to import, cultivate and sell tropical orchids in Britain. For 50 plants Day paid pounds 50 (about pounds 3000 in todays money) and got, not workaday cymbidiums, but dendrobiums from India, odontoglossums from tropical America, lycastes, cattleyas, all aristocrats amongst orchids.

Less than 10 years later, a description of the High Cross orchid house, 30ft long by 11ft wide, appeared in the Gardeners Chronicle with plenty of cattleya orchids and other. In Victorian times, this was the journal of record for anyone interested in plants and, breathlessly, the magazines correspondent wrote of the exemplary heating system, the "cool, moist bottom plan" worked out by gardener, Robert Stone, the "unusual vigour and luxuriance" of the plants. "Every Orchidophilist ought to see them," he concluded. Today its Thai orchid.

In January 1863, a year after the Gardeners Chronicle piece appeared, Day, who had been taking drawing lessons from a Royal Academician, Cornelius Durham, began to paint orchids.

At first, he recorded the specimens of orchids in his own collection. Then he began to include rare new orchids arriving at Veitchs famous nursery in Chelsea. He got a special admission ticket for the Royal Botanic Gardens allowing him to paint specialties in Kews famous orchid house.

Over about 25 years, he filled 53 "scrapbooks" as he called them with a series of glorious watercolors of orchids, scribbled round with notes of their acquisition, habitat, sale price, proper cultivation, all of which give a riveting glimpse into this obsessive world of the Victorian orchid collectors.

A selection of the 2,800 pages of the scrapbooks has recently been brought together with the help of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, in A Very Victorian Passion: The Orchid Paintings of John Day. Days paintings are combined with a scholarly commentary provided by Philip Cribb, the present curator of Kews orchid herbarium and Michael Tibbs, a well-known orchid grower and breeder. Here is a very special blue vanda orchid and a yellow vanda.

The obsession was sustained and intensified by an extraordinary web of plant collectors working in Assam, Bhutan, Columbia. In India, and later in Burma, Major Robson Benson enlivened his career as a soldier by collecting orchids for the nurseryman Hugh Low. Colonel Emeric Berkeley did the same thing in the Nicobar and Andaman Islands.

Henry Blunt collected orchids in Brazil and the northern Andes. William Boxall established himself in the Philippines and sent back glorious paphiopedilums, vandas and phalaenopsis orchids. To transport them, he invented a special kind of case, using ground oyster shell as glazing.

Carl Roebelen collected for the ambitious orchid nurseryman, Frederick Sander of St Albans. One of his most famous introductions was the fabulous Phalaenopsis sanderiana, a wide-winged moth orchid with pale mauve-pink petals provocatively arranged around a creamy- yellow mouth. Roebelen had discovered the new orchid on Mindanao and with the ruthlessness typical of the Victorian collectors had stripped the area bare and amassed 21,000 of the orchid plants ready to ship back to Sander.

But then a hurricane struck the islands and the entire consignment was lost. When Sander heard the news he telegraphed Roebelen: "Return. Re-collect." Some of the grander Victorian growers, such as the Duke of Devonshire at Chatsworth in Derbyshire and the Duke of Northumberland at Syon House in Middlesex, employed their own collectors, but orchid fanciers like John Day acquired their best treasures at auction. Nurserymen such as James Veitch, Conrad Loddiges and Benjamin Samuel .Williams of the Victoria and

Paradise Nurseries in Upper Holloway, regularly sent consignments of vanda orchids and other species to be auctioned by Messrs Stevens of King St, Covent Garden.

It was in their orchid sale room that, after an epic battle with a fellow enthusiast,  Sir Trevor Lawrence, a contemporary of Days, acquired the one single plant of Aerides lawrenciae imported by Frederick Sander from the Philippines.

Lawrence, who lived at Burford Lodge, near Dorking, Surrey, paid 235 guineas for this treasure, the equivalent of pounds 14,000 today. The German taxonomist Heinrich Reichenbach named the orchid after Sir Trevors wife, who, he wrote, "is considered to afford the most ardent stimulus to Sir Trevors love for Aerides, always desiring the progress of the grand collection at Burford Lodge."

The craze for orchids, of course, had a disastrous effect on the wild orchid populations. By the time that John Day was painting the beautiful hybrid Paphiopedilum vexillarium orchid raised by the breeder John Dominy at James Veitchs nursery in 1870.

One of its parents, the Himalayan orchid species Paphiopedilum fairrieanum was already almost extinct. But it was a wildly competitive orchid market.

Most professional orchid collectors were under instructions from their employers to strip out entire populations of orchids so that the nurserymen could reap the financial advantage of their monopoly.

Just a few, such as Edward Andre, regretted the "melancholy fate" of thousands of orchids imported to Europe. He welcomed the civil war that had broken out in Colombia in the 1870s as it would allow "a fallow time for the orchids, which otherwise would own a fair chance of extirpation."

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3 Orchids White

Orchid Orange Color full Plant

Orchid White

Orchid Violet full Plant

Orchid Dark Violet

Cattleya Orchid White and Violet

Orchid Orange Color

Orchid Dark Yellow

-At the beginning of the craze, many orchids did indeed suffer a "melancholy fate"

because so little was known about their proper culture. In the wild, many of the most desirable kinds - phalaenopsis and elegant oncidiums - grow as epiphytes, anchoring themselves to trees, rather than in the ground. In the rain forests of Central and South America, you might find one single tree being used like an apartment block: cattleyas and laelias on the first floor, with odontoglossums, oncidiums and masdevallias higher up. Each species evolved to suit a particular habitat and microclimate. All these different requirements were not easy to replicate in the average greenhouse.

Day bought his first odontoglossum from Stevenss saleroom on 9 January 1877. It came from the collection of the Rev Alfred Norman, rector of Burnmoor, Co Durham, but turned out to be a disappointing dud. Three years later, he bought another, this time from William Buls nursery in the Kings Rd, Chelsea. This plant was in full bloom so there could be no unforeseen disappointments. By this time, good forms were fetching high prices. That same year, a plant from Serjeant Coxs famous collection at Moat Mount, Mill Hill in north London, fetched pounds 22 10s (about pounds 1,350). 

Orchids remained staggeringly expensive because they were very difficult to propagate from seed. Then some observant person noticed that in the wild any surviving seedlings usually sprang up close to the mother plant. It turned out that a fungus in the roots of the mother plant was an essential catalyst. Seeds could not germinate without it.

By 1922 an American  

professor, Dr Lewis Knudson of Cornell University, was showing commercial growers how to inoculate their sowing medium with the nutrients provided by the fungus. For the next 40years, more than a million seedlings were successfully raised by this method. Then in 1964, Dr Georges Morel introduced the revolutionary technique of propagation by tissue culture - micropropagation. Most orchids now begin life in a laboratory and take four years to develop from a scrap of tissue in gel to a full- grown flowering plant. That has brought down the average cost of an orchid from pounds 500 per plant to pounds 15, though novelties continue to command crazy prices. An enthusiast recently paid pounds 50,000 for a new Japanese variety Neofinettia falcata `Brown Bear'.

 scale insects. They had to syringe flowers early morning and again in the afternoon. They had constantly to check ventilation. By June shading was inspected and, if necessary, adjusted every hour. Some orchids needed liquid feeds. Others didn't, some needed to rest. Others had to be kept in permanent growth. Special composts had to be mixed and plants repotted. Above all, the great boilers that heated the orchid houses of the period had to be fed with vast mountains of coal and coke, the raw materials that had made the fortunes which so many collectors then lavished on orchids.

But already by 1838, before John Day even began his orchid collection, Joseph Paxton, head gardener to the Duke of Devonshire, always ahead of the game, had 83 species growing beautifully at Chatsworth. By 1885, 2,000 species were being grown in cultivation. At her Diamond Jubilee in 1897, Queen Victoria was presented with a basket of orchids "the best and rarest from Her Majesties Dominions". In the basket were orchids from the West and East Indies, Burma, India, Africa and British Guyana.

At Drumlanrig in Scotland, the Duke of Buccleucs gardener grew 250 pots of Odontoglossum `Alexandrae with white petals touched with lemon and rose as hair decorations for the ladies of the house. For mens buttonholes, he grew paphiopedilums, perhaps the sexiest of all orchids, with long, drooping, whisker-like petals set either side of a weird central pouch. A hooded dorsal petal of greenish copper hangs protectively over the tongue of pollen.

 Sir Trevor Lawrence favored phalaenopsis for his buttonhole and in Volume 37 of his scrapbooks Day sketched a very fine spray of the Burmese species Phalaenopsis lowii that Lawrence was wearing in his buttonhole at Stevenss saleroom. Day often found himself bidding against Lawrence for choice new species.

The merchant banker, Baron Henry Schroeder, was another regular rival. But in Stevenss saleroom on 31 March 1881, Day was the seller not a buyer. In the first of the five two-day sales which saw the dispersal of the famous Day collection, Lawrence paid 140 guineas (roughly pounds 8,500) for a fine moth orchid, Paphiopedilum stonei. It was named after Days faithful gardener, Robert Stone, who was in charge of the orchid collection from 1862-1875.

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