 And now, THE HISTORY OF ORCHID! Now, just how far back do orchids go? We're gonna start with an extinct species of bee, proplebia dominicana. A study in the scientific journal Nature revealed that a bit of orchid pollen was found encased in a myocene amber, Jurassic Park style, and was dated about 15 to 20 million years old. But that's not all. Hold on to your butts. Genetic sequencing indicates that orchids go back to the late Cretaceous period about 76 to 84 million years ago! And according to Mark W. Chase, the former director of the Jordell Lab at Kew Gardens and author of the Book of Orchids, there is a biogeographical and phylogetic evidence that shows orchids could go back as much as 100 to 120 million years ago. Orchids are all under the family Orchidaceae, but there are varying accounts of exactly how many species there currently are. But most current sources put it anywhere from 25 to 30,000 different species of orchids. And that's just the species. It's now believed that there could be as many as 300,000 individual varietals of orchids. Can I get a whoa? Whoa! Here's where things get just a little bit odd. Big thanks to Greek philosopher Theophaestrus who gave us the biological name of orchids, which is Orchis. And it literally means... Testicles! Now this is actually because some of the orchid root systems resemble testes. Or so they say. I can't make this stuff up. I can't. The term orchid was actually introduced in 1845 by John Lindley in the book School Botany and Vegetable Physiology, or the Rudiments of Botanical Science. Catchy title. Let's skip ahead to 2800 BC, where we find the first written evidence of orchids in an old Chinese medical text. Starting around 700 BC, there's even more extensive evidence of orchids in Chinese and Japanese art and literature. And this brings us to one of the world's most famous Chinese philosophers ever, Confucius. No! He is not just a construct of the fortune cookie companies! Confucius called orchids the king of fragrant plants, and because of his writings, the orchids acquired a revered status and became one of the foremost revered plants in China. Now this quartet of plants is known as the Four Gentlemen or the Four Noble Ones. They are called this because they uphold the greatest virtues of the Junzi, also known as the gentlemanly virtues of Confucianism. They are bamboo, chrysanthemums, the plum tree, and orchids. They are also meant to depict the Four Seasons of the year. Sidebar! The four tiles of a mahjong set which depict flowers are always supposed to use the Four Noble Ones as those flowers. Consider yourself edified. Confucius' influence on orchid acceptance actually extends to Japan, where we find an old Japanese legend about a sterile emperor's wife who was able to conceive 13 children because she inhaled the perfume of orchids. And the Japanese went so gaga over orchids that it actually affected their economy. And the actual emperor at the time had to ban orchid sales and planting. Anyone caught dealing the flowers was put to death. Japan actually still has some orchid selling restrictions to this day. Just not so deadly. Now orchids are actually found on every continent except for Antarctica. Makes sense. And as we start moving forward in time, we find stories about them from most every continent. In Europe, the ancient Greeks were not so much admiring orchids as using them for aphrodisiacs. The indigenous Oregon inland plateau natives were using Gutierrez ablongata orchids for medicinal purposes. And the ancient Kami of Cambodia have orchids in their architecture. But the next really cool incident involving orchids involves the evil Spanish conquistador Cortez. Who upon entering Mexico in 1519 encounters the great Aztec Emperor Montezuma who is drinking a certain drink called Chocolato which is partially comprised of the pods of the vanilla orchid. What? The vanilla orchid? Yeah, the vanilla planifolia orchid is actually the primary source of where we get vanilla. Hmm, learn some new every day. To find out more about vanilla orchids, watch my history of vanilla. Oddly, it's not until 1568 that orchids are even mentioned in English literature. And even then, it's not until the 1700s that orchids are imported with any regularity into Europe. And when they did, they didn't do very well. It wasn't until 1787 that a clamshell orchid is recorded as flowering under the caribotonists at Kew Gardens in London. And it wasn't until 1856 that the first official man-made hybrid was created. How about a little bit of Charles Darwin? Now Darwin wrote volumes of research on orchids in pollination. But one he couldn't quite figure out was the Engricum sescopodale, which has an incredibly deep pollen chamber. Darwin wrote his friend and botanist, Joseph Hooker. Good heavens! What insect can suck it? He figured that it must be pollinated by an insect with some kind of 13-inch proboscis in order to reach down into the deep pollen chamber. Turns out, he was right. And in 1903, it was eventually discovered that an African hawk moth from Madagascar fit the bill. And now, prepare yourself for orchid mania. Orchid mania! Orchid mania! Many people now refer to this era in history actually as the orchid delirium. But research shows that the Victorians actually called it orchid mania. Psychopsis papillio is the beautiful flower that sent the Duke of Devonshire's orchid obsession into overdrive. Once he saw it, the Duke became so obsessed that he built a greenhouse the size of an acre and burnt 300 tons of coal each winter to carry heat via seven miles of pipes to maintain his orchid collection. It was the Lady Slipper Orchid, however, that got Victorian botanists to go absolutely bonkers. They just wouldn't stop digging it up or picking its flowers. Luckily, in 1930, a Lady Slipper Orchid was found around the Yorkshire Dales. Because of the orchid madness sweeping the nation, however, they had to place it under surveillance, police protection, and create a secretive committee kind of like the Freemasons to protect the plant. People were so desperate to steal a cutting of the plant. Tripwires were installed during the flowering season. Keep it safe. Since they were so rare, orchids were considered status symbols for the elite and royalty. And unfortunately, that's the only people who could afford them because orchid prices at the time were astronomically high. In 1890, Queen Victoria's royal orchid grower, Frederick Sander, auctioned a specimen of Catlia orchid from South America for 2,000 pounds. Adjusted for inflation, that's about 240,000 pounds today. Now, because of this manic drive to claim the rarest orchids for their own collections, the ultra-rich financed large expensive expeditions to bring back the new species of orchids which no one had seen before. Unfortunately, because they didn't know much about orchid care, their survival rate was horrible. And this led to the invention of the Wardian case, a sealed glass mini greenhouse that simulated the tropical environment to help keep orchids alive. Now, Victorian orchid hunters went psychotic and went all across the globe trying to find these new orchid species. Now, these orchid hunters spread lots of misleading information they'd lie their butts off to throw other people off their path. The reason they did it is because the orchid hunters could actually win wealth and prizes for bringing back really good orchids. And Frederick Sander was one of the worst, sending out tons of people to bring orchids back. One of his hunters, Joseph Warsawix, posted that he plundered all of Quito and Quinta of its orchids. And plunder is only part of it. Orchid hunters would burn the forest behind them in order to prevent their competitors from getting the same orchids. What the... You want more bazaar? Okay, orchid hunters would sometimes use more common orchids as packing material for the rare orchids. That said, Sanders and some of the orchid hunters did do a few helpful things by saving some of the orchids for scientific research. And Sanders wrote the first official list of orchid hybrids. But it hardly makes up for the thousands and thousands of orchids that were killed and the viriles and species that may have gone extinct because of the era of orchid delirium. Today, thankfully, the approach to orchids is completely different. In 1973, sites was created to prevent the illegal trade of orchids that still exists. Illegally traded orchids seized by the United States Customs are taken care of by the New York Botanical Gardens Rescue Program. Still, orchid mania remains a humongous blemish on the history of orchids and the numbers of species that were lost. And we can only hope in the future that people will finally get a clue and calm the f*** down. Thanks so much for watching. As always, if you like this video, hit the like button, share it with your friends, subscribe, bell. If you want to learn more about the stories I talked about today, go ahead and look at the links in the description down below. Hey, do you want an orchid? Go ahead and tell me in the comments section down below if you do. And what kind it is? I'd really like to know. Until next time, be kind to each other and no orchid hunting.