- Paperback: 288 pages
- Publisher: Vintage Books USA; Reprint edition (Feb 2001)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0679771832
- ISBN-13: 978-0679771838
- Product Dimensions: 13.1 x 1.5 x 20.3 cm
- Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 1,697,093 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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More About the Author
Product Description
Amazon.co.uk Review
If the Renaissance had tulipomania, which has already been explored so elegantly in Anna Pavord's The Tulip, the modern era has become lost in Orchid Fever, as Eric Hansen explains in this exquisite book, summed up in its subtitle of A Horticultural Tale of Love, Lust and Lunacy. Hansen, author of the award-winning Stranger in the Forest, returned to the Borneo rain forest to accompany two American orchid growers in their search for Paphiopedilum sanderianum--the holy grail of orchids, and one of the rarest plants in the world. Whilst searching for the orchid Hansen learnt of the extraordinary passions inspired by orchids, the international intrigue associated with its cultivation and the ineptitude with which CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora) treated its preservation.
Hansen's subsequent foray into the bizarre world of orchids led him on a global odyssey from Borneo to eccentric orchid conventions in California, obsessive orchid growers in the frozen wastes of the Arctic Circle, shady orchid dealers in Germany and sniffy orchid experts in Kew Gardens, in an attempt to understand the perennial seduction of the orchid. En route Hansen also uncovers a murkier side of an orchid world that illegally traffics in rare species. The world-wide retail orchid business is conservatively estimated at $9 billion annually. The orchid's mixture of beauty, fragility and blatantly sexual appearance lies behind this extraordinary obsession, and Hansen tells his story wonderfully. The book is full of wit, pace and local colour, and has a great eye for the bizarre, as in his discovery of the recipe for fox testicle ice-cream made from dried orchid tuber powder. Orchid Fever is a wonderful book which should on no account be limited to horticulturalists!--Jerry Brotton --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Product Description
The acclaimed author of Motoring with Mohammed brings us a compelling adventure into the remarkable world of the orchid and the impossibly bizarre array of international characters who dedicte their lives to it.
The orchid is used for everything from medicine for elephants to an aphrodisiac ice cream. A Malaysian species can grow to weigh half a ton while a South American species fires miniature pollen darts at nectar-sucking bees. But the orchid is also the center of an illicit international business: one grower in Santa Barbara tends his plants while toting an Uzi, and a former collector has been in hiding for seven years after serving a jail sentence for smuggling thirty dollars worth of orchids into Britain. Deftly written and captivatingly researched, Orchid Fever is an endlessly enchanting and entertaining tour of an exotic world.
"A wonderful book, I've been up all night reading it, laughing and crying out in horror and clucking at the vivid images of bureaucracy with the bit in its teeth." —Annie Proulx
"An extraordinary, well-told tale of botany, obsession and plant politics. Hansen's vivid descriptions of the complex techniques some orchids use to pollinate themselves will raise your eyebrows at nature's sexual ingenuity." —USA Today
The orchid is used for everything from medicine for elephants to an aphrodisiac ice cream. A Malaysian species can grow to weigh half a ton while a South American species fires miniature pollen darts at nectar-sucking bees. But the orchid is also the center of an illicit international business: one grower in Santa Barbara tends his plants while toting an Uzi, and a former collector has been in hiding for seven years after serving a jail sentence for smuggling thirty dollars worth of orchids into Britain. Deftly written and captivatingly researched, Orchid Fever is an endlessly enchanting and entertaining tour of an exotic world.
"A wonderful book, I've been up all night reading it, laughing and crying out in horror and clucking at the vivid images of bureaucracy with the bit in its teeth." —Annie Proulx
"An extraordinary, well-told tale of botany, obsession and plant politics. Hansen's vivid descriptions of the complex techniques some orchids use to pollinate themselves will raise your eyebrows at nature's sexual ingenuity." —USA Today
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A compulsive and an essential read!,
By Steve Benner "Stonegnome" (Lancaster, UK) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER) (VINE VOICE) (REAL NAME)
This review is from: Orchid Fever (Methuen non-fiction) (Paperback)
Whether you happen to be an orchid lover, or merely a curious bystander, "Orchid Fever (A Horticultural Tale of Love, Lust and Lunacy)" will have you by turns helpless with mirth and seething with indignation, or else simply agog with incredulity from start to finish. For it is, quite simply, an absolutely stunning piece of investigative journalism, dressed up as a tale of personal obsession and eccentricities. Written using plain language and with an outstanding witticism, it makes for compelling reading throughout, whether or not you know anything about orchids, or the orchid-growing and trading communities that it explores. Chapter by chapter, alternating hilarious episodes with the downright unsettling or just plain unbelievable, Eric Hansen gradually lays bare the seedy underbelly of a world that perhaps few of us realise exists. He reveals an alarming world-wide conspiracy, fuelled by greed, protected and upheld by idiotic international bureaucracy and a network of power politics, which daily threaten innocent lives and legitimate livelihoods as well as vast swathes of natural fauna that they purport to be protecting. Populated as it is by gentle, likeable heroes, blackguardly villains, utter buffoons and the most outrageously bizarre of characters, it is sometimes easy to forget that this book is factual, so far-fetched are some of the events and scenarios that its author recounts. And yet, this somehow makes the book all the more scary, for occasionally things happen to make you realise that it is not a work of fiction. And at that point, the anger sets in... anger that things should be this way and are likely to remain so, despite the best efforts of some of the book's obvious heroes. Thoroughly researched over a period of some seven years and never less than fascinating, this book exposes the full and terrifying consequences for anyone who succumbs to orchid fever. It is an essential read for anyone who thinks that orchids are nothing more than beautiful but harmless flowering plants. Or indeed for anyone who has never heard of fox testicle ice-cream!
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Reality in the Horticultural World??????,
By A Customer
This review is from: Orchid Fever (Methuen non-fiction) (Paperback)
Given the lengths that the author had to go to to get his information, you would have thought this book involved serious murderers, drug trafficers or underworld characters. In reality this book shows the lengths to which authorities, people and nature will go to to protect these beautiful plants. This book is compelling and full of astonishing revelations.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Sexy stuff!,
By A Customer
This review is from: Orchid Fever (Methuen non-fiction) (Paperback)
One minor moan, which I will get out of the way first ... it reads a bit like a lot of articles strung togather rather than developing like you would espect a book-length study to do. But who cares really? It's a hoot, it's dead interesting, and it's very seldom that it goes off the boil in any way. I really loved it and I totally recommend it. My grandma is an orchid fancier and I really don't know if I'll be able to look her in the eye next time I go over for a coffee!!!
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