In 1818, a naturalist named William Swainson found, perhaps by accident, an orchid with a particularly beautiful bloom clinging to a granite cliff in Brazil. Its petals were the luminous saturated mauve that appealed to Victorian sensibilities; its lower lip was crimson. Safely arrived in England, it acquired a name, Cattleya labiata, that, happily, encapsulates the four principal concerns of this digressive, winding and elliptical book.

First, Cattleya, for Mr Cattley, who had no part at all in the collection of this flower. He was a wealthy merchant and keen plant collector who received it and flowered it in his greenhouse in Barnet. The fact that the talented botanist he was lucky enough to employ, John Lindley, named a whole subset of orchids after him for the sole purpose of ingratiation indicates the power that such patrons exercised in the floricultural world, the importance of winning the race for novelties and the degree of mendacity that characterised the profession. Second, labiata, a term with sexual implications, which ‘correlated the orchid, soon to be the focus of such intense pursuit, with women, sexuality, desire’, and promoted its use as an acceptable erotic signal at a time when it was not polite to say the word ‘trousers’. Third, to understand this at all, you would have to know Latin. This requirement was one of the means by which women, the poor and people of colour were excluded from a pursuit that belonged to the elite. Fourth, the flower was called Cattleya labiata because the naming of plants in the Linnaean system was a means of separating them from their origins in far-flung parts of the world.

So, empire, lies, plunder, greed and a veiled reference to sex. The Lost Orchid is only partly a book about the history of this orchid. What really interests Bilston is how orchidomania became a vehicle for the kinds of narratives that imperialists used to promote their aims. She intends, she