$10,000 Orchid

If a flower is a work of art, an orchid is a masterpiece. A piece of the world's rarest single orchid plant bloomed last week in Summit, N. J. bearing three beautiful, pure white flowers. Two hard-bitten old orchid hunters, John Lager and Henry Hurrell, hastily summoned the Press to marvel.

Not for two decades have Orchid-hunters Lager & Hurrell scrabbled through the jungles looking for orchids for tycoons' hothouses. Generation ago they made two astounding strikes. High up in the branches of a South American tree, John Emil Lager found a gold powdered red Masdevallia orchid unknown to science. Five hundred miles away he found a few other specimens. The entire shipment got sidetracked in a coastal warehouse, dried out, died. None was ever found again (TIME, April 3).

John Lager's next great discovery was a pure fluke. In 1908 he sent a crate of 1,000 dormant,unpotted orchid plants from Colombia to his greenhouses in New Jersey. Since they were not in flower, there was no way of telling more than that they were Cattleya Gigas, a fairly common orchid family. Of the 1,000, about half were sold in small quantities to other nurserymen just as they left the crate. The rest Mr. Lager potted, put in the greenhouse. In 1910 one plant suddenly bloomed pure white. No pure white Cattleya Gigas has ever been found before or since. The most valuable orchid in the world, it was sold by Lager & Hurrell for $10,000 to a European commercial establishment which in turn sold it to Baron Firmen Lambeau of Belgium. Lager & Hurrell promptly made it a house rule never to sell an orchid plant until the partners had a chance to see what the flowers were going to be like.

Because it is what horticulturists call a "sport" there is only one way that Baron Lambeau's Cattleya Gigas Alba can be propagated. Seeds are useless; its seed if sown would revert to the colors of its comparatively worthless parents. But every year or so, depending on the Alba's strength, an expert with a sharp knife can cut off three or four of the pseudo-bulbs that form round its base, make a new plant from them. Baron Lambeau performed this operation several times, keeps his plants in his private hothouses. Not long ago a Mr. F. E. Dixon of Elkins Park, Pa., an orchid grower with the instincts of a stockbroker, cornered the market by buying every available Cattleya Gigas Alba var Firmen Lambeau in Britain. From a stray orchid of the original Cattleya Gigas Alba, Mr. Lager acquired the piece of his own plant that flowered so lushly last week. There are seven bulbs on this. Soon he expects to have two plants in two pots. Only once a year does an orchid bloom. Not for generations can ordinary citizens expect to see the flowers of Alba.

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