There was a mystery here that needed to be investigated. But the orchids had finished flowering for the year.
I don’t think Edith knew of any similar observations by other researchers when she wrote about her backwards-pollinating insects in 1927. She says that these observations have ‘so far puzzled several leading entomologists’. I suspect this refers to entomologists she knew and talked to about her observations (like Tarlton Rayment), rather than other published accounts of the behaviour she witnessed. I think she would have mentioned them by name if she had.
In the intervening winter months, Edith approached her mystery methodically and systematically. Like any good scientist, she went to the literature and sought the advice of experts. It seems likely that she wrote to Dr. R. J. (Robin) Tillyard, who had recently published the influential Insects of Australia and New Zealand and had just taken up a position, in March 1928, as head of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (later CSIRO). At some stage during this process Edith discovered that she was not the first to observe the strange behaviour of wasps and orchids.
The physical resemblance of many orchids to insects (and indeed some other animals) had been noticed before, as is obvious from their common names. Charles Darwin noted that some of these similarities must be a fluke – like the frog or lizard orchid – but others, with a striking resemblance to the insects that might pollinate them, were too similar to be coincidental. Darwin was not one for coincidences.
‘Long and often I have watched plants of the bee ophrys, I have never seen one visited by any insect,’ Darwin mused. ‘Robert Brown imagined that the flowers resembled bees in order to deter their visits, but this seems extremely improbable.’
Darwin believed (correctly, as it turns out) that the bee orchid, Ophrys apifera, was predominantly self-fertilised. So what then was the point of investing so much energy in such highly decorative flowers? This was Darwin’s great mystery. And if the orchids were self-pollinated, why did bees still visit the flowers, albeit a little bizarrely? The observation, related in a book by Gerard Smith, was worthy of a footnote.
‘Mr. Price has frequently witnessed attacks made upon the Bee Orchis by a bee,’ recorded Smith in 1829.
‘What this sentence means I cannot conjecture,’ Darwin added in 1877.
The cause of the sudden explosion of flowering plants into a rich diversity of forms and habits in the fossil record 130 million years ago tormented Darwin – it was an ‘abominable mystery’. And orchids, one of the most beautiful, elaborate and largest of the floral families, were the greatest mystery of all. He devoted a book to them. On the Various Contrivances by Which British and Foreign Orchids Are Fertilised by Insects was published just three years after On the Origin of Species. Perhaps Darwin might have had more luck solving some of these mysteries if he’d looked for more orchids when he was in Australia, instead of platypuses.
‘The riddle of those strange attacks has almost certainly been solved,’ replied Edith to the long-departed Darwin in 1928, in a conversation spanning decades and generations, ‘in the first place by Monsieur M. Pouyanne, in Algeria; later, by Colonel M. Godfery, F. L. S at Hyéres, France.’
And ‘even more conclusively’, she added, by her own research.
I am stepping carefully into the faintest imprints of Edith’s footsteps, tracing her path through her papers – what she read, what she knew, whom she spoke to and when. The position of a quotation mark or apostrophe, an attribution, a difference in tense from past to past perfect: these tiny details yield major changes in meaning.
I think it is Godfery’s paper, published in 1925 in the Journal of Botany: British and Foreign, that she has read by 1928. Reference lists will not become a reliable feature of scientific papers for some decades. Like Darwin, Edith names her sources but does not reference them in detail, so I can’t be sure. But she quotes from this paper, uses similar phrases, and the State Library of Victoria has a complete collection of the journal. The 1925 volume is not in my library, though. I have to order it by interlibrary loan. Within a few days, a digital copy arrives from the CSIRO library in Canberra: Tillyard’s library.
Godfery’s paper is inspired by the ‘brilliant observations’ of Maurice-Alexandre Pouyanne, a French colonial judge in Algiers. Pouyanne’s findings of twenty years of research were published, in French, with the Swiss botanist Henry Correvon, in the Journal de la société nationale d’horticulture de France in 1916 and again in 1923. Godfery’s wife, Hilda, a noted orchid artist, had illustrated Correvon’s book on orchids.
The trail is long: from Pouyanne in Algiers to Correvon in Switzerland to the Godferys (who lived in Edith’s old hometown of Guildford when they weren’t in the south of France), then possibly via Tillyard in Canberra and finally to Edith Coleman in Melbourne, Australia.
I can’t find Pouyanne’s original French papers in Australia, so I email a colleague in England. He replies within a few hours, from Atlanta, and says he’ll send me the papers when he gets home in a day or two. The files arrive the next week, along with a translation from the French, which he had commissioned for his own work. What would have taken Edith months, or even years, bounces around the globe in a matter of seconds, minutes and days.
Colonel Masters Johnson Godfery’s observations were, according to his obituary, ‘carried out by watching cut flowers in vases on hotel verandas in the Mediterranean region’. An endearing image, if a little disparaging. Godfery was an authority on European orchids, particularly Ophrys. By Godfery’s own account he was on his knees, eyeglasses on, closely inspecting a bee clambering backwards into some orchids that he had planted in the hotel’s garden. Having failed to catch the insect with his glasses case, he returned the next day with a
