In 1928, Edith was unknown to the world of orchidology. She had not been ‘trained’ by anyone, she had no mentor or supervisor to vouch for her. She had no institutional affiliation. She had simply appeared, out of nowhere. The experts didn’t know what to make of her, didn’t know if her work was reliable. It needed verification and scrutiny. They checked with people they knew locally – with Rogers and Lea. The work seemed good. So they backed it – but carefully. Such is the cautious, critical progress of science. It is not just what you know that matters in science, but also who you know.
Edith worked swiftly to fill both of those gaps.
‘If you have known these spider orchids in your childhood,’ Edith said, ‘without doubt they have written their names indelibly on a corner of your memory, and the mere thought of them will carry you back to that sunny hillside where you first saw them and loved them.’
When I was small, about four or five years old, we lived on the forsaken outskirts of a small country town, overlooking the undeveloped scrub of ‘Stinky Creek’. Not many people lived here – a handful of young families building dirt-cheap homes scattered among older Aboriginal residents in silvered corro shacks down dusty tracks. I would often slip under the gap-toothed fence to play next door at Auntie Kath’s with her dogs, the wearily patient ‘Mum’ and the last of her many litters, the boisterous ‘Pup’.
It was Auntie Kath who took me looking for flowers one spring, across the sandy road into the scrub. I trailed happily behind, puzzled that we would look for flowers in the middle of the bush. ‘Flowers’ and ‘bush’ did not fit together in my rigidly literal preschool mind. The only flowers I had seen at Auntie Kath’s clustered in neat plastic bunches on checked tablecloths.
‘Here it is,’ she said, stopping in a clearing.
I remember dark and purple, spiky and magnificent. I remember thinking it looked like the evil queen in Sleeping Beauty and I was transfixed. My concepts of ‘beauty’ and ‘nature’ were instantly transformed.
It was the entomologist Tarlton Rayment who first used the term ‘pseudocopulation’ to describe the behaviour that Edith had observed. Pseudocopulation in biology generally refers to any behaviour that looks like copulation (or internal fertilisation) but where the fertilisation occurs externally. Male frogs use amplexus to fertilise eggs as they are released by the females. Many insects, particularly spiders, use spermatophores, bundles of sperm which are transferred directly into the reproductive tract of the females, or are sometimes given as a nuptial gift of food. Pseudocopulation may also refer to homosexual mounting behaviour in some species. But the use of the term in relation to orchids and wasps is slightly different. Here the behaviour is intra-specific. An unrelated third party is the one copulating, and yet it is the orchid that is fertilised.
‘I am invited to see for myself the phenomenon of insects effecting a pseudo-copulation with the flowers,’ Rayment wrote in A Cluster of Bees. ‘But there is no doubt about their actions.’
The acknowledgement sections of Edith’s papers read like a rollcall of biological expertise: Tillyard, Lea, Rayment, Rogers, Kershaw and Nicholls. If Edith’s published papers are the proof of her work, it is her lost letters that are the hidden buttressing beneath. She is reaching out to experts in her field, sending them her papers, asking them for advice and assistance, making the connections that are essential in science. She is not just soliciting information, she is also letting them know who she is, establishing a presence, sending them her credentials.
I have always been impressed by the quality of her research and the breadth of her knowledge, but I’m only just beginning to appreciate the significance of her ability to network.
William Morton Wheeler was curator of invertebrate zoology at the American Museum of Natural History, famous for his work on ants. He was an obvious choice to review Rayment’s book on Australian native bees for the Quarterly Review of Biology. Wheeler was enchanted by Rayment’s descriptions of Australian plants ‘so unforgettably and weirdly beautiful’. It was Rayment’s account of Edith’s work that particularly caught Morton Wheeler’s attention.
He was sitting on the museum steps when he saw the orchidologist Oakes Ames approaching and couldn’t resist a passing gibe.
‘He jokingly referred to the questionable morals of my orchids and asked me if I was aware of the extent of their sexual depravity,’ Ames recalled. ‘I tossed his good natured slurs aside, and assured him that I knew all about the behaviour he criticised and that I would go down stairs to my orchid herbarium and write a paper he would enjoy.’
Ames rushed downstairs to his files, where he retrieved and re-read his ‘treasured sendings’ from Edith and Godfery.
‘I was surprised. I suppose, being overwhelmed with work on the identification of orchids, I had taken as a part of the day’s work references to intimate studies by others on the phenomenon of pollination. But I was surprised, nevertheless. And none of my colleagues in our Division of Biology had a glimmering of what one might imply by the term: pseudocopulation.’
Oakes Ames picked up Rayment’s terminology and used it in his seminal review on ‘Pollination of Orchids through pseudocopulation’, which he immediately sent to Edith. Her grandson John still has this reprint, with some of the affectionate letters from both Oakes Ames and his artist wife Blanche – some glued to pages, others still in tiny stamped envelopes – the text itself carefully annotated with little crosses in the margins of key passages.
‘I wrote this paper to emphasize what should have been known,’ Ames said, later adding, ‘I tossed that paper off at fever heat, only to find that it struck twelve in unexpected places.’
The paper excited much attention in the orchid community, being widely reviewed, cited and reprinted in many places and bringing Edith’s, Godfery’s
