The Romance of Nature
A poem about orchids, and their evolutionary soulmates.
Angraecum sesquipedale, the Latin name for Darwin’s orchid, symbolises romance in the natural world, beyond us.
We think of love — real lust and adoration — as a purely human institution, but that isn’t true.
Even evolution itself was set in motion by flirting acids, bumping up against each other until they finally replicate.
The next few million years or so are passed by planetary orgies, ’til the day your mother met your father; on it goes.
Darwin’s orchid has a spur — an opening — of quite some length, meaning that its nectar — and its pollen — are well-hidden. It doesn’t share its beauty or its treasures easily and, in fact, it’s completely inaccessible.
That is, to all but the humble Morgan’s Sphinx Moth; a soulmate, with no exaggeration, to the orchid.
Xanthopan morganii praedicta is its official name, but neither species care what us humans choose to call them.
The moth and flower are attuned in symbiosis; beholden to one another. Possessed of eleven inches of…
