One of Three Winners of the 2022 Singapore Unbound Awards for the Best Undergraduate Critical Essays on Singapore and Other Literatures

Victorian Botanical Fiction Uprooted: Orchids as Weapons of Anti-colonial Resistance in Ng Yi-Sheng’s “Agnes Joaquim, Bioterrorist”

By Katherine Enright

Abstract

In this essay, I analyze Ng Yi-Sheng’s 2012 short story “Agnes Joaquim, Bioterrorist” as a subversion of the conventions of Victorian plant fiction and of the orchid as a Singaporean national symbol. A subgenre of botanical horror, a profusion of stories about killer orchids in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries encapsulated the West’s intense desire for rare and beautiful orchids alongside xenophobic fear of their associated dangers. Invariably, an intrepid colonial explorer or botanist is enthralled by a sexualized incarnation of a foreign flower and lured almost to his death, only to recover at the last moment and triumph over the threat. Ng turns this trope on its head, imagining instead a radical speculative biography of Agnes Joaquim, the discoverer of Singapore’s national flower—an orchid hybrid Vanda Miss Joaquim. In his retelling, both Agnes and the orchid are granted agency as they embark on an anti-colonial campaign of global scope, toppling empires in their path. This feminist and delightfully queer story, I argue, reveals new anti-colonial possibilities within the historical genre of speculative botany—and challenges us to imagine the orchid’s meaning beyond its use as a patriotic emblem in modern-day Singapore.

Joliz Dela Pena - Nilalang (2021), Performance-Sculpture
(Photography: Em-P L’Abee)
Image description: A closeup shot of the artist kneeling in a short-sleeved, navy-blue dress and mixing mud inside a long, rectangular, plastic container with white symbols. She is pouring in a bowl of water with one hand while using her other hand to simultaneously mix the water into the dirt.

In April 1899, a woman named Ashkhen Hovakimian (best known by her anglicized name, Agnes Joaquim) won first prize for the rarest orchid at Singapore’s annual flower show. Several years prior, she had successfully crossed two orchid species to produce a new hybrid, a beautiful pink-purple and white flower. Henry Ridley, the director of the Singapore Botanic Gardens, made the first scientific description of the flower’s “waved edges” and “rosy-violet petals” and named the orchid after Agnes, whom he lauded as “well-known for her success as a horticulturalist” (Ridley). The flower became known the Vanda (now scientifically reclassified as Papilionanthe) Miss Joaquim. Even before its first showing in Singapore, the orchid had a global reach, and not only in the written accounts Ridley published in British journals—a live plant, cultivated from cuttings sent by Ridley, was shown to great acclaim at the Royal Horticultural Show in London in 1897 (Wright et al.). Almost a century a later in 1981, this orchid was to be named Singapore’s national flower; today, its likeness is emblazoned across currency notes, postage stamps, and patriotic banners around the island. A handy symbol of Singapore as a “garden city,” the Vanda Miss Joaquim continues to represent the country on the world stage—it has even inspired a half-dozen national costume ensembles at the Miss Universe pageant in the last two decades. Agnes Joaquim, for her part, has become a kind of incidental national hero [1]. She was, for example, recently included in a children's book series featuring prominent Singaporeans ranging from founding politicians Lee Kuan Yew and Dr. Goh Keng Swee, to Olympic swimmer Joseph Schooling (Wolf et al.).

Departing entirely from this national mythos, author Ng Yi-Sheng revisited Agnes’ life in a radically unexpected way. His short story, published in the 2012 Singaporean speculative fiction anthology Fish Eats Lion, has a three-word title that packs a punch: “Agnes Joaquim, Bioterrorist.” Set in a steampunk Victorian world at the turn of the twentieth century, Ng imagines Agnes working with her eponymous orchid to topple empires across the globe. Agnes is infected—or perhaps inspired—by her creation as the orchid plants a hypnotic message in her mind: “Only you can change the world” (Ng 14). And so she does. As the story progresses, despotic heads of state are found dead one by one, strangled by green vines and purple flowers and divested of their colonial possessions. Like the historical Vanda Miss Joaquim, Ng’s orchid circulates the globe—not as a scientific specimen but as a drug, Joaquimine, a kind of anti-opium that galvanizes the people of the world with an anti-colonial fervor. The story ends with Agnes dying of a tumor, perhaps as a result of the orchid’s parasitism upon her body. In her last breath, she and her orchid turn Queen Victoria to the decolonial cause, and the Queen dismantles the British Empire before herself bursting into a bloom of a million orchids in emancipatory triumph.

Ng’s story is an anti-colonial botanical fantasy, almost humorously audacious in the extent of its historical reimagining of prematurely ruined empires—but the biography of Agnes Joaquim is not the only historical touchpoint for the story, and Ng’s speculative moves are not entirely modern nor unprecedented. On the contrary, Ng’s story, from his diction to the thematic elements and speculative use of violent orchids, draws directly upon the genre of Victorian plant fiction. Ng consciously reproduces many of the genre’s conventions, down to its racist and exoticizing language—he describes Singapore as an “Oriental” colony and includes as his background characters “Asiatics,” “memsahibs,” “a Chinese man with . . . pigtails,” for instance (11). Ng uses this language both to establish his setting and almost as literary camouflage, to place the story stylistically among its Victorian predecessors and strengthen the association between his twenty-first-century speculative fiction and its nineteenth-century models. As I will argue in this essay, Ng also reproduces many of the genre’s characteristic themes, in particular the malevolent and seductive potential of plants that are granted agency. But rather than writing yet another horror story that reinforces a colonial hierarchy of exoticization and xenophobia, Ng imagines orchids to be far more than the costly but deadly commodities that lined the coffers of empire. Instead they become emancipatory—and in exploring the agency and sexuality of both Agnes and her orchid, Ng retools the genre to imagine the anti-colonial possibilities both of multispecies plant-human relations and the Vanda Miss Joaquim as a Singaporean symbol.

In the era of Victorian natural history, the discovery of exotic and carnivorous plants challenged established British views of the nature of life and sparked both intense fanaticism and fear in the colonial imagination. Orchids, in particular, were highly sought after in a nineteenth-century craze termed Orchid Mania or Orchidelirium. Though there are wild orchids native to the British Isles, Victorian collectors desired the multicolored, exquisitely beautiful flowers found in the tropics from Southeast Asia to South America, made all the more precious for their rarity. As a luxury commodity, these orchids could fetch a premium—at the high end, Frederick Sander, the Royal Orchid Grower to Queen Victoria, auctioned off a single specimen of Cattleya warscewiczii for two thousand pounds, which is equivalent to approximately $350,000 in today’s currency (Zemlan). And as with any obsession, there was a darker undercurrent to Orchidelirium as well. Orchids were rare in part because of the dangers associated with their collection in the wild. On one infamous orchid hunting expedition in 1901, eight men left for the Philippines. Of these men, one was eaten by a tiger, another was doused in oil and set aflame, five vanished, and only one man emerged unscathed with a precious haul of orchids. Though bizarre and awful, this story was not unusual: there are records of “dozens of hunters” dying by disease, animal attack, murder, or other misfortune, that carried back as stories to Britain in sensational fashion and formed part of the lore around orchids (Orlean 56).

Orchids also gained a reputation as dangerously seductive—or seductively dangerous— through their unusual and deceptive reproductive strategies. Some nectar-less orchids, like those in the genus Ophrys, visually mimic various insect species including bees. Instead of attracting pollinating insects with sweet nectar, they instead falsely seduce insects by presenting themselves as mates. In attempting to mate with the flower, the insect picks up pollen that it then carries to the next plant, a pollination strategy termed pseudocopulation (Endersby 208). This reproductive trickery, and the suggestion it poses of plants having agency and hence the potential to harm and entrap animals, compounded with the histories of death and loss to lump orchids together in the public imagination with animal-killing carnivorous plants. This held true despite the fact that orchids themselves are not insectivorous. And in response, “the idea of plants possessing agency—even intelligence—was met, quite literally, with horror” (Sandilands 421). The intermingled fear and desire of these exotic, potentially deadly, and malevolent plants were expressed in a burgeoning genre of botanical horror stories.

This strange and deadly fascination with orchids gave rise to a profusion of stories that imagined orchids as vampiric killers and racialized exotic seductresses, reinforcing fears of the corrupting effects of foreign life forms on the British metropole. The most famous of these tales is H. G. Wells’ 1894 short story The Flowering of the Strange Orchid, in which orchid enthusiast Mr. Wedderburn makes a speculative purchase of a mystery orchid that comes with a cautionary tale: in a far distant South Asian swamp, a man had died to secure the plant. Wedderburn becomes fascinated by this unusual orchid and contemplates taking up Darwin’s research on unexplored mechanisms of orchid reproduction. On the day the flower finally bursts into bloom, his housekeeper finds Wedderburn on the brink of death on the greenhouse floor: the orchid, having overpowered the man with its “intensely sweet scent,” had sunk its “tentacle-like” aerial roots into his skin and was sapping the blood from his veins (Wells). The story’s horror lies not only in the plant’s intentional violence but also in the fact that Wedderburn was nearly killed on home soil, the dangers of the tropics having invaded England. Wells’ story prompted “a minor genre of “killer-orchid” stories . . . with new examples being added well into the twentieth century”—and now, with Ng’s story, the twenty-first (Endersby 206).

Many of these killer-orchid stories dramatized the quest to foreign shores to find orchids, and feature collectors seduced by orchids—a sexual entrapment associated with foreign women who would lure white men to their death. In Fred M. White’s 1896 short story The Purple Terror, for example, an American naval officer is enthralled by a beautiful Cuban woman adorned with orchids, sending him on a near-deadly quest into the jungle in search of the blossoms. And Endersby also gives the example of John Blunt’s “The Orchid Horror” (1911), which features a protagonist who again has a brush with death in the jungle searching for a flower at the behest of the seductive “Goddess of the Orchids” (qtd. in Endersby 217-18). These stories feature deadly plants that are at once characters and part of the setting, creatures without sentience that can somehow rid men of their free will. These are characteristic elements of the genre, in which, writes Elizabeth Chang, “plants . . . gained agency . . . through fantasies of the suffering they could inflict and the revisions of narrative agency they could propose,” as malevolent plant characters “radically [altered] notions about sentience, mobility, reproduction, and representation” (Chang 159, 161). In fact, these altered notions of plants explored in speculative fiction spilled over into real-life botany as well. Jim Endersby argues that it was in response to stories like Wells’ that the question of orchid pollination, first raised by Darwin, was finally resolved as the influence of popular culture allowed “scientists . . . to see plants as equipped with agency, actively able to pursue their own, cunning reproductive strategies” (Endersby 205). The uneasy possibility of plant malevolence, or violence, lingers in the domain of speculative fiction.

Joliz Dela Pena - Nilalang (2021), Performance-Sculpture
(Photography: Em-P L’Abee)
Image description: The artist uses the mud to build an abstract sculpture. She packs on the layers of mud over a thick metal wire foundation. Two women watch this performance in the foreground.

In “Agnes Joaquim, Bioterrorist,” Ng plays with this central question of plant agency, making it deliberately ambiguous who is in charge: Agnes or the orchid. In the story, Agnes’ anti-imperial quest begins in response to the Hamidian massacres of her Armenian countrymen under the Ottoman Empire, to which the British had turned a blind eye and refused intervention or economic sanction. The next year, the sultan was found dead “with a sprig of purple blossoms sprouting from his mouth,” and “Agnes’ reign of terror had begun” (Ng 16). Clearly, Agnes was radicalized by a deeply a personal, national motivation—and yet Agnes is not straightforwardly using the orchid as a weapon. It seems almost to have its own agenda, complementary to Agnes’, and a level of hypnotic control over her. Take, as illustration, the following passage:

This was what the flower wanted of her; she knew it. For she had heard its commands over the last month . . . She stroked the petals of the specimen that sat on her lap, remembering that in her veins ran its fiery sap, transferred via the touch of its spongy roots, its slender stalk, and its gossamer labellum. And in her ears rang the flower's words, over and over like a malfunctioning gramophone: "Only you can change the world” (14).

In this passage, Ng assigns the flower intentionality, the ability to imagine goals and to achieve them—to want something of Agnes and have the control to “command” her to do its bidding (14). He ascribes the flower both sentience and the power of speech, as the flower’s words ring in Agnes’ ears as a hypnotic message. As in the Victorian killer-orchid stories, the flower seems to have compromised Agnes’ independent will, and to have viscerally entered her body, yet the tone here is far less malevolent. “What the flower wanted” of Agnes in this passage was for her to acquire laboratory space and access at the Singapore Botanic Gardens, establishing her role as a scientist in an era where there was a gendered distinction between the feminine pastime of enjoying flowers and the man’s science of botany (14). The orchid allowed Agnes to have her name immortalized at a time where there was a “general suspicion of female participation in the regulated taxonomy of specimen names” (Chang 162). Furthermore, Agnes does not exhibit discomfort or duress, instead “stroking” its petals in her lap almost as though the orchid were a beloved pet or even a lover (Ng 14). The content of the orchid’s commanding message is affirming, inspiring even. And though the orchid’s “fiery sap” runs in her veins, Ng describes the initiating process as a “transfer,” rather than an infection or invasion like the vampiric roots that ensnared Wells’ protagonist (14). The orchid has become part of Agnes, or vice versa, and they seem willing bedfellows.

Drawing on themes of seduction and queer reproduction in this genre of “sexualized botanical horror stories,” Ng complicates the seemingly mutualistic relationship between Agnes and the orchid in the story’s conclusion (Sandilands 421). In Victorian plant fiction, “both women and plants were reimagined as more active, sexual, and intelligent beings than earlier generations [of men] had perceived,” and Ng draws out the complexities of the relationships that arise between them (Endersby 219). The association of women with flowers in killer-orchid fiction was so strong that the boundaries between the two blurred, as Endersby highlights in the example of Edna Underwood’s 1920 story, An Orchid of Asia, in which the main character creates an “orchid-woman”—a hybrid orchid with a woman’s essence (Endersby 218). There is something queer about this hybridity, because the orchid-woman is not born but cultivated under a sweet-smelling narcotic thrall, given life by some other means than heterosexual reproduction. Ng establishes early on that Agnes has the plant’s sap in her veins, but at the end of the story we find, in a shocking twist, that it also entered another part of her body—Agnes had “an enormous tumor . . . in her uterus, which had been killing her slowly since her discovery of the flower ten years before” (Ng 19). Had the flower, then, been a parasite all along? Was Agnes merely a casualty in the flower’s anticolonial mission, killing not only the imperial antagonists but also the story’s hero? Perhaps Agnes had already achieved her life’s mission—Ng granted the fictional Agnes another decade on the historical Agnes, who passed in the same year she discovered the Vanda Miss Joaquim. Yet her death casts a pall on the revolutionary, heroic team-up of Agnes and orchid—in the end, unlike in many of the Victorian orchid stories, it is the flower that wins.

It matters that the tumor was found in Agnes’ uterus, implanted almost like a slowly developing lethal fetus, because Ng harks back to the seductive mystery of orchid pollination in Victorian botany. In an inversion of the man-seducing trope, the only character that we might imagine the orchid seducing is Agnes herself—the description of her stroking the orchid, admiring its “slender stalk,” and “gossamer labellum” (the protruding bottom petal or “lip” of an orchid) is almost erotic (Ng 14). The other possible candidate for seduction, whether by Agnes, the orchid, or both, is—improbably—Queen Victoria. When Agnes is found dead, she is next to Queen Victoria, side by side on a four-poster bed strewn with flower petals (20). They are discovered in the burned-out ruins of the orchid-engulfed Raffles Hotel; there is the suggestion, however faint, of both an assassination attempt and of romance. Unlike every other head of state in the story, Queen Victoria survives her encounter with Agnes, but we learn that she did not leave untouched. Soon after, during a public visit in London, “her body burst into blossom . . . the seeds blew from her body, taking root instantly in the cobblestoned streets of snow. And across the city, a million orchids bloomed” (22). It is a strangely beautiful image, a miraculous profusion of orchids springing up against white snow in an industrial city—but it also grotesquely recalls the reproductive strategy of a bacteriophage, a virus that takes over host bacterial cells and makes numerous copies of itself inside before bursting the vessel wide open and releasing the next generation. Ultimately, it is the triumphant culmination of the anti-imperial agenda—Queen Victoria was sacrificed to the flowers she loved so much in a moment of transcendent beauty, and what was born was a new era.

The anti-colonial potential of plant-human interactions—exemplified in Queen Victoria’s floral demise—is sustained in the story through Ng’s creation of a fictional drug, Joaquimine, made from the orchid. There is a precedent in Victorian plant fiction of orchids described as narcotics—in Blunt’s The Orchid Horror, for instance, the orchid’s scent is a “poisonous sickish-sweet drug” that overwhelms the protagonist (Blunt 287). Those orchids acted to rob people of agency, but in Ng’s story, instead, smoking Joaquimine gives people revolutionary agency. The drug made from the orchid also has a kind of hypnotic effect—but rather than ensnaring those who inhale its scent, it implants a revolutionary message, the same one that Agnes hears: “Only you can change the world” (Ng 19). Ng casts the drug deliberately as an antithesis to opium, which kept the people reliant and colonial coffers well-lined, and had famously extended the British imperial reach into China and East Asia in the two Opium Wars of the nineteenth century. By contrast, in a tongue-in-cheek way, Ng describes Joaquimine as “especially dangerous for the British Empire” (17). The drug is a stimulant that spurs a “burgeoning tide of intellect” among oppressed peoples around the world, acting as a catalyst for political organization. The international networks and intellectual movements inspired by Joaquimine almost seem to foreshadow the Wilsonian moment of anti-colonial nationalism and independence movements around the world in the wake of World War I. Ng’s characterization of Joaquimine turns the Victorian orchid-narcotic trope on its head, turning the orchid from a debilitatingly seductive drug into an emancipatory agent that heightens each smoker’s inherent intellectual and political potential.

Ng’s speculation about plants as an anti-colonial threat has precedent in Victorian fiction too—but the earlier manifestations of deadly plants posing danger to imperial interests were attached to xenophobic fears that were always quelled. Historian of science Elaine Ayers argues that certain tropical plants—most especially the Rafflesia, native to Southeast Asian rainforests and the world’s largest flower—actually did embody a form of resistance to colonialism (421). The Rafflesia has to this day never been successfully planted outside its natural habitat, and many men lost their fortunes, natural history collections, and even their lives in the pursuit of integrating the species into the knowledge system of colonial botany. In her reading, we might consider orchids as anti-colonial actors as well given their association with deadly collecting missions. In Victorian fiction, however, the destabilizing threat of the killer-orchids is always ultimately neutralized—it is telling that in every story I have mentioned, the (white, male) protagonists actually make it out alive. In White’s story The Purple Terror, for instance, a Cuban man named Tito leads the main character—an American officer gathering intel for the colonization of the island—to the deadly orchid grove, with the intent of entrapping and “[getting] rid of the Americans”; he is thwarted, however, and the story ends with the protagonist threatening Tito’s execution (White). This conclusion is typical of the genre in which, Catriona Sandilands writes, stories “flirt with the lively breach of 'normal' order but, eventually . . . reinforces it and puts plants . . . back in their proper places” (421). The killer-orchids pose a threat to white men and bring them to the brink of death, but in the end the antagonistic flowers are thwarted and colonial agendas reasserted.

But not here. In Ng’s story, the orchids’ anti-colonial threat is actualized in a triumphant show of radical botany that shows how speculating with plants opens paths to political action. In “Agnes Joaquim, Bioterrorist,” the late Qing Dynasty Empress Dowager Cixi is dissolved in a pitcher plant; President William McKinley and the queen regent of Spain, Maria Christina, are found dead together before the end of the Spanish–American War, having relinquished all imperial possessions; and the flesh of Tsar Nicholas II is turned to wood (Ng 17). This list of plant horrors is very Victorian, but the horrors do not end up reinforcing colonial hierarchies and xenophobia—instead, they topple empires. The orchid may be violent and deadly but it is not quite an antagonist, and the deep fear of the Victorians—the power of the exoticized “other” of the colonies to fight back—is realized in a way that Victorian literature never allowed. Ng drives this point home by killing off Queen Victoria herself with orchids at the end of the story, in a (literally) all-consuming end to the British aristocratic orchid obsession.

Joliz Dela Pena - Nilalang (2021), Performance-Sculpture
(Photography: Em-P L’Abee)
Image description: A portrait photo of the finished sculpture standing inside a metal, square base. The sculpture has an organic shape with many wavy arms, resembling a tree. The top half of the sculpture exposes the metal-wire foundation.

Ng’s speculative imaginings demonstrate what Natania Meeker and Antónia Szabari term “radical botany,” in which “plants are not just objects of manipulation but participants in the effort to imagine new worlds and to envision new futures” (Meeker and Szabari 2). In Ng’s story, the orchid “becomes capable of unleashing speculative energies for envisioning and indeed participating in the world,” radically altering global power hierarchies and creating emancipatory possibilities (2). Meeker and Szabari warn that plants are not an “unproblematic outlet for utopian fantasy,” a category Ng’s story might fall into if not, perhaps, for the death of the story’s (human) protagonist (2). Yet Ng’s story fits neatly into the radical botany “dream of a fusional relation to the plant as a counter to the violence done by modern economic systems, politics, and culture”—and colonialism (Meeker and Szabari 4, emphasis added). Natasha Myers suggests that we can stake a claim on what the nature of this fusional plant-human relation should be, and proposes “plant-human mutuality,” “conspiracies,” and “alliances” (qtd. in Meeker and Szabari 21). Beyond the bodily fusing of Agnes and the orchid, Ng’s description of the drug Joaquimine and its galvanizing effects—spurring its users to read Marx and organize revolutions—offers another avenue for this cross-species collaboration. Indeed, Ng’s story exemplifies a kind of “strategic speculation” that makes plants our allies, as Agnes Joaquim and the Vanda Miss Joaquim “[created] a new political world with plants” (Meeker and Szabari 21). As the example of Victorian plant fiction propelling botanical research into orchid pollination shows, speculating with plants is a cross-disciplinary project of huge scope, of which speculative fiction and its authors are crucial contributors.

Ng’s retelling of Agnes’ story, and of her moment in Singaporean history, allows us to imagine the Vanda Miss Joaquim as part of a radical history that stands in contrast to official narratives inflected with colonial nostalgia. As Timothy Barnard writes, today “colonialism continues to oversee the historical narrative” of The Singapore Story as “the frame from which the past of the island [is] bounded and understood” (598, 596). Ng’s speculative fiction offers a way to dismantle this frame and challenges us to take anti-colonialism in its place. His characterization of Agnes Joaquim as a botanical terrorist is even more provocative considering the current politics of orchid hybridization in Singapore, a cutting-edge field of research sponsored by the Singapore Botanic Gardens. New hybrid flowers are meticulously cultivated as tools of “orchid diplomacy” and named after important guests to Singapore as a gesture of goodwill (Tan). In the VIP section of the National Orchid Garden today, one can admire the floral namesakes of more than a hundred dignitaries, a category that naturally includes visiting monarchs and imperialist leaders. I can only begin to imagine what botanical demise Agnes Joaquim, the bioterrorist would conjure up for Queen Elizabeth II, Margaret Thatcher, or the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge—though I suppose, in her revolutionary reality, none of them would come to exist at all. By mimicking and subverting the genre of Victorian plant fiction and retelling the story of Agnes Joaquim, Ng imagines what the national flower of Singapore might stand for beyond its colonial legacy, and makes the provocative speculation that plants and humans, working together, can resist empire.

Endnotes

[1] Especially after her descendants and historians campaigned to have her role as the creator of the orchid officially recognized by the National Heritage Board in 2016, laying to rest decades of historical and undoubtedly sexist speculation that she had merely chanced upon the hybrid (Wright et al.).

Works Cited

Ayers, Elaine. Strange Beauty: Botanical Collecting, Preservation, and Display in the Nineteenth Century Tropics. 2019. Princeton U, PhD Dissertation. ProQuest, https://www.proquest.com/docview/2212925935.

Barnard, Timothy P. “Commemorating Raffles: The Creation of an Imperial Icon in Singapore.” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, vol. 50, no. 4, 2019, pp. 579-598.

Blunt, John. The Orchid Horror. Argosy, Sept. 1911, pp. 282-289.

Chang, Elizabeth Hope. “The Sentient Specimen Returns.” Novel Cultivations: Plants in British Literature of the Global Nineteenth Century, U of Virginia P, 2019.

Endersby, Jim. “Deceived by orchids: Sex, science, fiction, and Darwin.” British Journal for the History of Science, vol. 49, no. 2, 2016, pp. 205-229.

Meeker, Natania and Antónia Szabari. Radical Botany: Plants and Speculative Fiction, Fordham UP, 2019. Project MUSE. Muse.jhu.edu/book/71885.

Ng Yi-Sheng. “Agnes Joaquim, Bioterrorist.” Fish Eats Lion: New Singaporean Speculative Fiction, edited by Jason Erik Lundberg, Math Paper Press, 2012.

Orlean, Susan. The Orchid Thief: A True Story of Beauty and Obsession, Ballantine Books, 2000.

Ridley, Henry Nicholas. “Vanda Miss Joaquim.” The Gardener’s Chronicle, 24 Jun. 1893, p. 740.

Sandilands, Catriona. “Fear of a Queer Plant?” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, vol. 23, no. 3, 2017, pp. 419-429. Project MUSE, muse.jhu.edu/article/659881.

Tan, Rebecca. “Flower Power: Singapore’s Orchid Diplomacy.” BiblioAsia, vol. 18, no. 1, 2022, https://biblioasia.nlb.gov.sg/vol-18/issue-1/apr-to-jun-2022/singapore- orchid-diplomacy#fn:5.

Wells, H. G. The Flowering of the Strange Orchid, 1894. The Literature Network, www.online-literature.com/wellshg/2865.

White, Fred M. The Purple Terror. The Strand Magazine, 1898. Project Gutenberg Australia, http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks11/1100781h.html.

Wolf, James, et al. Agnes and her Amazing Orchid: How Vanda Miss Joaquim became Singapore’s National Flower, Epigram Books, 2018.

Wright, Nadia, et al. “Blooming Lies: The Vanda Miss Joaquim Story.” BiblioAsia, vol. 14, no. 1, 2018, https://biblioasia.nlb.gov.sg/vol-14/issue-1/apr-jun- 2018/blooming-lies-vandaj/.

Zemlan, Victoria. “By Hook or By Crook: The Plunder of Orchids from the New World.” Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden, 14 Apr. 2012, https://www.lewisginter.org/by- hook-or-by-crook-the-plunder-of-orchids-from-the-new-world/.

Katherine Enright is a final-year student at Harvard College, where she studies History and Anthropology with a particular interest in plant humanities and the histories of science and empire. In her free time, Katherine enjoys dancing Bharatanatyam and exploring mangroves.

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Joliz Dela Peña, also known as JDP 2009, is a self-taught interdisciplinary artist from the Philippines, currently based in Tiohtià: ke. Intimate connection to memories, identity, and immigration are recurring themes in Dela Pena’s practice. Through performance accompanied by installations, she pursues to relive realities, explore its complexities, and translate invisible tension/s into various visual and tactile qualities.

In recent works, she attempts to translate fragmented memories from her personal life as first-generation immigrant, as well as borrowed from others, to create a larger and more universal perspective for the audience to relate or connect to.