“Empresses and Orchids” with Erica Hannickel

Join us for a special March meeting featuring historian and author Erica Hannickel, whose book The Orchid Muse explores the history of our fascination with orchids.

In her talk, “Empresses and Orchids,” Erica tells a tale of two 19th century empresses who loved orchids. Empress Cixi of China (1835-1908) utilized the beauty and fragrance of cymbidiums and other Chinese orchids in her meteoric rise to power from concubine to China’s head of state. Empress Eugenie of France (1826-1920) used orchids to gain fame as a royal and as the 19th century’s foremost fashion maven - Coelogyne, Dendrobium, and dozens of other genera grown in her greenhouses festooned her hair, clothes, parties, and palaces. The talk highlights powerful women, the fraught political connection between the two, and previously unknown moments in orchid history.

Erica will be available to sign copies of her book before the presentation.

Erica Hannickel Bio

Erica Hannickel is a nonfiction author and professor of history at Northland College in Ashland, Wisconsin, as well as a master gardener. An orchid enthusiast for more than 20 years, she currently grows about 150 orchids at home on two baker’s carts and in a miniature orchid cabinet. Her most recent book Orchid Muse: A History of Obsession in Fifteen Flowers (W.W. Norton & Company, 2022) chronicles little-known stories of orchids involving empresses, artists, enslaved people, and naturalists from around the world. The book was longlisted for the 2023 PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award, shortlisted for the 2023 Wisconsin Library Association Nonfiction Award, and won the 2023 Council on Botanical and Horticultural Libraries Literature Award.