The Goblin Orchid

Mormodes maculata

A flower twisted off its own axis — and it fires pollen at whatever touches it.

Book: The Orchidaceae of Mexico and Guatemala
Artist: after Augusta Withers and Sarah Drake, for James Bateman
Date: 1837–1843
Held by: Wikimedia Commons

Mormodes maculata

Format

The full-resolution scan, colour-managed to the source — yours to print, study, and explore, down to the stipple.

Size

$29.00

The story

Mormodes is built asymmetrically — the whole flower twists off its axis, so that no two sit the same way on the spike — and it is spring-loaded. Touch the column and the pollen packet is fired out and glued to whatever did the touching. Darwin was fascinated by these mechanisms and wrote a whole book about orchid pollination; Bateman's plates are among the pictures he was looking at. An orchid is not a decoration. It is a machine for using an insect.

See it on your wall

The garden, brought indoors

The Goblin Orchid printed large and framed, hung in rooms like yours. Every edition ships ready to become the piece the room is built around.

About this reproduction

A faithful reproduction of a public-domain plate held by Wikimedia Commons — the work is centuries out of copyright (1837–1843).
Printed to order on archival cotton-rag stock, pigment inks rated 100+ years (inscribed pieces and atelier bouquets are set by hand and printed to order).
Colour-managed to the source scan: the hand-colour is the colourist’s, not ours. We correct nothing and invent nothing.
Ships in 5–10 business days, rolled in a heavy-wall tube (framed pieces ship flat-packed).
If it arrives less than perfect, we reprint or refund — your choice.

Why our plates cost more than a poster: we print from the highest-resolution scans in existence, at sizes where the engraving itself becomes visible — the stipple that makes a petal look soft, the wash of the hand-colourist, the veins of the leaf — on stock made to outlive its owner. A poster reproduces the picture. This reproduces the plate.

From the same hand