‘The Queen’ of Flowering Plants Is for First Ladies
How a Virginia grower is reviving the rare Jacqueline Kennedy cattleya orchid and building a legacy of presidential spouse namesake orchids.
On an early February morning, Art Chadwick walks along the benches of one of his redwood-constructed orchid greenhouses in rural Powhatan County, Virginia, and holds up an orchid.
It’s large and impressive.
“Here’s the orchid that is predominantly named after first ladies,” he says. “The cattleya.”
Chadwick, founder of Chadwick & Son Orchids, gestures to its signature flamboyant bloom, commonly in purples and whites but available in many shapes and colors nowadays. There are two fringed petals and another decorative lip in front of a backdrop of its sturdy, green leaves. It’s incredibly fragrant and in its natural tropical environment it “wiggles in the wind,” says Chadwick.
The cattleya’s association with America’s first ladies dates back to the courtship of the widowed President Woodrow Wilson and his fiancee Edith Bolling in 1915, when orchids first were fashionably worn as corsages, according to Chadwick. During that time, Woodrow Wilson gave Edith Bolling a fresh cattleya every day. For decades thereafter, the cattleya orchid would be worn by first lady successors, notably Mamie Eisenhower, and women throughout the country until around the 1960s when the adornment fell out of fashion.
“They were worn for 40 years by most of America,” Chadwick says.
In fact, it was First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy who Chadwick notes transitioned the cattleya orchid from being worn to being displayed. The only place cattleya orchids could be seen on Jacqueline Kennedy, writes Chadwick, is in her bridal bouquet for her wedding to John F. Kennedy (the 35th president of the United States 1961-1963) and in the corsages of her bridal party. The former first lady displayed orchids in flower arrangements throughout the White House.
Today, Chadwick has been busy in response to cattleya orchid enthusiasts who, he says, are interested in all first lady cattleyas but especially the Jacqueline Kennedy hybrid. The first lady namesake orchids are not bred for mass production and there aren’t many Jacqueline Kennedy cattleyas in existence.
So Chadwick decided to clone it.
Nurturing the Jacqueline Kennedy cattleya
In another rural agricultural community, this time in south-central Florida, plant scientist Beth Lamb keeps a watchful eye over the small green specks of plants inside a handful of test tubes in her home laboratory. Encased are the plant cells from new growths of the Jacqueline Kennedy cattleya orchid. They are being grown from cells dissected from a tiny growing point of the orchid that came from the namesake plant given to Lamb from Chadwick last October.
Lamb, owner of Lamb & Lamb Inc., has degrees in plant pathology and plant virology from the University of Florida and has worked in agriculture, specifically in ornamental horticulture plant propagation, her entire career. But orchids have been Lamb’s true passion ever since she was a teenager working in an orchid nursery in Orlando. Her work on first lady cattleyas, including the Jacqueline Kennedy hybrid, is going to “give it a new lease on life,” she says.
Eventually, the little specks will become little clumps of plants that will be moved into larger, 16-ounce containers to allow for growth. The stable, sterile conditions inside the laboratory make it conducive for rapid, year-round growth. Lamb will test the young plants in the process to make sure they are healthy before being sent back to Chadwick.
The exalted cattleya stands the test of time
The majestic characteristics of the cattleya orchid, originally named by English orchid collector William Cattleya, would eventually become synonymous with prominent female figures in history. Early on, orchids were named for European royalty—queens, princesses and baronesses. In the United States, the first time an orchid was named for a first lady was in 1929, for former First Lady Lou Hoover, whose husband, Herbert, served as president from 1929-1933. Joseph Manda and Sons of Bridgeport, New Jersey, named the hybrid cattleya “Mrs. Herbert Hoover.” First lady namesake orchids thereafter would use the woman’s name.
“The cattleya is the queen of flowering plants,” Lamb says in reference to the size and beauty of the bloom. “It is said that the orchid corsage wears the woman, but our first ladies—they wore the orchids.”
“The cattleya is the queen of flowering plants,” Lamb says in reference to the size and beauty of the bloom. “It is said that the orchid corsage wears the woman, but our first ladies—they wore the orchids.”
Indeed, it is Chadwick who has the distinction of naming cattleya hybrids after the last six presidential first ladies, from Dr. Jill Biden to former First Lady Barbara Bush, and has personally presented the flowers to most of them. The namesake flowers are officially registered with the United Kingdom-based Royal Horticultural Society, an organization that tracks all the orchid names ever used. “There are hundreds of thousands going back to the mid-1800s,” Chadwick says.
This spring, Chadwick will publish First Ladies and Their Orchids: A Century of Namesake Cattleyas, which he co-authored with his father, Arthur Andrew Chadwick, before he passed away in 2021. It follows the first book they co-authored, The Classic Cattleyas, which is in its second printing. First Ladies and Their Orchids will include stunning color photographs and the rich history of first lady cattleyas and also their parent and grandparent cattleyas.
“Many of these orchids are completely out of circulation and haven’t been seen for decades,” Chadwick says.
Unlike the other first ladies with namesake orchids, Jacqueline Kennedy had two orchid hybrids named for her, Chadwick explains. One from a breeder in Tennessee in 1960 and another in 1961 from a breeder in New Jersey. It worked out that two were named for the former first lady because they were of slightly different genera. But it was the Jacqueline Kennedy hybrid cattleya out of Patterson & Sons in New Jersey that “took over the East Coast,” according to Chadwick. The company, at the time, grew thousands of them for cut flowers.
“This cattleya is very floriferous and strong,” Chadwick says of the Patterson & Sons cattleya.
The work on the Jacqueline Kennedy cattleya back in Lamb’s lab, though, won’t immediately fulfill the demand for the orchid that Chadwick is looking to meet. That is because the orchid will take up to seven years to grow to the size that will produce the desired bloom.
Carrying on a first lady legacy
Despite being an engineer by trade, Chadwick opted to go into the orchid-growing business with his father, who was an accomplished orchid hobbyist, in 1989. Not long thereafter, he suggested to his father, who handled the breeding, that they revive the tradition of naming orchids for presidential first ladies.
“It’s a legacy,” Chadwick recalls telling his father. “You can’t just let it die because the corsages aren’t being worn.”
His father’s response?
“That’s ridiculous,” Chadwick remembers his dad saying. “You don’t want to mix business with politics. That’s a terrible idea.”
Against his father’s wishes, Chadwick grew and named his initial first lady cattleya in 1993 for Hillary Rodham Clinton.
“I thought it just needed to be done,” Chadwick says. “We needed to get back to the first lady hybrids being named.”
After Clinton, he named the Laura Bush cattleya, a flower that has been recognized by the American Orchid Society with two flower quality awards. In realizing that Laura Bush’s mother-in-law, Barbara, did not have a namesake, he named one for her, too. In all, Chadwick & Son have named the last six first lady namesake cattleya orchids.
“I want to be part of that tradition,” Chadwick says. “It becomes a national treasure.”
Chadwick & Sons has donated first lady namesake orchids to the Smithsonian Botanical Garden. When they bloom, Chadwick says, the Smithsonian posts them and puts them on display for the public.
“It’s already in people’s minds as this is part of Americana,” Chadwick says. “And now they are house plants rather than cut flower bouquets.”
Growers from around the world have named different kinds of flowers after first ladies over the years, but it's never been done with consistency, according to Chadwick. Because of the lifecycle of cattleya orchids, that is understandable. They are not easy to mass produce because they take seven years to bloom, he says.
Chadwick explains it like this: “The first step is to grow them from seed, where you've got thousands of different ones—different colors and whatnot. Then you find the very best one, and you clone it. That takes another seven years. So now you've got 14 years invested in this project. You have to be pretty committed to this.”
Back to the Jacqueline Kennedy cattleya. Chadwick & Son had the original plant from 1961 that bloomed every year.
“It’s incredible,” Chadwick says. “But everyone wants one.”
They only had a few, and to have more, says Chadwick, it had to be cloned. Bits of the mother plant were sent to Lamb in 2023. Now the specks of the Jacqueline Kennedy cattleya are starting to form. Chadwick estimates they’ll be ready in 2030, almost 70 years after the flower was named for the former first lady.
Meanwhile, Lamb tends to Chadwick’s “little tiny babies” daily. She likens her work to what is often said in the agricultural industry: “It’s the shadow of the master that fattens the cattle.” In other words, she is always caring for them.
“You have to be observing the plants to know what to do next with them,” she says. “Things happen fast in the laboratory.”
In her own way, Lamb personally relates to her work with the first lady cattleyas and what they symbolize. Most of what Lamb does, like the role of many first ladies, is handled quietly, behind the scenes.
“I treat [this work] with the utmost importance and reverence because of who’s being memorialized, ” Lamb says.
Presenting namesake orchids to first ladies
Over the years, Chadwick has had the opportunity to present his namesake orchids to the first ladies. He describes Hillary Clinton as “delightful” and Laura Bush as a “real horticulturist.” In fact, Chadwick traveled in 2018 to the Dallas Garden Club to give an orchid presentation where Laura Bush was seated in the front row. Laura Bush’s orchid has a patriotic look featuring a white flower with a purple starburst pattern.
“She had a lot of comments and insight,” Chadwick recalls, adding that he joined her for lunch afterward. “She’s really into it from a technical standpoint.”
Most recently, he presented Dr. Jill Biden with her namesake orchid in the White House. He says he talked with her about first lady portraits, many of which include flowers.
During election years, though, Chadwick has learned how to prepare for future first ladies and eventually, a first gentleman. On election night, Chadwick names the spouses of both candidates, so that no matter who wins, they have the namesake cattleya locked in. He approaches it this way because he “can’t take the stress.”
Inevitably, they end up naming runner-up cattleyas, like former Second Lady Tipper Gore (1993-2001) and Ann Romney, wife of Senator Mitt Romney from Utah who was the Republican Party nominee for president in the 2012 election.
“They are some of the most beautiful [orchids] of all,” he says.
Nineteen first ladies now have namesake cattleyas, with more to come.