📚 Orchids

The complicated flower: the species and their culture, and the patience of the grower who keeps them.

Below are the 30 works carrying the subject orchids in the Open Library catalogue with the most editions in print. Author and first year are as the record states them; a missing year means the record does not carry one, not that the book is undated. Novels set in the subject are left out, because a list of historical fiction is not a list of history. Where one author dominates the reprint counts, no more than two of their titles appear.

Cover	Title	Author	First published	Editions
	About Orchids	Frederick Boyle	1893	27
	The various contrivances by which orchids are fertilised by insects	Charles Darwin	1862	25
	Offering	Clint McDade & Sons	1947	19
	Fennell's orchid news	Fennell Orchid Company	1947	17
	The orchid-grower's manual	Benjamin Samuel Williams	1852	14
	The Woodlands orchids	Boyle, Frederick	1901	14
	The Orchid Thief	Susan Orlean	1998	11
	Travels and adventures of an orchid hunter	Albert Millican	1891	10
	Orchid Biology	Joseph Arditti	1977	9
	Orchids	Mike Tibbs	1990	9
	Micropropagation of orchids	Joseph Arditti	1993	8
	Orchids for dummies	Steven A. Frowine	2005	8
	Bog-trotting for orchids	Grace Greylock Niles	1904	7
	Orchids	Inc Alberts & Merkel Bros.	1948	7
	Orchideenatlas	Helmut Bechtel	1980	7
	Die orchideenfloren der südamerikanischen kordillerenstaaten	Rudolf Schlechter	1919	6
	ABC of orchid growing	John V. Watkins	1948	6
	Home orchid growing	Rebecca Tyson Northen	1950	6
	Orchids	Margaret Ilgenfritz	1950	6
	The early history of the Don navigation	Thomas Stuart Willan	1965	6
	British Orchids	Angus Duncan Webster	1886	5
	The orchids of Burma (including the Andaman Islands) described	Bartle Grant	1895	5
	Neue und seltene Garten-Orchideen	Rudolf Schlechter	1911	5
	The Orchids	Carl L. Withner	1959	5
	Wild orchids of Britain	V. S. Summerhayes	1968	5
	Orchideen	Walter Richter	1969	5
	Orchids Simplified	Henry Jaworski	1992	5
	The physiology of tropical orchids in relation to the industry	Choy Sin Hew	1997	5
	Orchids	William Watson	1890	4
	Hand-list of orchids	Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew	1904	4

List built from Open Library (CC0 metadata) · retrieved 03 Nov 2026 UTC · capped at 30 works per subject.

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