The Orchid Thief

by Susan Orlean

  In 1874 Miss Jane Kenniburgh of Carickfergus, Ireland, moved to Tallahassee, Florida. She brought with her a load of her favorite belongings, including her Phaius grandfolius, a variety of tropical orchid that is sometimes called “nun’s lily.” Before she died Miss Kenniburgh gave the plants to her friend Mrs. S. J. Douglas, the daughter of Florida’s governor, and later Mrs. Douglas gave them to her daughter Mrs. George Lewis. Mrs. Lewis’s orchids had a leisurely life. They lived in the Lewises’ greenhouse in the winter and sunbathed under oak trees in the backyard during the summer. The Florida climate agreed with them and they thrived and multiplied. There is no record of what finally became of them, but Miss Kenniburgh’s Phaius are recognized as the first greenhouse-cultivated orchids in Florida. More orchids followed. Orchid collectors sprang up in Miami, in Fort Lauderdale, in Naranja, in Homestead; the great estates of Palm Beach and Miami built orchid houses and hired resident orchid keepers; in 1886 Dr. Charles Torrey Simpson, the naturalist who later wrote the best-known guidebooks to Florida’s animals and plants, bought a piece of jungle on Biscayne Bay and planted orchids on every other tree; commercial orchid nurseries like John Soar’s of Little River popped up around the state. Businesses that rented blooming potted orchids for special occasions and took care of the plants when their owners were away were set up in society towns like Palm Beach.

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  Orchid hunting became known as terrible and romantic. A young preppie named Norman MacDonald wrote a book in 1939 called The Orchid Hunters, the story of how he and a college friend considered and rejected the idea of collecting monkeys, divi-divi, carnauba wax, and alligator hides, but then decided to go orchid hunting in South America. The book begins with the inscription: “Warning to the literal minded. Do not try to follow the trail of the orchid hunters on the [book’s] map. In keeping with the close-lipped tradition of the profession, the real names of the towns and rivers have been deliberately changed. Not that you’d want to go there, but then …” and continues with this prologue: “The old orchid hunter lay back on his pillow, his body limp.… ‘You’ll curse the insects,’ he said at last, ‘and you’ll curse the natives.… The sun will burn you by day and the cold will shrivel you by night. You’ll be racked by fever and tormented by a hundred discomforts, but you’ll go on. For when a man falls in love with orchids, he’ll do anything to possess the one he wants. It’s like chasing a green-eyed woman or taking cocaine.… it’s a sort of madness.…’ ”

  Men from Florida dominated American orchid hunting. They combed through Central America and South America and came back with shiploads. They dug around in the woods and swamps just a couple of miles from home. The Fakahatchee Strand was a plentiful place—long ago it was like an orchid supermarket. Hunters in the Fakahatchee hauled out thousands of orchids, piled them into horse-drawn flatbed carts, boxed them, shipped them, went back into the Fakahatchee again. In one shipment in 1890 two thousand butterfly orchids went by train from the Fakahatchee to New York City, followed by trainloads of dollar orchids, cow horn orchids, ladies’ tresses. I came upon an old graying photograph of one of these shopping trips—two horses, four men in sun hats and short sleeves, two carts with wide-spoked wheels groaning with loads that look like brushy rubbish but were in fact stacks and stacks of orchid plants. Hunters in Florida found new species in their backyards that they had expected to find in the Caribbean. Some of these species had probably traveled across the ocean by wind or bird or by some coincidental transport, and southern Florida was as far north as they could grow. In 1844 the botanist Jean-Jules Linden discovered an interesting snow-white orchid in Cuba. The plant was leafless and had a mass of roots, so he named it Polyrrhiza lindenii—“the many-rooted plant found by Linden.” In 1880 a botanical explorer named A. H. Curtiss found the same Cuban species in Collier County, near the Fakahatchee Strand. It was definitely Polyrrhiza lindenii. After a while, the species acquired a common name in Florida—it became known as the ghost.

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  One oven of a night while I was in Florida, the American Orchid Society threw a black-tie gala to celebrate its seventy-fifth anniversary. The party was being held at the Flagler mansion in Palm Beach, just a couple of miles from the society’s headquarters on the Vaughn estate in West Palm Beach and just a couple of miles from where I stayed most of the time when I was tagging along with Laroche. I assumed a lot of collectors would be coming to the party, so I wanted to go. It also meant that for the first time since coming to Florida I would have a chance to wear something other than swamp clothes—the clothes that I had to throw away as soon as they’d served their purpose—or plant-nursery clothes—baggy khakis, and T-shirts that were becoming permanently marked with dust and mulch. I had brought a black silk jacket and cocktail dress with me that I still hadn’t even taken out of their dry-cleaning bags. I’m not sure what I had imagined my life in Florida was going to be like, but I guess I must have expected there might be more occasions that involved cocktails. It wasn’t like that at all. I stayed at my parents’ condominium in West Palm Beach—most of the time my parents weren’t there—and every morning I’d get up, listen to the unvarying weather report, slap on some sunscreen, and then go down to Homestead or across to the Fakahatchee or over to Miami with a stop in Hollywood to talk to orchid growers and visit nurseries and see people at the Seminole reservation and take a walk in the woods. It felt as if I were driving a million miles every day. My right index finger got numb from pushing the scan button on the radio, and I started doing all those hot-weather traveling-salesman car things, like spreading a map across the dashboard whenever I parked and bending the sun visors at severe angles to get maximum shade and keeping a few changes of clothes in the car. My nose was always filled with the sugary smell of flowers and the bitter smell of fertilizer and the sour smell of tar melting on the road. At night I’d come back, usually muddy, to West Palm Beach, sometimes with a plant or two in the trunk that someone had pressed upon me, and first I’d look for someone to give the plant to and then I would go for a run on the golf course, watching for alligators and thinking over what I’d heard that day about plants and Florida and life and other things. Most of the restaurants in West Palm Beach stop serving early, so I had to really scamper to get food before everything was closed. The place open the latest was a sushi bar in a strip mall that was alongside an Australian steakhouse, an Italian café, and a Thai diner. A lot of the time I was in Florida I was in a bit of a daze, a kind of stranger’s daze that comes on when you hear and see and smell and touch so many new things that they all start to smear together into one single feeling of newness and strangeness. I have friends and relatives in Florida, but I didn’t see most of them while I was there; I felt as if I really was in some other exotic place where I didn’t expect or want to recognize anything I’d see.

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  The American Orchid Society gala sounded as if it would be a rich business opportunity for Laroche, since these collectors were exactly who he expected would clamor for his homegrown ghost orchids someday, but I knew he wouldn’t attend an event like this if you paid him a million dollars. I called and asked him to come with me anyway, just to get his goat. Also, I didn’t really want to go all by myself. The day I called he was in an expansive mood. “Me at that party?” he said. “No fucking way. Those people hate me. They think I’m a criminal. They despise me. I’m bad news in the plant world.” He sounded pleased. “They want me dead. I’m serious. You think I’m kidding? Well, I’m not. And to be honest, I feel the same way towards them.”

  “So you’re not coming with me?”

  He snorted and said absolutely nothing else, and after a moment he hung up the phone.

  The Flagler mansion is a good place to have a gala. It was built in 1902 by Henry Flagler, the financier and oilman who was one of Miami’s earliest developers, and it is an enormous place—even its wings have wings. Since 1959 it has been a historical museum, but you can still tell how nice it must have been when it was somebody’s house. It
is as square as a ship and its portico has six soaring columns. Inside, the rooms are large and the ceilings are high and heavy-beamed and everything in the house is twinkly—twinkly polished wood and twinkly polished silver and twinkly gilded curlicues on the walls and floors. For the party the front lawn of the mansion was dotted with winking yellow lights that looked bright and blurry in the night’s wet heat. When I drove in, the mansion’s half-moon driveway was filled with long, clean, twinkly cars and a half-dozen parking attendants wearing starched white shirts and bow ties who were sprinting back and forth from some faraway parking lot. I waited for my turn and watched each of the cars ahead of me pop out first a woman in a long gown with a stole around her shoulders and then a man in a crisp black tux. It was a luscious, moony night. Palm trees leaned over the driveway and cast shadows shaped like giant hands. The lawn was glittering with dew. Crickets hidden in the grass were chirping. Every now and then the door of the mansion would swing wide and let a blast of orchestra music out into the night air.

  It was a little dazzling inside, too. A couple of hundred people were milling around in the entry hall, and more were inching through a receiving line where the Orchid Society’s party chairmen were shaking hands and introducing the honorary chairmen from England—the earl and countess of Mansfield, Lord and Lady Skelmersdale, and the Honorable Alasdair Morrison and Mrs. Morrison. The Englishwomen were wearing beautiful poufy dresses in delicate colors and had upswept light-colored hair. There were sixty or seventy round dining tables arranged in the entry hall and along the balustrade overlooking the dance floor. Each table had a different arrangement of orchids at the center. The table orchids had been donated by growers from Florida and California and Thailand and the Isle of Jersey and Hawaii and the Netherlands. In the entry hall there were three high platforms, about halfway to the ceiling, and on top of each platform was a brass bowl the size of a bathtub overfull with pink and ivory and pale green and lavender and lemon-orange and pure-white orchids. The orchids in the bowls had been flown in that morning from Singapore. Anywhere you stood the air smelled good. A waiter bobbed up and down through the crowd with tiny hors d’oeuvres on a silver platter that had orchids piled in the center. A woman I recognized from an orchid show grabbed my elbow and said hello and then whispered that she’d heard there were supposed to be pure chocolate orchids for dessert but they’d melted earlier in the day.

  People had donated things to be auctioned after dinner—an antique slot machine, tickets to the Olympics, antique hand-painted orchid plates, six rare paphiopedilums, a portrait of a paphiopedilum by a famous paphiopedilum artist, a portrait of your favorite orchid painted for you by the official painter of the Royal Horticulture Society, the right to have a new orchid hybrid named for you or for whomever you chose. Elizabeth Taylor had donated six hundred bottles of her new perfume that were parceled out as little gifts for the guests. Next to the auction items a big portrait of her sat on an easel. The line to view the auction items was wide and long, so I could only peek over a shoulder here and there; I could see that someone had left a $575 bid for the orchid plates and $500 for the favorite-orchid portrait.

  On my way to my table I saw the earl of Mansfield leaning against a wall. His wife had impressed me in the receiving line because she was so pretty and her hands felt like baby powder. The earl of Mansfield has a trim build, shiny white hair, black plastic eyeglasses, and an absentmindedly cheery aspect. He must have escaped from the receiving line. His head was now a little drooped. He was grimacing and rolling his shoulders but somehow managing not to spill his drink. I said hello, and he looked lively and said, “Nothing like a good American martini to make you feel well!” He invited me to lean against the wall with him. After a moment he said he’d just had a minor operation and was recuperating and had just finished a really delightful trip—he’d gone shooting with great friends in Spain and then shooting with great friends in Sweden and then visiting great friends in Italy and then visiting great friends in Barbados. He asked me what species I collected, and I admitted to him that I was just a spectator in the orchid world. He sighed and said his whole orchid obsession began innocently with a cymbidium from Harrods that was sent to him by a friend. “I’d never had anything to do with orchids before that. I put the cymbidium in my little greenhouse and I’m afraid to say it … perished. Then in 1971 I moved to Scotland and, oh, my, I started a collection. I had inherited an old gardener from my father who liked asparagus and tomatoes but didn’t like orchids at all, so I had to keep after him.”

  The earl was now looking very perked up. He mentioned that he had his own little distillery that made Royal Lochnagar Special Reserve single-malt Scotch. A waiter was passing by, and the earl waved him over and traded his old martini for a new one. During the transaction the waiter stood stock-still and looked unaccountably bashful until the earl gave him a wink and then turned back to me. “Once we started with the orchids we’ve never looked back,” he said. “I grew to be quite in love with them, you know. I like them because they’re slightly evil and slightly mysterious, don’t you think? In the early days I found it hard to make them flower, and when I did, it was a great, great triumph. They are a great, great challenge. They sulk, they pout, they ignore you. But it’s been onward with the orchids! I’ve built a special orchid house on my estate, with three climates, all computer-controlled, so I can have species that don’t tolerate one another’s climates. I have all information about every single plant on the computer—where it came from, when it’s flowered, all the particulars.”

  I asked Lord Mansfield what he did for a living. He said he’d been Margaret Thatcher’s minister of state until 1981 and a member of the House of Lords. “Now I’m—I suppose you’d say I’m retired,” he said. “I would spend every day in my orchid house if I could, but duty still beckons, doesn’t it, though?” He gestured toward the receiving line and then made some comments about the flower arrangements in the entry hall. The rumble of the crowd was quieting and the orchestra was settling down, which meant it was getting to be time for dinner. The earl straightened up and then did that chicken-neck motion that men do to get their Adam’s apple out of their collars. “You say you have no orchids at all?” he asked. “A young lady like you could start a collection now and by the time you were my age you’d have great, great results.” His own collection was less than thirty years old and it was the largest one in Scotland.

  “Do any of your kids have orchids?”

  He laughed and said, “I have a son who is thirty-nine and I’m sure he wants to get his hands on my orchids. I think he’s quite eagerly waiting for me to die.”

  Gorgeous

  I called Laroche the next day to tell him about the gala and the flowers I’d seen and the people I’d met there. I had gotten to know him well enough by then to know exactly how he’d sound and what he’d say. No matter the time of day—that day I happened to be calling around noon—Laroche always answered the phone sounding as if he’d been woken up after falling asleep on a couch watching a game show. I don’t think I ever actually woke him up. It was just his low, slushy voice and his manner—drowsy, cross, suspicious as a tax examiner’s. Then, once he would establish that it was me on the phone, his voice would amplify in one blast and he would immediately start complaining that I had broken some promise to call him or see him or meet him somewhere. The complaints were never true. I had nothing else to do while I was in Florida except to follow him around, and besides the obvious fact that he was the whole point of my being in Florida I was very homesick a lot of the time and was always excited and conscientious when I had plans. In fact, Laroche was the one who was always leaving me in the lurch. When I first met him his accusations rattled me, but I had finally persuaded myself to ignore them. That day when I called he managed a muffled hello and then began chiding me for not calling earlier, and when he was done, I told him about the Orchid Society party, and when I was done, he cleared his throat and said, “I’m going to a little orchid show in Fort Laud
erdale this afternoon, if you want to come. It’s just a little show, but there will probably be some cute things there,” and then he gave me directions to War Memorial Auditorium, where it was being held.

  I always felt lucky when there was an orchid event being held while I was on one of my trips to Florida, but in truth there really isn’t ever a time when there isn’t some kind of plant show or garden meeting or plant lecture going on. The Miami paper always publishes a list of the week’s upcoming plant events in the area. That week, for instance, there was going to be a Tropical Flowering Tree Society meeting; a South Florida Fern Society lecture (“How to Groom Ferns for Shows”); the Fort Lauderdale Orchid Society meeting; a Rare Fruit Council lecture (“Transplanting Mature Tropical Fruit Trees”); the Bromeliad Society of South Florida show and sale; meetings of the Gold Coast Orchid Society and the Florida Native Plant Society and the South Florida Orchid Society (“Orchid Trends in California”) and the South Dade Garden Club and the Evening Garden Club of Fort Lauderdale. In Florida, plants are everywhere, like money. Plants are money. Wherever I drove, I passed greenhouses as long as train stations, and potted palms being sold out of the backs of rust-mottled pickup trucks, and Christmas tree farms, and orchid farms, and houseplant farms, and sod farms, and tree-moving companies (CALL US AT 930-TREE!), and signs on light posts saying PALMS CHEAP FOR SALE AHEAD or THIS WAY: MANGO AND BANANA TREES, and flatbed trucks loaded with palm trees stacked lengthwise, their trunks wrapped in wide white muslin strips so that they looked like racehorses’ legs. If you didn’t like plants you would be lonely here.

  After I spoke to Laroche I got myself ready and then drove to the auditorium in Fort Lauderdale and waited for him. I didn’t see him at first, so I wandered across the street to an antiques store that didn’t have anything in it made any earlier than around 1968. Through the store’s front window, I could see people hustling in and out of the auditorium. Everyone coming out was carrying a bag or a box with the top of a plant sticking out. At last I saw Laroche’s van pull into the parking lot past the sign that said EXIT ONLY and past the orange cones marking the legitimate parking, and then it came to a stop in a shady spot. I left the store and crossed the street to meet him. When I got there he was leaning against the door of the van looking ashen-faced and skinny. I said hi and asked if he was feeling okay. “Of course I’m not,” he said impatiently. “I’m fucking dying.” He refused to specify what was killing him, so we just stood there quietly until he finished his cigarette and then walked to the auditorium entrance.