The Orchid Thief

by Susan Orlean

  The tickets were six dollars. Laroche looked at me. “Can’t you get these for free?” he asked.

  “Free? How would I get them for free?” I said. Laroche frowned and then stepped in front of me and said to the man at the ticket table, “Hey, how about if you give us two tickets?” The ticket seller chuckled and stuck out his hand, palm up. “It’s research,” Laroche insisted. The man’s hand didn’t move. The door to the auditorium opened and a couple came through, leaving the show. The man was balancing a box full of plants on his hip. As they walked by he was saying, “I am really not a cattleya person, Dee Dee!” and she was shaking her head and saying, “Well, I am really not a paph person, Phil!” A rush of warm air picked up one of the show programs sitting on the table and it went fluttering and landed with a sigh on the floor. A fidgety line was forming behind us. I counted out twelve dollars into the ticket man’s hand. Laroche dropped the stubs in the prize-drawing box and then pushed through the door.

  For the show, booths with orchids for sale were set up all around the edge of the auditorium and in rows across the middle. In the very center of the hall were two islands where the dealers had arranged their displays. Laroche told me the theme of the show had something to do with circuses, and pointed to a display near us that had orchids set up on a miniature Ferris wheel and grouped around toy clowns and tableaux of circus animals. We started to circle clockwise. The first booth we passed had a sign above it saying DANCIN’ DOLLS—PINK SHOWY BABY! FRAGRANT! and a long table crowded with plastic pots. Most of the plants were tiny, just squirts of foliage. One, toward the back, was tall with long, arching leaves and a flower shaped like a little dustpan. The leaves were blackish green and the flower itself was glossy yellow, the yellow of a newly waxed taxi, and it was spattered with hundreds and hundreds of burgundy flecks. The flecks were slightly ovoid, and they were clustered in curving rows so that they looked as if they had been painted on as the flower spun around. Staring at the pattern of the flecks was dizzying. Staring at it for a long time was hypnotizing. After a while it made the muscles in the back of my eyes tingle. Laroche leaned over and squinted at it. He moved the flower from side to side. “These are as pretty as hell,” he said at last. “It’s like an explosion in a paint factory. You know how this happens? Its chromosomes are all fucked up. That’s how you get these nauseating patterns. The Japanese love that. This is probably a huge hit in Japan.” He took a sharp breath. “If I could breed a black orchid with a purple lightning bolt across the petals, I’d never have to work again.”

  A woman wearing clingy pink shorts stopped at the table. She gaped at the flower Laroche was holding. “How do they do this?” she asked him. The dealer who was in charge of the booth came over. The woman said to him, “I have to ask you something. My orchids are wimps. Where did I go wrong? They’re pathetic. I’ve been feeding them Bloom Booster and they’re still wimpy.”

  The dealer said, “Don’t give them too much food. It’s like an eating disorder. It’s like bingeing.”

  “But I thought Bloom Booster …”

  The dealer scowled. “Well, people think Bloom Booster is a miracle and, honey, it’s not.”

  She pursed her lips. “I get it, I get it. Thanks. Now. Let’s see. There’s an orchid here somewhere that smells like chocolate that I want to go find.”

  Laroche tapped her shoulder. She turned around and he said, “It’s none of my business but there’s also one that smells like Grape Kool-Aid and you shouldn’t miss that one, either.”

  They had fabulous, fantastic names: Golden Grail and Mama Cass and Markie Pooh and Golden Buddha Raspberry Delight and Dee Dee’s Fat Lip. When orchids were first brought to England they were thought to be members of a very small and very unusual plant family. Then the number of newly discovered species reached the tens of thousands, and the nature of the orchid family was reconsidered. In fact, it became almost impossible to keep track of all the new orchids being discovered, so an official registry was established in 1895, which is now run by the Royal Horticultural Society, and has continued to be used by orchidists all over the world. New species were usually named by the person who discovered them or by the person who sponsored the person who actually discovered them or, in the case of hybrids, by the person who first created them. The International Orchid Register now lists the names, with explanations, for more than one hundred thousand species and hybrids:

  “Carteria: Dedicated in 1910 to Mr. J. J. Carter of Pleasant Grove, who was the first one to lay eyes on it.”

  “Hofmeistera: I have dedicated the genus to a most friendly and distinguished man, W. Hofmeister, thinking that the plant both by its conspicuous pollen and all the beautiful coil-bearing little cells and the wonderful web of its perigonium exhibiting so many microscopic virtues is properly and appropriately dedicated to Hofmeister, a microscopist.”

  “Robiquetia: In honor of M. Pierre Robiquet, French chemist, for his numerous important discoveries, including caffeine and morphine.”

  “Orleanesia: In honor of Prince Gaston d’Orleans, Comte d’Eu, distinguished amateur and patron of floriculture in Brazil.”

  Some orchids have been named for their appearances. The ghost orchid has many roots; its official genus name is Polyrrhiza, which is Greek for many roots. A genus with a droopy head and floppy petals was named Corybas, which is the Greek name for the attendants of the goddess Cybele, who accompanied her in wild dances and orgies. Some orchids have been named for revenge. In the late 1960s, two species of Oncidium were discovered in Brazil by an American whom I will call John Smith. One species was big and beautiful; one was measly. Smith persuaded a Brazilian man to collect the plants for him and to make the difficult trip with them to port by promising to name one of the orchids in his honor. He did, but the one he named in honor of his Brazilian porter was the measly Oncidium, not the showy one. A few years later, Brazilian orchid breeders used Smith’s big, beautiful Oncidium to make hybrids; the first two were given the names Greedy Gringo and Very Bad John.

  Commercial growers often name new hybrids after friends or good customers or favorite famous people. Chadwick & Son, a Virginia nursery, recently registered a hybrid named Hillary Rodham Clinton ‘First Lady.’ In honor of Elizabeth Taylor, the chairwoman of the American Orchid Society’s seventy-fifth anniversary gala, there is a Laelia anceps cultivar named ‘Elizabeth’s Eyes.’ The ‘Jackie Kennedy’ orchid is snow-white with purple trim; the ‘Richard Nixon’ is the color of putty with brown speckles. There is a ‘Nancy Reagan’ orchid and an orchid hybrid named for the daughter of writer Joan Didion and an orchid hybrid named Rajah’s Ruby ‘Babe’s Baby,’ named by Brooklyn Dodger Babe Herman, who bred it. An Illinois orchid breeder named a new Phalaenopsis hybrid after Shinichi Suzuki, the Japanese violinist who developed a method for teaching music to tiny children. I met many people in Florida who had orchids named for them by Florida nurserymen Bob Fuchs and Martin Motes. Once, I was at a show with an orchid judge named Howard Bronstein, who pointed at one of the plants and exclaimed, “My God, what a terrific ‘Howard Bronstein’!” In fact, Howard Bronstein said it was one of the best ‘Howard Bronstein’s he’d ever seen. He had seen a lot of them, because the plant is a popular hybrid that had been created and named for him by his friend Bob Fuchs.

  —

  Laroche narrated for me as we walked through the show. “I used to be dearly in love with these. They’re Oncidium pupillo … butterfly orchids. I used to love the hell out of them.… That’s a clamshell orchid, it’s a miserable little thing.… Look at this rigid, blackish one, it’s a Paphiopedilum. Can you imagine if you lived in Victorian England where the idea of a flower was a daisy, and you instead had this black, rubbery, hooded thing in your house? You would rule.… Oh, someone’s got some ferns. Isn’t that gorgeous? That’s gorgeous. I collected ferns for a while. They’re hard to grow. They like to die. That’s what they like to do the most. ‘What should we do today? Hey, let’s die!’ There are a lot of great ferns on the Seminol
es’ land. I want some for the nursery. I think we could make a dollar.… Do you like this? My ex-wife used to grow these, so every time I see them I get kind of nauseous. Why did we break up? Hell if I know. Why does anyone break up? Actually, we broke up because she could sit through an entire side of a Grateful Dead album and I couldn’t.… Quick! What’s this? I just showed you this. Clamshell orchid. Easy, look at the little shell shape of the petal.… Here’s a weird shape. Look at this long tube. A moth uses its big-ass tongue to get this guy pollinated. It’s just like the ghost orchid. They get pollinated by this huge hawk wing moth. They’re huge moths. One time when I was in the Fakahatchee one of them flew out of nowhere and hit me in the face and I started screaming like a little girl.” We stopped in front of an orchid that had a rounded top petal and a bulbous pouch and a long skinny petal on either side that curled in a corkscrew and stood straight out. Each piece of the flower was a different color—cocoa, rust, gold. To me it had the face and silhouette of a poodle riding in a car with the windows open so its ears were blown back from its face. Laroche ran his finger along one of the curly ears and said, “Imagine you’re this plant. Why do you have petals that do this? It has some purpose, everything has some purpose. I believe in botany by imagination. I try to put myself in the plant’s point of view and try to figure them out. The only ones with features that have no real purpose are the hybrids, because someone put them together and came up with an unnatural thing. That’s the cool thing with hybridizing. You are God. You do the plant sex. It’s a man-made hobby.”

  “Are there any hybrids that occur naturally?”

  “Hardly any,” he said.

  “Why?”

  He snorted. “Well, you wouldn’t, even in a fit of boredom, decide to have sex with a gorilla, right?”

  —

  We were in a hall of clones, Laroche said, a room full of artificially made genetic copies. Some of the orchids we were looking at were grown from seed or taken as cuttings, but most of them were made in labs. Cloning plants is now commonplace, but the method has existed only since the late 1950s, when a French botanist named Georges Morel developed it while trying to figure out how to grow virus-free potatoes. Morel discovered that if he placed a few cells from the most actively growing part of a potato plant into a growing medium and provided hormonal and chemical stimulation, the cells would multiply. Plant cells are undifferentiated until they orient themselves to the earth and the sun by detecting the force of gravity and warmth; as soon as they get oriented, some of the cells evolve into roots and others into leaves and others into stems. Morel realized that if he kept agitating and twirling the culture dishes, the cells would divide but remain undifferentiated—they kept splitting into more basic cells rather than developing into plants. He let the cells divide into thousands of basic cells and then he stopped shaking the dishes, separated the cells into smaller clumps, and placed the small clumps in another growing medium in motionless culture dishes. In a while the clumps matured into thousands of plants, and each one was an exact genetic copy—a clone—of the original plant. Morel had a number of graduate students assisting him with the potato-cloning experiments. One of them was a young man named Walter Bertsch, who happened to be an orchid fancier and also happened to be dating a girl who worked at a famous French orchid company. Bertsch tried applying Morel’s cloning technique to orchids and discovered that many species responded well. This is how orchids came to be the first ornamental plant to be cloned on a large scale.

  Before cloning, propagating orchids required a lot of patience. Orchids grown from seed took forever because the plants so rarely form seedpods, and then the seeds take seven years to mature. Orchids could also be divided—that is, one plant could be divided into two or, at the very most, three—but the rate of increase was unimpressive. The science of cloning remade the nature of orchid collecting. It became possible to reproduce most species quickly and in large quantities and with perfect genetic uniformity, and that in turn made it possible to sell the plants at a reasonable price. Orchids used to live only in the wild or in millionaires’ hothouses. With cloning, they could be almost as common as daisies. The finest orchids do still cost a fortune. A show-quality Phragmipedium besseae is worth five thousand dollars or more, and species like lady’s slipper orchids that resist cloning are still rare and cost a ransom. Many species, though, can be created in a lab—created in tremendous quantities with absolute uniformity. An orchid breeder can be a sort of sorcerer’s apprentice, multiplying one plant into hundreds or thousands or even more. In theory there is no limit to the number of copies you can create. One beautiful plant could be cloned and turned into a million.

  —

  The door prize ticket was drawn and announced. We didn’t win. “There really is an orchid that smells like Grape Kool-Aid,” Laroche said, “and I would really like to find that son of a bitch.” He went booth by booth. Stewart Orchids. The Orchid Man. Mountain View Orchids. Orchids by Alexandra. Gold Country Orchids, “Our First Release of This Wonderful Orange Brassia!” A grower from Hawaii, whose sign said ALL PLANTS 30% OFF. I DON’T WANT TO TAKE THEM HOME! A grower from Venezuela with hundred-dollar cattleyas, who was saying, “These flowers are poetic. They hold themselves horizontally because they want to go back to Venezuela.” Swirls of people around the booths, stroking stems, leaves, petals, pushing money and credit cards across the tables, pointing at plants and saying “Covet, covet, covet!” and “Don’t let me even look at that,” and “I should wear a straitjacket to these shows”; they were old and young and middle-aged; couples whispering to one another with their eyes fixed on a plant and mothers with strollers that they leaned across to see the plants on the tables; they were dressed in white windbreakers and good shoes, or cardigans with orchid patterns, or silk ties printed with a hundred little cattleyas, or silver filigreed orchid earrings and pins, and shorts and T-shirts with orchids silk-screened across the fronts. They examined the plants up close, with one eye shut, the way a jeweler examines a stone, and then they stepped back and cocked their heads and had a second look, the way a curator studies a painting, and then they paid and walked off wearing the crazy grin of prizewinners.

  Laroche stopped at a small booth in a corner. “Here’s a weird-ass thing,” he said to me. He pointed to a row of tiny clay pots, thumb-sized maybe, and in each tiny pot was a clump of scaly gray-green roots. No leaves, no flowers. Laroche glanced at me and said, “Isn’t it beautiful?” He was, I think, kidding. The little roots of the plant quivered when he picked up the pot and held it up to me. “It’s an Asian ghost orchid. Pitiful-looking but rare and therefore desirable. You get so obsessed with these goddamn orchids that they all start to look beautiful,” he said. “It’s part of the sickness.”

  A young blond woman wearing a baby on her back stopped at the booth and stood next to Laroche, scanning the table of plants.

  “Look,” he said to her, holding out one of the pots, “isn’t this beautiful?”

  “It’s gorgeous,” she said.

  In a loud voice, Laroche pointed to the ghost orchids and said, “Oh, these plants look awful. They must be dying!” The dealer had been ringing up someone’s order at the other end of the sales table. He snapped his head around and glared at Laroche.

  Laroche raised his eyebrows and said, “Sorry, dude.”

  The young woman turned the plant around and around in her hands and ran her finger down the roots and then pulled them apart a little so she could see if there was more to it inside the pot.

  Laroche watched her. Then he asked, “Do you love it?”

  “I do love it,” she said. She hesitated. “I mean … it’s … it’s a little … unusual. But I do love it.”

  “You love it even though it’s an ugly little runt,” Laroche said. “It has no flower, it has no foliage, it probably looks just like it does now when it blooms.” His voice was warm. She nodded. “I know why you love it,” he said. “It’s just part of the sickness.”

  It was illuminati
ng to be with Laroche in a place like this. People noticed him. In appearance he was arresting. He had possibly the most untanned complexion in the state of Florida, and his thinness made his body look as if it stuck in more than out. At the Fort Lauderdale show he was wearing overalls faded almost white that hung off him like laundry on a line. His nearly colorless eyes and toothlessness made him look spectral. People seemed to take to him anyway. He chatted his way around the auditorium. Some people recognized him from the photograph that ran with the story I wrote about him in The New Yorker, so they approached him and said something friendly about it, which pleased him—he’d answer, “Yep, that was me, I’m the one who stole all those orchids,” and talk proudly about the case. Or he’d volunteer comments to the dealers or the spectators, or declare something loudly and profanely, which always got him a look and usually started a conversation. He talked constantly, he knew something about everything or he was very good at faking that he did, he reeled off Latin names and botanical facts and took professorial interest in my learning as we went along. He was an endless puzzlement. I was always surprised by how much people liked him. They liked him in spite of the fact that he is a confirmed misanthrope, and that he has none of the usual traits of popularity—conventional good looks, smooth manners, an agreeable temperament—and that he has a challenging, slightly obscene sense of humor and the habit of lateness and that he constantly over-promises. They liked him, I think, because he could be as earnest about their concerns as he was about his own, and because his self-confidence was contagious—he made people feel that they were innately able to do the right thing. He could even persuade you that the wrong thing was the right thing if it was the only option you had. A few weeks before the Fort Lauderdale show I was staying in West Palm Beach at my parents’ condominium and wanted to talk to Laroche, so we arranged to meet halfway between West Palm and his house in North Miami. I told him I had to meet early because my mother was in Florida with me and I needed to borrow her car and didn’t want to leave her stranded for the day. Laroche insisted that he was always up at dawn and could meet me at 7:30 A.M. or so. He also promised that he would figure out an easy place for our rendezvous and call me in the morning with directions. He even offered to give me a wake-up call. I woke up on my own at 6:30 A.M. and went for a short run around the golf course. I came back and showered and got dressed. At 10:00 A.M. I still hadn’t heard from him, so I finally called his house. His dad answered and said John was sleeping and would probably be mad if he woke him up. By the time Laroche called me back it was almost 11:00. Before I had a chance to bawl him out, he announced that he had decided that getting together wasn’t a good idea since I was visiting with my mom. “I mean, she’s your mom and all that,” he said. “I mean, that’s important. You don’t see your mom every day, you know? Look, look, here’s what we’ll do. I think you should go hang out with your mom, take her out for a nice lunch or brunch, enjoy the day, you call me tomorrow, I’ll let you know what’s going on, we’ll talk, everything will be fine.” He was so sure it was the right plan that he convinced me that it was the right plan and probably what I’d wanted to do all along.