The Orchid Thief

by Susan Orlean

  The signs flashed past us: NATIVE TREE NURSERY; HANCK WHOLESALE FOLIAGE; KERRY’S BROMELIADS; GOD (HOLY) SIN—REPENTANCE—THE ONLY CHOICE. Every inch of land was swollen with something—with grass, with fruit trees, with shaggy bushes, with anonymous spikes of green. We drove alongside acres of ficus trees planted in rows like corn. Little plants I usually see in florist shops were growing in columns of hundreds, and each was a hundred times bigger than the ones I usually see. At a sign that said MOTES ORCHIDS Tom drove in. “I want you to meet Martin Motes,” he said. “He’s a very, very good vanda man. He has his own ideas. Some of them are quite controversial and he’s a little bit of a … hippie, but I’m very fond of him.” Motes Orchids was a complex of slightly seedy shadehouses and little outbuildings and Martin’s slightly shambling house. In the yard two large mud-colored dogs were lounging around. In the driveway there was a late-model BMW with the license plate VANDA 1. Standing beside it I could see a swath of fuchsia and lavender and white behind the flapping shade cloths. After a moment Martin Motes came out of the shadehouse. He looked about fifty and had a lean, jaunty build and a close-shaven beard and the kind of tan that looks as if it will never go away. Everything he was wearing was baggy and soil-colored, and he had soil from his fingertips to his elbows. “Senor Fennell!” he said cheerfully. “You have caught me in the middle of my ruminations.” He looked at me and said, “My dear, I am working on a twenty- to thirty-year botanical plan to break the teeth of time.”

  Tom rummaged around in his pocket. “Seedpod for you, Martin,” he said, pulling out a brown sickle-shaped thing. “Lee Moore brought this for you from Peru. I also wanted to bring you something Snake Boy found, but he wasn’t home.” Just then, a truck drove in and grumbled to a stop behind Tom’s car. The driver climbed out and started unloading boxes from the back of the truck. Martin glanced over and said, “Aaahhh, the jewels have arrived.” I said that I’d never heard anyone greet a truck so ceremoniously. “I must inform you that I am a recovering academic,” Martin said. “I’m still fighting off the effects of a doctorate in twentieth-century poetry.” He started reciting some early Yeats and then broke off in the middle of a couplet to open one of the boxes. Inside were a half-dozen orchid plants with sickly-looking leaves. Martin said they were from Peru, and like many plants coming in from abroad they had been in the USDA quarantine in Miami for twenty-one days. Once plants finish their quarantine they are fumigated and released. Martin resumed the Yeats couplet and then stopped and said to the truck driver, “Tell your guy that this is not the way I like my plants to look after fumigation. I’m sure he’ll be, uh, most appreciative upon receiving that news.” The driver shrugged and handed Martin a clipboard and a pen and said, “Yep. Now sign.”

  Martin’s shadehouses were filled with vandas, an orchid genus with rounded petals and a wide, open face and foliage that looks like the top of a pineapple. Vandas have a benign aspect and a lip that isn’t as pouchy or weird as that of other species. They come in every color in the world and with leaves that can be freckled or veiny or unmarked. That day it happened that a lot of Martin’s plants were blooming. Most were in shades of purple or pink, and in the dim shadehouse they looked illuminated. Martin said most of his imported plants were from Thailand. In his lab he was working on some new hybrids that he would germinate and grow himself. Hybridizing is a tricky part of the orchid business. The goal is to cross-pollinate two plants with good qualities and end up with a hybrid that has the best qualities of each of its parents. There are more than sixty thousand orchid species and at least sixty thousand registered hybrids, all one hundred twenty thousand of which can be crossed with natural species or with other hybrids—in other words, you would need a calculator to figure out how many possible hybrid crossings there are. Some crosses produce weaklings or mutants that have no redeeming features. Others produce wonderful new flowers with, say, the rich color of one parent and the fine shape and hardiness of the other. It’s impossible to know in advance which crosses will work and which won’t. A successful hybridizer has to have good instincts, good luck, a lot of knowledge about each parent he plans to use, and a lot of time, since a new cross won’t have its first flower for about seven years.

  If an orchid breeder can come up with a good cross, he will have a flower that people will want and will have to come to him to buy. Anyone can then duplicate the same cross on his own because the parentage isn’t kept a secret, but he will have to wait seven years to get a bloom. In other words, a grower with a new hybrid has in effect a seven-year copyright on the flower. For those seven years, he has the monopoly on its commercial value. For those seven years, he also has monopoly on the status creating a new hybrid confers—he can register it with the name of his nursery and enter it in American Orchid Society competitions and get attention for his cultivation skills. He can even influence the future of the flower. He can hybridize with a particular characteristic in mind, and if his hybrids become popular and award-winning, other growers will probably start working on hybrids with the same traits. Martin, for instance, wants to breed vandas that look more the way vandas did when the Victorian orchid hunter Carl Roebelin first found Vanda sanderiana in the rubble of an earthquake in the Philippines. Other growers want to move the species in the opposite direction, and their hybrids are bigger, more sculpted, more vivid, and more extreme. Whoever has more success in orchid shows and among the orchid opinion makers will set the fashion for the vanda of the future.

  Coming up with a good hybrid is as troublesome as inventing a new recipe, A lot of orchid growers don’t bother with it at all and instead specialize in growing the finest specimens of orchids that already exist. Martin told me that he thought a lot of breeders who claim to have produced new hybrids have actually bought them from a nursery in Taiwan and Thailand and take credit for it themselves. “I am absolutely certain that some of the hybrids you hear about have been spirited away from distant points,” Martin said. “There are too many occasions when some breeder in Florida announces a hybrid cross he claims to have just made and co-incidentally you will see the exact same cross at a nursery in Thailand. Just think about it. There are untold millions and billions of possible orchid crosses you can come up with. Either the American breeder is buying the new Thai hybrid and claiming it as his own or this is the most remarkable coincidence in the history of human creativity.” He said many orchid people want to have new plants to market and want the prestige of creating something but are really too busy or lazy to work on their own. “It’s a falling-off of the basic sense of honor,” he said. “It’s conceptual theft. The guy who came up with the hybrid in Thailand is probably a Buddhist and therefore is nonconfrontational. For a Buddhist it would be spiritually incorrect to protest about intellectual pirating, so whatever breeder here buys it can claim it as his own and never worry about being contradicted.”

  As we walked through the shadehouse, Martin and Tom traded orchid stories and debated the botanical advantages of pollination by pseudoantagonism versus pseudocopulation. I walked a few feet behind, listening, and then stopped by a sexy pink flower and sniffed it. It smelled like lemon sponge cake. “That’s a nice flower,” Martin said. “That goes for about a thousand dollars.” We passed a table of small pots of little bloomless plants. Martin picked up one of the pots, poked his finger into the soil, and then shook his head. Tom raised his eyebrows and asked, “What have you got here?”

  “Here we have a failed experiment,” Martin said. “And Dr. Martin Motes made an executive decision the other night that we have a hell of a lot of those, man.”

  —

  Sophisticated shoppers stop at Motes Orchids all the time. That afternoon two shoppers happened to arrive while Martin was showing us around. Their names were Richard Fulford and Denise McConnell, and both were elegant and polished Jamaicans who were regulars at Martin’s and had extensive orchid collections of their own. Richard was a businessman in Miami. Denise was just visiting. She said she lived on a gigantic estate in J
amaica called Bog Walk. Martin had been expecting them, so when he heard Richard’s car he hollered a few lines from Romeo and Juliet and then gestured for them to join us in the shadehouse. They hopped out of the car, raced up the driveway, ducked under the piece of green cloth at the entry of the shadehouse, and then slowed to a halting, window-shopping pace. They dawdled toward us past a group of plants with purple blooms the size of coffee cups. Above the purple plants hung slatted wooden baskets with plants blooming in bright white and pink. When Richard and Denise finally reached us they both had the same dazed look on their faces. “God, I feel like I might go crazy,” Denise said. She sighed. “Richard,” she said, “help me contain myself.” She told Martin she had promised her husband that she would exercise restraint. Her husband was also in Miami, but he didn’t want to come out to Martin’s. “Not an orchid man,” Martin explained to me.

  “No, it’s not his hobby,” Denise said. “His hobby is eating.”

  “Denise already got a box of plants today,” Richard said.

  Denise waved her hand and said, “Oh, those were just babies in that box. Maybe four or five thousand but they’re just little babies.”

  “Oh, my,” Martin said. Richard and Denise began inching away from us, toward a table with dappled yellow flowers. “Too many beautiful things, Martin,” Denise said.

  “I spent a decade to get that one,” Martin said. He pointed at one of the yellow flowers that was brighter and bigger than the others. “A decade of a man’s life.”

  “And just look at that lip,” Richard said. Everyone stood silently. A bumblebee floated by, listing from side to side like a drunk. It bumped into the yellow flower and ricocheted off it and bumped into another one. The flower quivered from the impact of the fat bee. “Denise,” Martin said, “you should own this plant. A woman of your discriminating taste! ‘Present mirth hath present laughter, every wise man’s son doth know.’ You owe it to yourself to own this.”

  “It’s definitely pulling me,” she said.

  “Do you need something suitable to put in a suitcase and smuggle back to Jamaica?” Martin said. He was joking. He winked at her. “Because, my dear, if you do, here’s a delicious little miniature.” He reached for a pot that held the cutest plant in the world. I had vowed that I would acquire not even a single orchid on any of my trips down here, but I thought I might die if I couldn’t have this one. The background of the petals was the beigey yellow of a legal pad, and over the yellow background was a spray of hot-pink pinpoint dots, and the flower was attached to the plant by a stem that was twisted like a stick of licorice. The petals were plump and supple and pleasant to touch. The center of the flower looked like the face of a piglet. I felt as if the plant was looking at me as much as I was looking at it. The flower wasn’t beautiful—it was absorbing. I felt that I could stare into the center of the flower for hours.

  “Oh, Martin, I don’t need to smuggle, Martin,” Denise said. Her rolling accent gave his name a romantic sound. “I don’t have to shop to fit my suitcase. I have a permit.” She and Richard headed toward the back of the shadehouse. One of them spotted a cream-and-pink flower and pointed to it. They both gasped. “What is this, Martin?” Denise called out. “I’m going wild, Martin.”

  He looked over to see what she and Richard were pointing at. “Oh, yes. Ain’t that a caution!” he drawled. “Bless its little heart.” Then he pretended to get busy with something. Denise gave Richard a look and said quietly, “It must be some special cross. He isn’t going to tell us what it is.”

  “Tsk, tsk,” Martin said without looking up. “Thou shalt not covet.”

  Just then one of Martin’s long-legged mud-colored dogs trotted into the shadehouse and bit me really hard. I made enough noise that everyone noticed immediately. Martin grabbed the dog and started discussing how interesting this was because the dog had never bitten anyone before. I thought the conversation was rather academic, so after listening for a second I limped over to the house and went to find some rabies medicine. By the time I came out Denise had assembled about forty plants that she wanted to buy. Martin was writing a receipt for her. “Let’s see, Denise,” he said, squinting at the receipt. “Have we spent all your money yet?”

  She groaned. “Oh, Martin, unfortunately we have got to Go.”

  “Oh, well,” he said. “All right. Now, my dear, I have an announcement to make. Dr. Motes has decided to throw in one of those mysterious pink vandas that you had your eye on.” He grinned. “I believe in the Eleventh Commandment: Thou shalt not withhold gorgeous new vandas from thy dearest customers and friends.” He went over to the table with the anonymous flower. Denise and Richard followed him with their eyes. Denise looked as if she was holding her breath. As Martin lifted one of the pots he turned to us and said, “Dearly beloved, have I shared my views on organized religion with you yet?”

  —

  The day had slipped into that yellowy hour when the sun is lingering on the horizon still hoping to burn you to death. Tom said we ought to move on, so I said good-bye to Martin and arranged to see him again in a day or two. When we got back into the car, Tom sat and pondered for a few minutes about where we should go next. There were orchid growers in every direction. Within a mile radius of Martin’s driveway there probably were a billion orchids. It was a fact I never got used to in Florida, the fact of seeing so many and so much of something as exotic and precious as orchids, and seeing them without ceremony, lined up on long factory benches in toss-away pots. It didn’t make the orchids seem like ordinary merchandise—it reminded me more of the time I toured Harry Winston’s jewelry workshop and saw about two hundred thousand dollars’ worth of pear-shaped diamonds heaped in an old cigar box. It was actually more amazing than seeing them upstairs in a display case lined with red velvet. Tom said he wanted to take me to the ultimate of botanical superabundance, a place called Kerry’s Bromeliads. Kerry’s consisted of 329,000 square feet of greenhouses. In the 329,000 square feet of greenhouses there were 3.6 million orchids and 1.4 million bromeliads. “It’s a big place,” Tom said, as we drove toward it. “It’s really bigger than big.”

  The original Kerry’s Bromeliads had been swept away by Hurricane Andrew, so it was actually a brand-new bigger-than-big place with milk-white sheet-metal buildings and white golf carts zipping back and forth. There really is a Kerry, but when Tom and I arrived he was occupied with a new shipment of one million Phalaenopsis, so the nursery foreman offered to take us around instead. Kerry’s Bromeliads was not the sort of place you walked around. It was the sort of place you had to ride around in one of those golf carts and you talked to people by walkie-talkie and you identified by sector and subsector. The foreman’s name was Mike. He was a young guy, good-looking, and dressed in a beige polo shirt and shorts. He climbed into a golf cart and told Tom and me to sit in back, and then the cart lurched forward and we puttered toward one of the mammoth greenhouses.

  He said he would start by showing us some of the bromeliads. “What exactly?” Tom asked.

  “Neoregelia ‘Fireball,’ ” Mike said. “We’ve got about an acre of them here.” He steered into the greenhouse and drove down one of the rows. Each row had a bench on each side. The benches were about hip-high and a few feet wide, and the rows were as long as three tennis courts, and the greenhouse had dozens and dozens of rows, and the benches held thousands and thousands of plants. On this stainless, quiet, orderly grid of metal benches there was a wild-looking miniature jungle. Mike stopped the cart beside one of the benches. The plants on it had rigid red center spikes and stiff green leaves that peeled away from the stalks like the skin of a banana. These were the Neoregelia ‘Fireball.’ There were hundreds of thousands of them in the greenhouse. They were about to be packed and shipped to Home Depots and garden centers and Kmarts all over the country.

  “Let me tell you a story,” Tom said. “Do you know where these neoregelias came from? Well, there was this little old fellow who lived in a trailer park right near here in Goulds. He
lived alone—well, as a matter of fact, he lived in his trailer with a dog and a pony. It was really something. One day he found a little mysterious seedling on an orchid he’d gotten. He stuck the seedling in a hollowed-out coconut shell and grew it up, and it was this good-looking bromeliad. He set up his own little nursery and sold nothing but pups from that bromeliad. He must have made fifty thousand dollars on it. He lived off that one plant for years. That was his life, his livelihood, that one bromeliad he just stumbled upon.”

  “Amazing,” Mike said. He idly picked dead leaves off a plant near the cart.

  “You know, when the old fellow was retiring, I went and bought that original plant from him,” Tom said. “The plant was enormous by then. After I bought it I dug around and cut it back, and wouldn’t you know it, it was still growing in that same hollow coconut shell.”

  Mike started the cart and we rolled slowly down the row, brushing by leaves that hung over the edge of the bench. One bench was stacked high with small plastic pots. The plants inside them were withered and droopy. The other benches in the greenhouse were as ordered as checkerboards, but this one was a jumbled mess. Mike nodded toward it and said, “Failed Antherium project.”

  “What was it?” Tom asked. He reached for one of the pots and sifted the dirt in it with his finger.

  “Elaine,” Mike said. “A species called Elaine. It was created by irradiation. We took the germinating material and radiated it. We hoped to get some interesting mutations, but it didn’t work out that way.”

  I asked him what they were going to do with all the loser Elaines. “Take all ten thousand of them and toss them in the Dumpster,” he said.