The Orchid Thief

by Susan Orlean

  I wondered if it ever made him sad, to take thousands of plants and throw them away. I wasn’t being sentimental. I just wondered how it felt to create ten thousand new life forms and pitch the whole load into the garbage. Mike pursed his lips and squinted at me with one eye. Finally he said, “Well, of course it makes me sad. Really sad. I hate to see all that money down the drain.”

  It had gotten too late that day for me to hike around Orchid Jungle with Tom, so he offered to have me come back in a couple of days. When I did, I took a meandering route through Homestead just to drive by the nurseries again. It occurred to me when I passed by Kerry’s that the Elaines were probably gone by then.

  Plant Crimes

  Plants disappear all the time in south Florida. So do most other living things. One day after my trip to Kerry’s Bromeliads, after all the Elaines had disappeared, The Miami Herald reported that frog poachers were hard at work in the Big Cypress Swamp near the Fakahatchee, and that they were poaching two tons of Everglades pig frogs out of the swamp every month. This would yield approximately one and a half tons of legs for cooking. A few of the poachers were interviewed while they sat in their frogging camp one night skinning their catch. They said that except for all the slime involved, frog hunting was a good way to make a living. On the other hand, bell peppers are not a good way to make a living—a neighbor of Tom Fennell’s had twenty thousand dollars’ worth of them stolen out of his fields. He was so incensed that he pulled up every last one of his remaining peppers and said he would never grow them again.

  Laroche had a lot of company as a plant poacher. In fact, plant crimes showed up all the time in the Miami police blotter between the usual reports of assaults and stickups and stolen vehicles. That winter, instead of collecting plants, I began to collect news of plant crimes:

  FEBRUARY 6, 1992 — Burglars attempted to enter a home in the 6500 block of West 27th Court sometime over the weekend but couldn’t open the front door. Instead, they cut open a rear screen and stole eight orchids.

  APRIL 30, 1992 — Someone jumped the fence of a home in the 700 block of East 43rd Street Saturday and stole several orchids. The plants were valued at more than $1,000.

  JULY 18, 1985 — Frank Labate had $1,800 worth of plants stolen from the patio of his home. Labate said he lost an eight-foot-tall palm tree, a six-foot white bird of paradise, a fern, six orchids, and two bonsai plants.

  SEPTEMBER 2, 1984 — More than $2,000 worth of plants and patio furniture were taken from the backyard of Barry Burak. Burak reported 35 orchids totaling $1,400, a $200 staghorn fern, 10 hanging plants totaling $150, five potted plants totaling $200, and three metal patio chairs totaling $150 missing.

  MAY 6, 1984 — A seven-foot alligator meandered into the parking lot of the Venice Gardens apartments. When police arrived they found the gray gator trying to bite a man who attempted to get a rope around the reptile’s neck while another man held its tail.

  MAY 6, 1984 — Six show orchids, worth more than $700, were stolen from the backyard of Barbara Carter’s house.

  JANUARY 10, 1991 — A dwarf palm tree was dug up and removed from Ron Prekup’s front yard. A witness told police that two men dug up the tree, placed it in their pickup and left.

  JANUARY 10, 1991 — TREE MISSING.

  FEBRUARY 12, 1995 — A $250 palm tree was stolen from a yard. Someone dug up the tree, filled the hole and left with the fifteen-foot palm.

  JULY 27, 1991 — ORCHIDS STOLEN.

  MAY 16, 1991 — ORCHIDS STOLEN.

  MARCH 10, 1991 — ORCHIDS STOLEN.

  JANUARY 31, 1991 — ORCHIDS STOLEN.

  SEPTEMBER 20, 1990 — ORCHIDS STOLEN.

  JANUARY 5, 1995 — A palm tree and an electric meter were stolen from outside a home in the 200 block of S.W. 22nd Avenue. The owner peeked outside his house in the morning and noticed the items gone.

  AUGUST 20, 1994 — A thief stole a potted pygmy palm tree from the front yard.

  MAY 6, 1991 — The sago palm tree has become the hottest target of trendy thieves in the DeLand area. So far this year, as many as four hundred sago palms have been dug up in the middle of the night from yards throughout west Volusia County. Two were taken from the DeLand post office.

  JULY 20, 1997 — The Polk County sheriff’s office is investigating the theft of more than thirty orchids during two separate burglaries at Starr Lake Nursery near Lake Wales. Sheriff officials believe the burglaries occurred between 9 P.M. on July 20 and 6 A.M. on July 21. The nursery was also burglarized during the early morning of July 26.

  APRIL 21, 1994 — Police saw a man pushing a shopping cart with a big palm tree in it about 10:45 P.M. Saturday. When they approached him the man abandoned the cart and tried to hide behind a van. When police found him, he told them he stole the palm tree from a house and was going to sell it to buy crack.

  I sometimes collected international plant crimes, too. The English have especially felonious urges toward orchids. Kew Gardens has to display its orchids behind shatterproof glass and surrounded by surveillance cameras the way Tiffany’s displays its jewels. In 1993 a rare six-foot-tall monkey orchid with light pink flowers bloomed near London, and the Naturalists’ Trust had to hire two security guards to stand watch and protect the plant from collectors. The one extraterrestrial orchid crime I read about took place in the Soviet Union:

  Moscow, April 1988 — Police arrested an amateur biologist who flower-napped “Cosmonaut,” the only orchid ever grown in outer space, and planned to sell it on the black market to an orchid collector, a Soviet newspaper said yesterday. “Cosmonaut,” which was grown aboard the Salyut 6 space station and returned to Earth in 1980, died during the bungled flower-napping, Socialist Industry newspaper said. “Cosmonaut” was considered priceless because of its space origin.

  Police arrested Vladimir Tyurin, 36, a down-on-his-luck amateur biologist. Tyurin, who once worked on the cleanup detail at the Chernobyl nuclear power station, was the gardener at the Academy of Sciences botanical garden in Kiev. It appeared he had a Moscow buyer all lined up for “Cosmonaut” when police raided his apartment only to find the unique orchid limp and dying. The flower died before experts arrived, the newspaper said.

  —

  As far as plant crimes on earth are concerned, Laroche’s acquisitiveness was exceptional but not unrivaled. The Fakahatchee, the Everglades, the Big Cypress, and the Loxahatchee have been plundered since the day they were discovered. Sometimes, when the swamps were first being explored, orchid hunters would refuse to say where they’d found new species in hopes of protecting the plants. Fred Fuchs, Jr., a Fakahatchee regular, discovered Bulbophyllum pachyrhachis in Pond Apple Slough in 1956 but tried to keep the location secret. Eventually collectors figured out where the cache was, and by 1962 they’d swept it clean. It is illegal to take any plant or animal out of state or federal preserves, but plants and animals get taken anyway. Every day, casual visitors to Florida’s protected areas yank air plants off easy-to-reach trees—as a result, there are no longer any bromeliads left on the trees that are within an arm’s length from the Fakahatchee’s boardwalk. Lately there has been a great enthusiasm for a particularly rare Fakahatchee fern called a hand fern, which looks exactly like a filmy green human hand and has its spores grow out of its filmy green wrist. Hand ferns grow in the boot of cabbage palms—the crotch where the fronds attach to the trunk of the tree—and they are more abundant in the Fakahatchee than anywhere else in the United States. Laroche told me he knew where there were thousands of hand ferns on the Seminole reservation and that when he got around to it he was going to get a hand-fern marketing program under way. Hand ferns are hard to collect because they die when they are relocated, so the only way to possess them is to collect and cultivate their spores. The rangers in the Fakahatchee pay special attention to their hand ferns. A week or so after Laroche was arrested with his orchids, two clumps of ferns that were about to release their spores disappeared.

  In the Big Cypress Swamp, dwarf cypresses are reg
ularly stolen and sold as bonsai trees. In 1970, a champion mahogany tree on Key Largo was chopped down by someone who wanted to get to the dollar orchids growing on the top branches. Poachers have been caught with every kind of fern, with azalea bushes, with every species of palm, with cactus, with coontie plants. A man was caught in the Fakahatchee with twenty paurotis palms in his truck that were destined for a shopping mall where they would be stripped of their fronds, be refitted with artificial fronds made of silk, and then be arranged in the middle of a food court or in front of a boutique. Two men were caught in the Big Cypress with 110 pounds of goldfoot ferns that were bound for their Santeria store in Miami, where they would be used for medicinal tea that supposedly cures prostate problems. It seems as if everything in the woods gets stalked because so many things in the woods have a price. In 1993 three poachers were arrested in the Everglades with a haul of Alpine Silk butterflies, a species that has sold for thirty-seven thousand dollars a pair in Japan. In the Fakahatchee, rangers are kept busy arresting hunters for a “gun-and-light”—for hunting deer illegally at night, using a stunning floodlight. Alligators vanish all the time. Recently, two men were arrested in the Loxahatchee for killing an alligator. They’d shot it dead, cut off a twenty-nine-inch-long piece of its tail, loaded it into a canoe, then somehow capsized their canoe and got into a fight over which of them had caused the canoe to tip over. When rangers arrested them, they were still in the middle of the fight.

  —

  A couple of nights after I met Martin Motes, I went to a meeting of the Orchid Society of the Palm Beaches to hear him give a lecture. The meeting was a mile or so from the West Palm greyhound racetrack in an odd squat building that was in the direct landing path of the West Palm Beach airport. When I arrived, people were already milling around the room trading plants and eating cookies. The society’s president was standing at the podium. “Did someone park a white Honda with a little raccoon in it?” he called out. “Whoever you are, your windows are open.” A few minutes later he banged the podium with his fist and said, “As soon as you will take your seats I will present the only English professor/orchidologist who quotes Milton to his plants.” Before Martin began the lecture, he took me around and introduced me to a funeral home director/orchid collector, and a seventy-five-year old man who first bragged to me about his mini-cattleyas and then about his thirty-year-old girlfriend, and then a woman named Savilla Quick, who was famous for having a lucky touch with ghost orchids. Savilla had long Cleopatra eyes and a button nose and a drawly voice. She told me she was a farmer’s daughter and had grown up west of Miami, when west of Miami was still nothing but cypress stands and acres of saw grass and one vast spread called Flying Cow Ranch. On Sundays she used to go riding around the swamps looking for interesting things, especially orchids, and in particular the leafless species like the clamshells and the ghosts. At the time, it was still legal to collect wild orchids. Whenever Savilla spotted something she wanted, she’d stand up in her saddle and reach. “The horses knew what I was doing,” she said to me. “They’d stand perfectly still while I was balancing up there. There was only one exception, my palomino stallion. He always got a little wiggly whenever I stood up.” She would bring the wild plants home and attach them to trees in her yard. This was decades ago. Since then, the woods west of Miami have disappeared, and Savilla has grown up, married twice, moved several times, had children, and retired from her job, but the orchids she collected when she was young are still growing in her backyard.

  Savilla said I could come over to her house in Boynton Beach to see her old ghost orchids. She said I had to come the next day, because she and her husband, Bob, were packing to go to Arkansas for the summer, but I was so excited to finally see a ghost orchid that I wouldn’t have waited a minute longer. The next day I even got to Savilla’s early, which might have been the first time in my life I’ve ever gotten anywhere ahead of time. Savilla was busy on the phone trying to arrange for summer homes for her orchids when I arrived. Her husband met me at the door and deposited me at the dining room table, and then went into another room and came out a few minutes later to show me some pens he had carved out of exotic wood. When I wasn’t admiring the pens, I glanced out the dining room window into Savilla’s shadehouse, trying to see if I could catch a glimpse of her ghosts. The shadehouse was about the size of a tractor-trailer and bristling with plants. A little wind was pushing the hanging baskets around and rustling the green shade cloth and making pieces of a wind chime click against one another with a lazy sound.

  When Savilla got off the phone, she rushed into the dining room and perched on the edge of a chair, lacing and unlacing her fingers and giving me a sideways look. “So, you want to know about the ghost orchids?” she asked. “Oh, I don’t know! Should I really tell you my secrets? Oh, I suppose I should. It’s good for the orchids, isn’t it? Everybody’s always trying to get my secrets out of me, because I’m one of the only ones who seem to be able to grow them.”

  Bob was packing up his exotic-wood pens. “Sugar, I don’t know what it is that you do, but you do have your way.”

  “The secret I’ve discovered is that the ghost orchids love a mango tree,” Savilla went on. “You put the little babies on a mango tree right where the sprinkler hits it, and they love it. And whenever I get some pollen from one of them I put it right into the refrigerator. Then there’s a wonderful gal in Jupiter who germinates the seeds for me. The little ghosts also love a pond apple tree. Right now I’m growing a pond apple tree in a pot to take with me to Arkansas. It’s not ready yet. When it’s big enough, I’ll train the ghosts onto it, and then we can take it in the car with us when we leave for Arkansas.”

  Many people in the orchid world knew about Savilla’s success with ghost orchids, and she got calls all the time from people who wanted to buy one. That week she had already gotten a call from Tampa and a call from California. The woman in California had told Savilla that she was desperate for a ghost orchid and asked how much Savilla wanted for one of hers. “I told her a hundred dollars,” Savilla said. “Honestly, I could have said a thousand dollars! She had gobs of money! She said she was desperate! But I could tell she wanted it only so she could brag about it. I think it was just a statusy thing for her.” I asked her what she had decided to do. She frowned and said, “I told her I’d call her if I had some seeds. I’ll probably do that, but I bet a nickel I never give her one. I can tell she was one of those people who would love the orchid for a minute and end up letting it die.”

  Sometimes Bob and Savilla sell their surplus orchids at plant shows. A while ago at one of the shows a man lingered at the Quicks’ table and then struck up a conversation with Savilla. Maybe they talked about ghost orchids and maybe they didn’t. Maybe he said he had a friend who wanted to buy one and maybe he didn’t. The one certainty is that the man bought one little orchid from the Quicks and left. Two days later the man called Savilla at home and said he wanted a few more orchids. She agreed to let him see her collection. “He’d been so sweet and so nice and so this and so that,” she said. “That’s why I let him come over, even though he’d only bought one little bitty orchid at the sale,” The man was especially curious about her ghost orchids, so when he came over she took him around the side of the house and showed him the cluster of them on her mango tree. Most of them weren’t blooming at the time, but one of the plants had started forming two seedpods. That evening the man called Savilla and offered her a hundred dollars for one of those pods. She couldn’t decide whether she should sell one, but the next day she called him back and said she’d decided that she would, and then she explained that the pods weren’t ready to pick, so he couldn’t have it quite yet. She said she would call him when his pod was ready. She had his business card, which had only a beeper number on it instead of a regular phone number, and a post office box instead of a regular address.

  A few days later Savilla decided to check on the progress of the ghost orchid seedpods, so she walked over to the mango tree and b
ent down to take a look. The pods were gone. One was missing altogether. The other was broken in two. Half of the broken one was still attached to the roots and the other half was lying in the grass around the bottom of the tree. Savilla describes herself as an extremely emotional person. She says that she now wishes she hadn’t let herself get so upset about the seedpods, but she did. She went berserk. She stormed around her yard and her house. Then she gathered the pieces of the broken pod and took them to Nancy Preiss, her seed germinator in Jupiter. Nancy looked at the pods and said they were ruined, but Savilla wouldn’t leave until Nancy agreed to examine them in the lab and see if they could be saved. When Savilla got home, she called the curious man for some sympathy. She told him what happened and reminded him that he had said that he was buying the pod for a friend of his. She asked him if he thought that his friend might have gotten impatient and didn’t want to wait any longer to get the seedpod. The curious man said he was awfully sorry about the pods but that she’d misremembered—he hadn’t been buying the pod for a friend, he wanted it for himself. He said some other ghost orchid fancier must have heard that Savilla had seedpods and had stolen them.

  Right after the pod theft, someone broke into the Quicks’ shadehouse and stole almost three hundred plants, including twenty-three of a variety that is more valuable than it is beautiful—something only an orchid person could love. The Quicks installed video cameras in the shadehouse and an alarm system in the yard. Sometime later Savilla spotted the curious man at a plant show. It was the first time she’d seen him since the pods disappeared. She hardly recognized him because he had completely changed his looks. “When I first met him, he was blondy-headed. Now his hair was dark,” Savilla said. “When I met him, he was wearing glasses, and now he had gone to contact lenses. And even his clothes had changed! He had been real casual when I met him, and when I saw him again he was in this sort of macho attire.” They didn’t speak; in fact, the curious man went out of his way to not even show Savilla his face.