The Orchid Thief

by Susan Orlean

  —

  He pulled into a driveway and past a fence that surrounded the nursery. Most of the plants Laroche had ordered hadn’t yet arrived, so at the moment the nursery was mostly a couple of acres of gravel and dirt and a few potted things. Near the fence there was a stack of sawhorses and cedar planters and plastic bags of mulch and the skeleton of a shadehouse—an upright row of metal hoops that looked like gigantic croquet wickets. There was no shade. The light was so bright that the gravel and dirt glinted. A breeze jiggled the string of plastic flags that Laroche had hung above the gate. At the far end of the lot three men were sorting through a pile of more metal hoops and a stack of nylon shade cloth. After a moment they came over and chatted with Buster. I recognized one of the men from court. His name was Vinson Osceola, and he was one of the three Seminole men who had been arrested along with Laroche. He was a smooth-featured guy with a long black braid and meaty shoulders. That day he was wearing a green T-shirt decorated with dozens of skulls. After Buster introduced us he said hello and then added, “I’m not going to talk to you too much. It’s nothing personal. It’s the Indian way.”

  Laroche’s office was in a beige trailer set on concrete blocks near the entrance gate. Vinson motioned toward it and said Laroche was inside. On the trailer door was a flyer saying “Maydell’s. Best Food on the Res. LUNCH specials Stew Beef or Spam and Tomatoes over Rice $5” and another in Laroche’s handwriting that said “Tuesday Jan. 24 GRAND OPENING of the Nursery. All tribe members invited for a free steak cookout.” Buster pushed the door open and then we made our way through mounds of papers and boxes and gardening journals to Laroche’s office. Laroche was sitting behind a metal desk reading a magician’s supplies catalog when we came in. He pushed the catalog aside and held up a postcard. “Hey, look at this postcard I got from my friend Walter. He’s in Botswana,” he said. “Walter is crazy about water lilies. He’ll go anywhere the minute he hears about a rare one. Sometimes he collects, mostly he just goes to look at it. I’m happy to report that this is a very cheerful postcard. It says, ‘John: Plants are good. See you soon.’ ” He put down the card. “You know, Walter’s pretty crazy.”

  Buster stood in the doorway of the office and ignored Laroche while he was talking about Walter. That moment I got the feeling that they viewed each other as useful but irritating—a combination of mutual appreciation and mutual disrespect. Buster pointed out the window. “John, how’re those boys working out?”

  “Fine, Buster,” Laroche said. He drawled so that it sounded like a longer word—foi-oi-oin. “We got orders for thirty-two thousand dollars’ worth of weeds and an order for nine thousand saw grass plants. State of Florida. They wanted seventy thousand saw grasses to plant on the median strip of that new highway from Tampa to Naples, but we can only give them nine thousand right now.” Laroche put his feet up on the desk and started rocking back and forth in his chair. He has a wispy little mustache that comes and goes, and that day it looked to be gone. He was wearing droopy camouflage pants, a Miami Hurricanes hat, and a Chicago Blackhawks T-shirt with team logo of an Indian chief. He later confessed to me that he has no interest in the Blackhawks at all, but the shirt was only a dollar and he thought it would be fun to wear so he could piss off the Seminoles. “I’ve got some good stuff on the way,” he said. “Pigeon peas, figs, frangipani, governor’s plums. I’m going to order some guava. And I got something today called a confetti shrub.” He yanked the bill of his cap and said, “You know, Buster, it’s hotter than hell out there today.”

  “It’s Florida, man,” Buster said. He turned to me. “We’re just starting to fill this place up now, but the project has been going on for ages. We were planning it for ages. It’s been trouble from the beginning, even before these boys got arrested. We had to find some land, and then when we found the land we had to get the easements from the power company, and then we had to interview a bunch of people to find someone who could get it going. And then we had to come up with a name for it, for the nursery. John got it into his head that he just couldn’t have some regular nursery name. He started pestering me for the Seminole word for everything—every minute it’s ‘Buster, what’s Seminole for this? Buster, what’s Seminole for that?’ He wanted the Seminole word for garden and nursery and greenhouse. Some of those words just don’t exist in the Seminole language. I wanted him to just set the place up and then get out there and start hunting for those orchids. I knew he was itching to get into that swamp, too, but he still kept after me for those Seminole words. Finally I really got fed up and told him, ‘Oh, Jesus Christ, John, just name the damn thing.’ ”

  —

  Of course, not everyone in the world liked Laroche. After I went back to New York that summer and wrote a story for The New Yorker about the case, I got a letter from a serious gardener who thought that I had been duped by Laroche. This gardener argued that Laroche was feckless and sinister. “To be gently unspecific, [Laroche] belongs to a milieu whose members turn to horticulture partly as therapy, partly as a convenient refuge from the burdens of responsibility,” the gardener wrote. “They are not committed to any rules whatsoever except their own impulses which are uncontrollable. They are not true professionals.… They go into the business in a disorderly sort of way and, in general, become notorious rather than ‘famous.’ They lead no regular mode of life, changing interests and occupations at regular intervals. Where their own interests are concerned no principle plays any role. Only impulse has rights. They survive miraculously and, though always poor, always find money.” Some of the Seminoles began to question their feelings about Laroche, too. Around the reservation people were starting to call him Crazy White Man or Troublemaker much more often than they called him John, and they complained that he’d gotten the Seminoles into legal trouble for no particularly good reason. Some tribe members even began to question the fundamental point of Laroche’s plans for the nursery, for the two and a half acres of penis-shaped peppers and Moroccan carrot trees and a laboratory bursting with ghost orchid clones. Laroche is good at filtering out dissonance. He ignored them. He proceeded with his nursery plans. He finished building the fourteen thousand square feet of greenhouses and the miles of benches for the bedding plants. He ordered more pink string beans from Argentina, more African palms, more juniper bushes that grow in spirals. He hosted a steak cookout for the nursery’s grand opening. He told Buster that while the ghost orchid project was temporarily on hold he had plenty of other things in mind for the nursery. “Time to kick into other plant areas,” he had told Buster. “Time to get into plant multiplication of another vein. Buy little ones, turn them into big ones, sell them at a profit. Turn them over, do it again. Simple plant multiplication for the masses.”

  Summer passed. Fall came, the plants multiplied, but the complaints among tribe members about Seminole Gardens multiplied, too. Around the same time, Laroche started to quarrel with his crew—he accused some of them of smoking marijuana on the job—and he complained about it to Buster and to Buster’s brother Carl, who was on the executive board of the tribe. Buster responded by suggesting that Laroche take a long and pleasant vacation anywhere in the world just as long as it was many miles away from the Seminole reservation. Laroche suspected that the tribe had decided that Crazy White Man was no longer welcome on the reservation, but he wasn’t sure why. “Goddamn politics, probably,” he said at the time. “Christ, I can’t even believe I’m dealing with this. Like I could give a damn. If they fire me, I’ll sue. I already did some legal research about this when I was researching the endangered-species laws. They can’t fire me, and I ain’t going to quit. There’s nothing they can do.”

  He took the vacation anyway. On the day he came back, there was a severance check waiting for him in the nursery office and someone else sitting at his desk. Then and there, he decided he would leave the reservation forever. It would be another one of his unconditional combustive endings, just like the end to his turtle phase and his Ice Age fossil phase—it would be the absolute
end to his Indian phase. He packed up his papers and catalogs and carried them out to his van. Above him the plastic flags strung across the nursery entrance popped and snapped in the wind. The sun was low, backlighting the plants in the shadehouse, throwing monster-sized shadows on the white shadehouse wall, shadows of gigantic Argentinean peppers, gigantic spinach bushes, gigantic pigeon peas, gigantic cracker roses. The saggy office trailer, the cat’s cradle of Florida Power & Light transmission lines above him, the dusty gravel below, the hazy hot light, the lab where the millions of ghost orchids were going to be grown—Laroche just walked away from it, got into his van, skidded over the bumpy driveway and out onto the bleached white street and left it all behind. He declared that in his life he would never step on Indian land again and therefore he would never see his nursery again, the place where he had hoped to create millions of rare flowers and make millions of dollars and permanently change the world. I could have never done it, could never have given up so fast on something to which I’d been so devoted, but Laroche shrugged it off. “Like I could give a damn,” he said.

  —

  After Laroche left, the nursery was abandoned under the hot press of the Florida sky while the tribe debated how to proceed. During the deliberations, more than half of the plants died. Even the cactus—Laroche had stocked up with four thousand cactus—burned up. Finally, Buster agreed to hire another nursery manager, a young muscular guy from Jacksonville named Rick Warren who had been installing sprinkler systems and working in a nursery on the side. Warren was not very much like Laroche. He was not a Crazy White Man—he was a soft-spoken and courteous white man, and his plans for Seminole Gardens were as earthbound as Laroche’s had been balmy. “You can’t be a nursery that just does exotics,” he told the Seminoles. “You need some solid products like Christmas trees and potted palms.” He lobbied to convert Laroche’s original nursery on Sixty-fifth Avenue to wholesale plants only and to move the retail portion to a new spot on State Road 441, the heavily traveled state road that runs along the eastern boundary of the reservation. Warren pointed out that at the State Road 441 location he would have rust-free city water for the plants, rather than the hard well water at the old nursery, and he would be in a prime commercial area near a tribal smoke shop, a store selling bird and monkey cages, and the Seminole Casino, rather than the desolate corner Laroche had been in. The lot on Route 441 had in fact once been the site of a produce house. “I saw it sitting there, empty,” Rick told me. “I thought it would be neat.”

  I couldn’t imagine the Seminole nursery without Laroche, and Laroche couldn’t imagine the Seminole nursery without Laroche, and Laroche also couldn’t believe I was actually planning to go to the Larocheless nursery sometime so that I could meet Rick Warren and see the place. “A sprinkler guy, for Chrissake,” Laroche hissed. “What a visionary.” One afternoon when I was driving through Hollywood on my way to an orchid show I decided to stop by. A shiny white office trailer sat near the entrance to the new nursery, and behind the trailer were single-file rows of plants in plastic tubs. Three men were roaming among the tubs, watering and grooming the plants. All three of them were wearing turquoise T-shirts printed with the slogan SEMINOLE GARDENS PLANT NURSERY SPECIALIZING IN LANDSCAPE DESIGN. GO NATIVE! and wet bandannas on their heads. After a few minutes, Rick Warren came out and showed me around. He was dressed in one of the turquoise T-shirts and a pair of grass-stained gardening pants. He led me down the center row of the nursery. “It’s really different here now than when you first saw the nursery,” he said. “We’re doing really solid projects now. The tribe is our number one customer. At Christmas, the tribe buys every member a Christmas tree, so I decided our first project should be Christmas trees. I mean, the way I see it, the tribe’s going to buy trees anyway, so they might as well buy them from their own nursery.” He paused in front of a humped, knotted knee-high tree in a small black pot. “Bonsai,” he said, twiddling one of the tree’s little branches. “It’s been my hobby since I was a little lad. I did my first bonsai when I was sixteen. This one here’s a hydroponic saw palmetto that I’ve got growing in sphagnum moss. I’ve done over two hundred bonsai. I got all the guys on the crew their own bonsai, and I’m teaching them how to prune them out and dwarf them. It’s a great hobby and it can be a nice little sideline business.” He fished a pebble out of the bonsai pot and tossed it on the ground and then tucked the moss around the base of the bonsai. “See, the nursery’s just a totally different place now than it was when Laroche was here. We’re just more practical than it was before. The tribe wants to make money, so I’m doing sensible planning. I’m stocking salt-tolerant plants and drought-tolerant plants like ponytail palms and dwarf Ixora and variegated Loriope. We need tough things like fan palms and majesty palms that can survive here. My goal is I want to be able to take a decent seventy-cent plant and grow it for two weeks and sell it for five dollars. I even got my crew started cutting grass, and it’s been going so great that now the tribe wants me to start a lawn-maintenance division.” One of the men watering the ponytail palms came over to talk to Rick and then introduced himself to me. His name was Herbert Jim, and he had long black hair and a sorrowful face. He told me he had grown up in a chikee in the Big Cypress and that if he could get a break from work he’d take me out there to meet his grandmother and see wild animals. He and Rick talked about the lawn-cutting schedule over the next few days, and then Herbert Jim nodded good-bye and went back to watering the palms. The fronds were sequined with water drops and the mist from the hose looked like a bunch of silvery scribbles in the air. It was a different place now, even though Laroche had been gone only a month or so. None of the men who had been in the Fakahatchee with him were working at the nursery anymore, and one of them had even left the reservation altogether. None of the plants at the nursery now had the mangy, fantastic look that Laroche’s plants and vegetables all had—Rick’s plants were clean-cut and regular and looked like plants that a normal person would be able to grow. I actually could even identify a few of them. “What Laroche was doing with the nursery, well, to be honest, I didn’t find it too realistic,” Rick said. “I don’t know the man, but it’s obvious that he had a lot of pretty impractical plans. He filled the nursery with weird things that were never going to sell. For one thing, he had all those orchids. And he had plants from places like Africa and India, and a whole lot of strange things that grow a million miles long and eighty million feet tall.”

  —

  In 1957 a group of Florida Seminoles, including Bill Osceola, Betty Mae Jumper, Laura Mae Osceola, Jimmy Osceola, John Henry Gopher, Miles Osceola, and Charlotte Osceola, drafted a constitution and charter that was then approved by the Department of the Interior and accepted by a majority of the tribe members. The charter gave federal recognition to the Seminole tribe of Florida and established the Seminole Tribe of Florida, Incorporated, to oversee tribal businesses and economic development. In 1971 the Seminoles decided to hold an official annual tribal fair and rodeo at the reservation in Hollywood. The first fair offered roping competitions, log-peeling contests, alligator wrestling, a powwow, and craft exhibitions. Over time, the fair grew into a four-day event and included golf and bowling and basketball tournaments; a Miss Seminole, Junior Miss Seminole, and Little Mr. and Little Miss Seminole pageants; a talent show, musical performances, and a snake display. The year Laroche had come and gone from the tribe happened to be the twenty-fifth anniversary of the fair, and people around the reservation told me it was going to be spectacular. I wanted desperately to go, and I especially wanted to go with Laroche, but he was resolute about never returning to the reservation. He was so committed to avoiding all contact with the tribe that he had even started buying his cigarettes at regular retail outlets rather than the tax-free tribal smoke shops, a considerable sacrifice given his smoking habit. “I ain’t gonna go back,” he said to me the day before the fair opened. “I’m completely over everything with the Indians. Christ, now I can’t believe I even put up with the bul
lshit there for a minute.” I asked what he was doing. “Screwing around,” he said. I said I meant professionally. He said, “I’m looking for something that doesn’t involve Indians. And I’m pretty fed up with plants. I’m going to do something that doesn’t involve things that die, that’s for sure. I can’t stand working with things that die on you all the time.”

  I could tell I wasn’t going to talk him into joining me at the fair, so I drove to the reservation the next morning alone. I was getting accustomed to this drive by now, coming down the highway from West Palm Beach, then driving down Stirling Road past the bus benches advertising the Seminole Trading Post and Smoke Shop and the Polish American Club Polka and Food Festival, past all the white-metal gates to all the condominium developments and past the casino dealer’s school, past the panel truck that was usually parked at the corner of Stirling Road and Route 441 selling fresh shrimp for three dollars a pound. The fairgrounds were west of the shrimp truck and east of the tribal headquarters. It was a large spread with a rodeo arena, several acres for booths, a deepwater alligator pit, and a new stadium that was named in honor of Laura Mae Osceola, who had helped draft the tribe’s constitution in 1957. That morning there were a score of pickups and horse trailers parked in the lot and people unpacking merchandise at the food and crafts booths. I spotted Buster, so I went over to say hello. He was standing near a rental truck absorbed in conversation with a short man with thick arms and thick legs and a chest like a file cabinet. The back of the rental truck was open and appeared mostly empty, except for a twelve-foot-long alligator that was napping on the tailgate.

  “Hey,” Buster said to me.

  “Hey,” the short man said. “Nice to meet you.”

  “He’s the alligator wrestler,” Buster explained, jerking his head toward the man.

  “Name’s Thomas Storm,” the man said to me. “Storm, as in ‘bad weather.’ ”