‘The sexiest flowers on earth’

The Orchid Thief of the title is John Laroche:

a tall guy, skinny as a stick, pale-eyed, slouch-shouldered, and sharply handsome, in spite of the fact that he is missing all his front teeth.

Susan Orlean wrote about him for the New Yorker, and then followed it up with this book, which reads like a very long New Yorker article: focusing on a niche subject, full of fascinating history and detail, and following intriguing byways.

The swamps of Florida are full of orchids. They grow by themselves, attached to trees or in the forks of branches, and some of those orchids are found nowhere else. Each hurricane from the Caribbean or South and Central America brings seeds and new varieties into the swamps. Most land on pools or roads or hard surfaces, but a few ‘drop somewhere tranquil and wet and warm’, and germinate.

The manifold shapes of these flowers arouses our highest admiration. They take on the form of little birds, of lizards, of insects. They look like a man, like a woman, sometimes like an austere, sinister fighter, sometimes like a clown who excites our laughter. They represent the image of a lazy tortoise, a melancholy toad, an agile, ever-chattering monkey.

Jakob Breyne, 1678. Reproduced in The Orchid Thief

Of course, this plenitude of gorgeous plants also brings humans, despite the fact that the swamps are, to put it mildly, inhospitable. In 1872, a surveyor described the Fakahatchee swamp as

a pond, surrounded by bay and cypress swamp, impracticable. Pond full of monstrous alligators. Counted fifty and stopped.

But when has inhospitability stopped humans? In theory, it is illegal to take plants out of national parks such as the Everglades, and it is also illegal to remove any endangered plants. Laroche, though, thinks he has found a loophole: the Seminole tribe is allowed to continue their historical practices, which includes extracting plant material. Thus, he plans to hike into the swamp with Seminoles, who will remove orchids, which Laroche will then clone and sell. As the cherry on top of this plan, he will then go to the Florida legislature and demand that this loophole be closed.

This audacious and self-serving plan will obviously hit snags, but you’ll have to read the book to find out.

When did orchids become so popular? Orlean does a marvellous job of tracing the history of orchid collection. In the 1800s, many orchid hunters drowned, died of dysentery or fever, or were killed by locals in Africa, Asia and South America. Assam is full of orchids, too, and there were times when competing bands of orchid hunters roamed the hillsides, leaving complete orchid devastation behind. They hired local guides, but scorned them:

Joseph Hooker [] called the Bhotias ‘queer and insolent’, the Lepchas ‘veritable cowards’ and the Khasi ‘sulky, intractable fellows’.

Each collector took many thousands of plants, because most of them died during the long ship voyages back to Europe. Until in 1827, an English surgeon discovered that plants would survive in a sealed glass container with a little moisture, and ‘natural boundaries melted’. This, however, did not stop the orchid hunters from ‘sparing nothing, scouring the country and leaving nothing behind’.

Cloning, discovered in the 1950s by a French botanist, was a way to produce massive numbers of orchid plants from a single source, and is the source of the cheap orchids we can now buy in grocery stores. The international trade in orchids is more than $10 billion a year, and some individual plants have been sold for over $25,000.

The ‘ghost orchid’ grows nowhere in the US but the Fakahatchee swamp in Florida.

The flower is a lovely papery white. It has the intricate lip [] of all orchids, but its lip is especially pronounced and pouty, and each corner tapers into a long, fluttery tail.

Orlean is determined to see a ghost orchid in the wild. She travels along with Florida park rangers, with Laroche, and with other orchid enthusiasts. These are not trips for the faint-hearted. Orlean wears leggings, long-sleeved shirts and cheap tennis shoes, and at the end of each trip the entire outfit has to be discarded.

My shirt was soaked with bug repellent and sunscreen, and my leggings were stiff with mud, and my shoes and socks were blackened by the silt I’d walked through in the sinkholes. [..] Mosquitoes sneaked in and out of my shirt by way of my collar and sleeves, and every plant with prickers snatched at my leggings, and the gritty sinkhole mud passed right through my socks and sneakers and stained my ankles and toes.

They are exhausting hikes too, as each step in the swamp must test for firm soil, then test for alligators, and then finally transfer weight onto that foot.

During her explorations in Florida, Orlean comes across a wide variety of orchid enthusiasts, each more incredible than the last. Mario Tabraue in Miami, for example, was a collector of endangered plants and animals, and also a big-league drug dealer, but Orlean never gets to interview him because he is in prison for a hundred years for murder and racketeering.

Florida is full of orchid nurseries, but the aforementioned hurricanes can also wipe out an entire nursery with all its greenhouses and shade houses. Several of Orlean’s interviewees, including Laroche, have had their collections wiped out.

Orlean writes in a straightforward, clear, quietly captivating style. Her prose seamlessly moves from the particulars of one person’s story to the broader history of orchid hunting, touching on Florida’s own history, the development of the infinite suburbs and roads across the swamps and the consequent reduction of natural spaces. But all is not lost: the orchids can turn up in a corner of a gas station or a crack of a stone or a tree branch. Nature is fighting back too: only relentless maintenance prevents wild plant growth climbing over the walls and roads.

Anyone who enjoys such articles in the New Yorker or Atlantic, or in the few papers that still produce long-form journalism, is bound to enjoy this book.

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