The Orchid Thief (10 page)

Once the Bachelor Duke was smitten by the oncidium he devoted himself to orchids and instructed Paxton to develop a collection for him. Within ten years, Paxton had assembled the largest orchid collection in England. Paxton assigned a gardener on his staff to go orchid hunting. In 1837 the young gardener sent Paxton from Assam at least eighty or ninety species of plants never before seen in Europe, mostly orchids, but also an exceptional genus of Indian tree,
Amherstia nobilis
, from Calcutta. The duke’s reaction to the
Amherstia
was so passionate that Paxton wrote to his wife: “Then came the solemn introduction of the duke to my long cherished love, the
Amherstia
. I cannot detail how this important introduction took place; suffice it to say that the duke ordered his breakfast to be brought into the Painted Hall where the plant stands, and he desired me to sit down and lavish my love upon the gem while he had his breakfast by it.” Paxton built for the
Amherstia
a special greenhouse, where it flourished but never flowered. Nevertheless, Queen Victoria visited it in 1843. It must have been one of the most wonderful nights in the world. The queen and the prince drove their horse and carriage through the Bachelor Duke’s Great Stove, which Paxton had illuminated for them with twelve thousand lights.

The Bachelor Duke’s obsession ignited the fashion for orchids in English high society that continued for decades. Orchids were seen as the badge of wealth and refinement and
worldliness; they implied mastery of the wilderness and of alien places; their preciousness made them the beautiful franchise of the upper class. So many new varieties were being found every day that no collector could ever rest—orchids were an endless preoccupation. Once the vogue for orchids began, the prices paid for the plants, the measures taken to obtain them, and the importance attached to them took on an air of madness. This Victorian obsession, this “or-chidelirium,” was a rapacious desire. In intensity, it was similar to the Dutch tulip mania of the 1630s, which reached its zenith in 1637, when the rights to a tulip bulb named Viceroy were sold at auction for a farm’s worth of valuable goods including six loads of grain, four oxen, eight hogs, twelve sheep, wine, beer, and a thousand pounds of cheese. The most valued tulips were those with brilliant streaks and stripes of colors, then thought to be the mark of distinction, and now known by botanists to be the evidence of a devastating flower virus spread by aphids. The Dutch tulip market grew into something much more than gardening—it became a speculative, highly leveraged futures bubble, which soon burst.

An average Englishman couldn’t afford an orchid collection or a greenhouse or a gardener or a professional hunter collecting for him. Owning orchids was the privilege of the rich, but the desire for orchids had no class distinction. Average Englishmen wanted orchids badly, too. In 1851 a man named Benjamin Williams wrote a series of articles advocating orchid ownership for everybody. The series was called “Orchids For the Millions.” Eventually it was published as a book so popular that it had to be reprinted seven times.

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The English were horrible orchid growers at first, and they usually killed every orchid they got their hands on. The director
of the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew in 1850 became so exasperated that he declared England “the grave of all tropical orchids.” Even if the great turn-of-the-century nurseries like Black & Flory, Stuart Low & Co., Charles-worth & Co., McBean’s, and Sander & Son were graveyards, they were magnificent graveyards, fitted with handblown glass panels and lined with wrought-iron plant benches. Toward the end of the 1800s orchid science progressed enough to make cultivation more reliable and England’s greenhouses finally started to bloom. The plants were no longer being potted in rotted wood and leaves, and instead were put in a healthier growing medium. Joseph Paxton was responsible for probably the most important advance: the English believed that orchids thrived in jungle-like environments, so they kept their greenhouses—what they called their “stoves”—suffocatingly steamy and hot. In fact most orchids prefer temperate perches above the jungle floor, on trees and rocks in the mountains. Until Paxton experimented with cooler, drier greenhouses, English orchids were being boiled to death. In 1856 the first artificial hybrid—a plant made by intentionally cross-fertilizing different species—bloomed. These early orchid “mules” were a botanical shock. Upon seeing one, the orchid grower John Lindley is said to have shouted, “My God! You will drive the botanists mad!” The breeders, the botanists, the hunters, and the collectors of orchids were all men. Victorian women were forbidden from owning orchids because the shapes of the flowers were considered too sexually suggestive for their shy constitutions, and anyway the expense and danger and independence of collecting in the tropics were beyond any Victorian woman’s ken. Englishwomen and orchids have for a long time had an uneasy relationship; in 1912, in fact, suffragettes destroyed most of the specimens at Kew Garden. Queen Victoria, however,
was a passionate orchid fancier. She created the office of Royal Orchid Grower and appointed the celebrated grower Frederick Sander to it. For her Golden Jubilee, Sander presented her with an orchid bouquet that was seven feet high and five feet wide, and a collector named Loher named the newly discovered
Dendrobium victoria-regina
in her honor. Queen Victoria’s affection for orchids added to their glamour in England and around the world. In 1883 Viscount Itsujin Fukuba built the first greenhouse in Asia. It was said to be as big as a mansion, and the viscount filled it with orchids that English growers, and particularly Frederick Sander, sent to him in Japan. In 1891 the Romanovs, who had built their enormous collection thanks to Sander, named him a baron of the Holy Russian Empire. Soon after, Sander awarded himself his own title. He began to refer to himself as the Orchid King.

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In 1838 James Boott of London sent a tropical orchid to his brother John Wright Boott of Boston. John Boott liked the orchid so much that he asked his brother to send him more. His brother obliged, and over the next few years Boott built a substantial collection in his Boston home. When he died he willed his collection to John Amory Lowell of Roxbury, Massachusetts, who added even more plants to it, and then in 1853 Lowell sold the whole collection to the tenant in his country residence. The tenant let most of the orchids die. The few survivors were divided among a Miss Pratt of Watertown, Massachusetts, and a Boston man named Edward Rand, who expanded the collection once again, cultivated a cattleya reportedly as large as a small washtub, and then in 1865 sold his estate and donated the collection to Harvard College. This is how tropical orchids came to America. Right off the bat, they had admirers as zealous as their admirers in
Europe, and American collectors soon rivaled the English. A collector named Cornelius Van Voorst, of Jersey City, New Jersey, bought his first orchid in 1855, and by 1857 he had amassed almost three hundred species, including an
Ansellia africana
that was so large that two men could hardly lift it. General John Rathbone of Albany, New York, started his collection in 1866. He wrote to a friend in 1868: “I was so delighted with the plant and flowers that I caught the Orchid fever, which I am happy to say is now prevailing to considerable extent in this country, and which I trust will become epidemic. In 1867, so that I might successfully grow this charming family of plants, I built a house exclusively for Orchids.”

In 1874 Miss Jane Kenniburgh of Carickfergus, Ireland, moved to Tallahassee, Florida. She brought with her a load of her favorite belongings, including her
Phaius grandfolius
, a variety of tropical orchid that is sometimes called “nun’s lily.” Before she died Miss Kenniburgh gave the plants to her friend Mrs. S. J. Douglas, the daughter of Florida’s governor, and later Mrs. Douglas gave them to her daughter Mrs. George Lewis. Mrs. Lewis’s orchids had a leisurely life. They lived in the Lewises’ greenhouse in the winter and sunbathed under oak trees in the backyard during the summer. The Florida climate agreed with them and they thrived and multiplied. There is no record of what finally became of them, but Miss Kenniburgh’s
Phaius
are recognized as the first greenhouse-cultivated orchids in Florida. More orchids followed. Orchid collectors sprang up in Miami, in Fort Lauderdale, in Naranja, in Homestead; the great estates of Palm Beach and Miami built orchid houses and hired resident orchid keepers; in 1886 Dr. Charles Torrey Simpson, the naturalist who later wrote the best-known guidebooks to Florida’s animals and plants, bought a piece of jungle on Biscayne Bay
and planted orchids on every other tree; commercial orchid nurseries like John Soar’s of Little River popped up around the state. Businesses that rented blooming potted orchids for special occasions and took care of the plants when their owners were away were set up in society towns like Palm Beach.

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Orchid hunting became known as terrible and romantic. A young preppie named Norman MacDonald wrote a book in 1939 called
The Orchid Hunters
, the story of how he and a college friend considered and rejected the idea of collecting monkeys, divi-divi, carnauba wax, and alligator hides, but then decided to go orchid hunting in South America. The book begins with the inscription: “Warning to the literal minded. Do not try to follow the trail of the orchid hunters on the [book’s] map. In keeping with the close-lipped tradition of the profession, the real names of the towns and rivers have been deliberately changed. Not that you’d want to go there, but then …” and continues with this prologue: “The old orchid hunter lay back on his pillow, his body limp.… ‘You’ll curse the insects,’ he said at last, ‘and you’ll curse the natives.… The sun will burn you by day and the cold will shrivel you by night. You’ll be racked by fever and tormented by a hundred discomforts, but you’ll go on. For when a man falls in love with orchids, he’ll do anything to possess the one he wants. It’s like chasing a green-eyed woman or taking cocaine.… it’s a sort of madness.…’ ”

Men from Florida dominated American orchid hunting. They combed through Central America and South America and came back with shiploads. They dug around in the woods and swamps just a couple of miles from home. The Fakahatchee Strand was a plentiful place—long ago it was like an orchid supermarket. Hunters in the Fakahatchee
hauled out thousands of orchids, piled them into horse-drawn flatbed carts, boxed them, shipped them, went back into the Fakahatchee again. In one shipment in 1890 two thousand butterfly orchids went by train from the Fakahatchee to New York City, followed by trainloads of dollar orchids, cow horn orchids, ladies’ tresses. I came upon an old graying photograph of one of these shopping trips—two horses, four men in sun hats and short sleeves, two carts with wide-spoked wheels groaning with loads that look like brushy rubbish but were in fact stacks and stacks of orchid plants. Hunters in Florida found new species in their backyards that they had expected to find in the Caribbean. Some of these species had probably traveled across the ocean by wind or bird or by some coincidental transport, and southern Florida was as far north as they could grow. In 1844 the botanist Jean-Jules Linden discovered an interesting snow-white orchid in Cuba. The plant was leafless and had a mass of roots, so he named it
Polyrrhiza lindenii
—“the many-rooted plant found by Linden.” In 1880 a botanical explorer named A. H. Curtiss found the same Cuban species in Collier County, near the Fakahatchee Strand. It was definitely
Polyrrhiza lindenii
. After a while, the species acquired a common name in Florida—it became known as the ghost.

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One oven of a night while I was in Florida, the American Orchid Society threw a black-tie gala to celebrate its seventy-fifth anniversary. The party was being held at the Flagler mansion in Palm Beach, just a couple of miles from the society’s headquarters on the Vaughn estate in West Palm Beach and just a couple of miles from where I stayed most of the time when I was tagging along with Laroche. I assumed a lot of collectors would be coming to the party, so I wanted to go. It also meant that for the first time since coming to Florida I
would have a chance to wear something other than swamp clothes—the clothes that I had to throw away as soon as they’d served their purpose—or plant-nursery clothes—baggy khakis, and T-shirts that were becoming permanently marked with dust and mulch. I had brought a black silk jacket and cocktail dress with me that I still hadn’t even taken out of their dry-cleaning bags. I’m not sure what I had imagined my life in Florida was going to be like, but I guess I must have expected there might be more occasions that involved cocktails. It wasn’t like that at all. I stayed at my parents’ condominium in West Palm Beach—most of the time my parents weren’t there—and every morning I’d get up, listen to the unvarying weather report, slap on some sunscreen, and then go down to Homestead or across to the Fakahatchee or over to Miami with a stop in Hollywood to talk to orchid growers and visit nurseries and see people at the Seminole reservation and take a walk in the woods. It felt as if I were driving a million miles every day. My right index finger got numb from pushing the scan button on the radio, and I started doing all those hot-weather traveling-salesman car things, like spreading a map across the dashboard whenever I parked and bending the sun visors at severe angles to get maximum shade and keeping a few changes of clothes in the car. My nose was always filled with the sugary smell of flowers and the bitter smell of fertilizer and the sour smell of tar melting on the road. At night I’d come back, usually muddy, to West Palm Beach, sometimes with a plant or two in the trunk that someone had pressed upon me, and first I’d look for someone to give the plant to and then I would go for a run on the golf course, watching for alligators and thinking over what I’d heard that day about plants and Florida and life and other things. Most of the restaurants in West Palm Beach stop serving early, so I had to really scamper to get food before
everything was closed. The place open the latest was a sushi bar in a strip mall that was alongside an Australian steakhouse, an Italian café, and a Thai diner. A lot of the time I was in Florida I was in a bit of a daze, a kind of stranger’s daze that comes on when you hear and see and smell and touch so many new things that they all start to smear together into one single feeling of newness and strangeness. I have friends and relatives in Florida, but I didn’t see most of them while I was there; I felt as if I really was in some other exotic place where I didn’t expect or want to recognize anything I’d see.