The Orchid Thief (19 page)

“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.

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.

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:

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:

—

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 regularly 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.