The Orchid Thief (20 page)

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 bent 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.

Savilla interrupted herself and said we should take a walk in the shadehouse. It was boiling outside. Savilla mentioned that her daughter had moved away from Florida and now lives in Anchorage, Alaska. We walked between the benches of plants, ducking to miss the hanging baskets of orchids. A turtledove was nesting in one of the baskets and watched us with its calm round eye, purring like a cat. The bird’s tail had a neon-orange stripe on it that looked unnatural. “I did that,” Savilla said, pointing to the bird. “I spray-painted the stripe on her when she first came to nest, because I want to keep track of the bird and see if she returns to her basket. With her stripe now I won’t mix her up with any other little bird.” We dallied. Savilla pointed out things she wanted me to see—a champion
Vanda
, an iridescent fern, a frizzy little orchid she’d collected as a teenager. I loved all of them. The leaves on her plants were glossy and full, as if they’d been shampooed and conditioned. The late-day light made the pink and purple blooms look incandescent and the red ones look like emergency flares. Savilla said we should go peek at the ghost orchid, and I got so eager I thought I would burst. We walked under the purring turtledove and around the side of the house to the mango tree. There, I expected to finally see my first ghost orchid flower. The plant’s green roots were spread on the trunk in the kind of starry web pattern that forms when you throw a rock through a window. I could see right away that none of the plants were flowering, and I
felt the air leak out of me in disappointment. One clump of roots did have a tiny raised pale-green bump that Savilla said would become a flower in a month or two. I ran my fingers up and down the smooth, rubbery orchid roots and up and down the nubbly mango bark, and then we went back in the house. Savilla opened a small file box and pulled out the index cards on which she records information about all the wild plants she’s collected. She handed me two cards. One said “Tiny Ghost
Harrisella porrecta
Collected 5/89 Big Cypress” and the other said
“Polyrrhiza lindenii
5/89 Collected Big Cypress.” These were the plants that were on her mango tree.

She put the index cards away and said there was one last chapter in the story of the seedpod. It takes about eight months for orchid seeds to germinate, and eight months after her seedpods were stolen Savilla received a letter from the curious man. “It was around Christmas time,” she said. “But it wasn’t a Christmas card, it was just a note. I first thought it was awful strange not even to say Merry Christmas. It just said, ‘Dear Savilla, I hope you’ve gotten over the tragic loss of your seedpod. Call me when there’s another.’ Isn’t that peculiar?” Her theory is that since she had hesitated before she agreed to sell the man a pod he had suspected that she would change her mind again, so he had decided to steal a pod before that happened. She figures that he had sneaked into her yard one night, stolen one pod and accidentally broken the other, then had tried to germinate the seeds, waited eight months, realized that the seeds weren’t going to grow, and so he had written Savilla a note just to seem friendly and also to con her for another seedpod. She never called him after she got the letter, but she still keeps his business card taped to one of her kitchen cabinet doors. She has asked around about him, and none of the orchid
people she knows have ever heard of the man. She assumes that she will never hear from him again.

—

One of the most notorious plant crimes in Florida took place in the spring of 1990, when someone broke into a shadehouse at R. F. Orchids and stole $150,000 worth of prize-winning orchids. Many of the stolen orchids were irreplaceable. Many were show plants that had won the American Orchid Society’s highest honors and were used as stud plants—big, vigorous specimens with deluxe pedigrees used for breeding and cloning. The break-in was big news among orchid growers and collectors because it was probably the biggest-ever orchid theft in Florida and maybe the biggest-ever in the United States, and it was definitely the biggest-ever theft of such special plants. The fact that it happened at R. F. Orchids made it even more newsworthy, because R. F. Orchids is one of the best and most successful nurseries in south Florida, and its owner, Robert Fuchs, is a grower everybody seems to know.

Bob Fuchs has been a full-time commercial grower only since 1985, but the Fuchs family has been involved with plants for three generations. The first Fuchs to come to Florida was Bob’s great-grandfather Charles, who had been a baker in Milan, Tennessee. In 1912, when Charles was forty-eight, he developed malaria. His doctor advised him to move south. A friend of Charles’s happened to be on his way to look at land in south Florida and invited Charles to come along, but he declined because the circus was in Milan that week and he didn’t want to miss it. A few weeks later he changed his mind and caught up with his friend in Homestead, Florida. In 1912 Homestead was not particularly developed. There were hardly any houses, no restaurants, no refrigerators, only a couple of telephones, and whatever telephone
wires there were had been strung up on pine trees. Charles and his friend decided to go for a walk around the area. The walk lasted ten days, and they never stepped out of piney woods the entire time. Charles fell in love with the land, so he mailed his family in Tennessee a box of Florida kumquats to show them his enthusiasm. No one in the Fuchs family had ever seen kumquats before, so they thought Charles had sent them strange little oranges. When Charles got back to Tennessee, he and his wife sold most of their belongings and their bakery business and arrived in Miami with just their children, their clothing, and two live chickens. Charles had bought a house for them in Homestead while he was on his trip. When the family arrived they found the house rough, dark, and filled with ants and fleas. The roads around the house were bumpy and narrow. After the family settled in, Charles’s oldest sons, Charlie and Fred, would ride their motorcycles to market every Sunday and go shopping. One time the boys bought some coconuts at the market and were carrying them tucked under their shirts so they could have both hands free to steer their motorcycles. On the ride home they hit some wild coconuts that were lying on the road. They were thrown off their bikes and sustained injuries from the store-bought coconuts under their shirts. Charles tried to make a living as a farmer when they first got to Florida, but the soil in Homestead was just a thin crust of sandy soil on top of hard coral rock. To plant something, you had to first blast a hole in the ground with dynamite. Charles finally gave up farming. He went back to baking and soon developed a recipe for a soft white sandwich loaf he named Cream Bread. Cream Bread became the most popular bread in Florida, and the Fuchs bakery eventually grew into a prosperous national business called Holsum Bakery.

In the 1920s, when Charles’s son Fred—Bob Fuchs’s grandfather—was first on his own, life in much of America was starting to look modern, but south Florida was still wild, even wilder than the West. It was unexplored and choked with jungle. The minutes of the American Orchid Society’s trustee meeting in 1921 note that a few trustees “gave some interesting accounts of their efforts to locate native orchids [in Florida] and the difficulties in trying to get them out of the dense woods—in some cases far removed from the hearts of men.” Even they regarded the Florida swamp with dread, as if it were an animal that could eat you alive. Only twenty years earlier it was considered reckless to try to cross south Florida. When an adventurer named Hugh Willoughby crossed the Everglades in a canoe in 1898, he was regarded with stupefaction. In his journal Willoughby wrote that he dined on fried blue herons and lobsters and cabbage-palm salads accompanied by the bacon, lemonade, and chewing gum he had brought along. He had planned to sleep on an air mattress, but it didn’t work out. “The experiment was a failure, and ended by my sleeping on [the mattress] without blowing it up, as whenever I would turn over it would roar like an alligator, and it bulged so in the middle that I would constantly fall off.” That he made it out alive at all astonished Willoughby’s friends. “Since returning home I have frequently been asked, Did you not suffer fever? Were you not made ill by your exposure in that terrible, malarious swamp? I reply that during the entire winter I did not have a single ache or pain, with the exception of an accident which befell me on the Florida Reefs, in which the bone of my nose was half cut through.”