The Orchid Thief (21 page)

Florida was a different kind of wild than Western wild. The pioneers out west were crossing wide plains and mountain
ranges that were too open and endless for one set of eyes to take in. Traveling west across those vacant and monumental spaces made human beings look lonely and puny, like doodles on a blank page. The pioneer-adventurers in south Florida were traveling
inward
, into a place as dark and dense as steel wool, a place that already held an overabundance of living things. The Florida pioneers had to confront what a dark, dense, overabundant place might have hidden in it. To explore such a place you had to vanish into it. I would argue that it might be easier to endure loneliness than to endure the idea that you might disappear.

—

Fred Fuchs was as good a baker as his father and occasionally helped out at Holsum, but he really preferred to work outside. As soon as he was on his own he became a farmer and an outdoorsman. He raised hogs and grew okra and developed a hardy and delicious species of avocado called the Fuchs Avocado. He liked to hunt in the Everglades with the Seminoles who lived nearby. He was big and strong and fond of eating raw deer meat. He and a few other men—Tom Fennell, Sr., Bill Osment, Captain C. C. von Paulsen, Raleigh Burney—were the great swamp explorers of their generation and the last generation to have so much of south Florida left to penetrate. Now, especially when I am sitting in line at a tollbooth on the Florida Turnpike, and the tile-roofed town houses spread in every direction look like the world’s biggest casserole of scalloped potatoes, I am astounded by the lives of Fred Fuchs and his fellow adventurers—that they had lives in which they slept on regular mattresses, had cars, and went to the movies, and yet still could walk just a few miles into the swamps behind their houses and find things never before seen or imagined. In the swamps Fred found many unusual things. In the Fakahatchee he found the cannonball
that supposedly killed Chief Tallahassee. In the Everglades he found a recording of “Yes, We Have No Bananas” in an old Indian camp in an abandoned grove of sugarcane and banana trees. He began collecting orchids around 1935 and took probably tens of thousands from the swamps, including fifteen or twenty new species. He found and named dozens of new air plant species. He also collected tree snails and trees. He was particularly impressed by royal palm trees, the Fakahatchee’s tufty-topped palm that is seen in this country only in south Florida. Because royal palms hardly ever fall down, Fred decided to plant a row of fourteen on his property. In the hurricane of 1945 most of Fred’s farm was blown away. He and his wife survived by tying themselves to one of those royal palm trees. In 1947, which came to be known in south Florida as the Year It Wouldn’t Stop Raining, gallons of rain fell and washed his farm clean, but Fred didn’t lose a single tree.

Fred’s son Freddie—Bob Fuchs’s father—also had a knack for discovery. He once tumbled into a deep hole in Sykes Hammock, a hardwood forest that had sprung up when primeval oceans first retreated and exposed south Florida twelve thousand years ago. While Freddie was stuck in the hole he noticed a rare fern that was thought to have become extinct since Dr. Charles Torrey Simpson last sighted it in 1903. Freddie went orchid hunting with his father, Fred, as soon as he was able to walk. Usually Fred would tie a rope around Freddie’s waist so he wouldn’t lose him in the mud. When Freddie was a teenager he helped out on the family farm by stuffing ground pork into sausage casings. When he grew up, he became the postmaster of Naranja, the town next to Homestead, and ran an orchid business on the side. By that time much of the Homestead area had been cleared and cultivated and you couldn’t even
dream
anymore about
walking ten days through unbroken pine woods. Orchid hunters who came to south Florida had to pierce deeper and deeper into the woods to find anything unusual. Freddie was tall and strapping and adventurous. He was happy to tramp through the inner acres of the Fakahatchee, the Big Cypress, and the Everglades to find orchids, and he later went orchid hunting in almost every single country in South America and the West Indies.

Bob Fuchs, Freddie’s son, is now fifty years old. He started with plants when he was little—he had his own bench of orchids in his father Freddie’s greenhouse and his own collection of African violets. When Bob was thirteen, he went on his first international orchid-hunting trip with Freddie in the Dominican Republic. The trip was supposed to begin in Santo Domingo, but their plane ran low on fuel and landed in Santiago instead. Authorities were suspicious of this unplanned landing, so they sent fully armed soldiers to meet the plane. When the Fuches climbed down to the tarmac, Freddie offered the soldiers a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken as a goodwill gesture. This apparently pleased them because they allowed Freddie and Bob to stay and collect for three days. When Bob was nineteen he discovered a new species in Nicaragua, which he registered as
Schomburgkia fuchsii
with the Royal Horticultural Society. His parents gave him a greenhouse as a high school graduation gift. Bob didn’t go directly into the orchid business. Instead he went to college, got an art degree, and became a junior high school art teacher in Homestead, In 1970, while he was still teaching, he set up a small orchid business in Naranja on his grandparents’ property. He called it R. F. Orchids, because his father, Freddie, was still operating his business, Fuchs Orchids. In 1984, a flower of Bob’s called
Vanda
Deva ‘Robert’ won the grand champion award at the Miami World Orchid
Conference and brought him fame in the orchid world. After that victory Bob retired from teaching and went into the orchid business full-time.

The first time I met Bob was the night before the annual South Florida Orchid Show was going to open at the Miami Convention Center. Exhibitors build their displays the night before the show opens, and I was at the Convention Center with Martin watching him put together the Motes Orchids display. Martin and Bob Fuchs don’t like each other, largely because both are vanda men and they have very different philosophies about petal shape and size and because businessmen are naturally competitive, and because they just don’t like each other. Nonetheless Martin said I should meet Bob because Bob is an important orchid person. During a break, Martin led me over to the R.F. display and made the introductions. Bob turned out to be a striking person. He looked as if he was at least six feet tall and had a fit, husky, high school linebacker’s build. He was absolutely, completely not tan. His hair was peach-colored and brushy, and he had a fluffy mustache and squinty blue eyes. He was the only person in the south Florida orchid world who was regularly described to me as being very handsome.

Just then, in fact, several women were twittering around trying and failing to get his attention. One of them was saying, “Bob, Bob, did you know the word ‘fuchsia’ came from the name of your family?” and another one was calling out, “Bob, Bob, I need to ask you about that vanda.…” Bob ignored them because he was watching his mother, who was heading toward us dragging a three-foot-long piece of driftwood that he wanted to add to his display. The women kept chattering. He kept ignoring them and instead turned and pointed to the side of the display and said, “Mother,
please
. I want the driftwood
here
.”

Everyone I met in the orchid world knew of Bob Fuchs. Some raved about him and said they considered him the king of the orchid world. Other people I asked would take deep breaths and release the air very slowly and then say that Bob was controversial. After a while I began to see this as a polite way to say that these people hated him, or at the very least that he made them unhappily jealous. I figured out right away why some people hated him—he is brassy and opinionated and has at times gone out of his way to be argumentative, and apparently his philosophy about orchid breeding is not everyone’s cup of tea. The list of what is jealous-making about him is also long—that he is from a family of Florida orchid aristocracy, that his business is very successful, that he wins a lot of awards, that the public loves his flowers and loves his displays, that he knows how to cultivate customers almost as well as he cultivates orchids. Or just go to his house! If you like flowers, or fluorescent-feathered exotic birds, or a perfect turquoise swimming pool with a vanda orchid mosaic in the middle, or a coral-rock pond with a waterfall and a special kind of dappled fish that flash to the surface of the pond when you feed them, or a beautiful wooden grandstand where you can sit and watch the waterfall and the fish, or a dramatic, airy house filled with antique Limoges and Royal Worcester orchid porcelains and fine furniture and trophy heads of African game and a Fabergé egg of gold and rubies with a tiny jeweled orchid sculpture for its yolk, or a front yard that opens onto a path leading to a spick-and-span nursery of seven greenhouses filled with a hundred thousand candy-colored flowers, you would probably like his house. One afternoon after the Miami show I went out to Bob’s, and after he showed me around he led me over to a grassy patch beside one of the shadehouses where there was a huge chikee hut—the hut must have been the size of four
hotel rooms—and we sat down at some kind of lovely table on some lovely chairs, and beside us were terra-cotta pots of ‘Miss Joaquin’ orchids with their pencil-thin leaves, and above us were a couple of ceiling fans going
chuk-chuk-chuk
as the blades flicked around, and the ice in our lemonade was clicking and sparkling, and behind Bob was a flow of green grass and green palm fronds and the blur of green in his shadehouses and above all that green was the blank blue Homestead sky, and from the west a breeze lifted and dropped pieces of Bob’s blond hair like an idle shopper, and from behind us came the sound of cars rumbling over the gravel of his driveway and then sighing to a stop, and then came the clunk of an expensive car door opening and shutting, and then, not too long after, the tweeting of a cash register inside the shop, and for a long time I didn’t want to say anything—I just wanted to sink into the greenness and the accidental melodies and the rich, hot laziness of the day. Bob finally started talking, and said he didn’t know what made people so jealous of him, but at that moment, in that big breezy chikee hut, with that green plushness all around us, I did.

—

Bob Fuchs’s fame peaked at the World Orchid Conference that was held in Miami in 1984. World conferences are held in a different city once every three years. They have been held in Glasgow, Tokyo, Honolulu, St. Louis, Singapore, and Long Beach. Miami hosted it only once, in 1984, and drew a record number of exhibitors from Florida and from all over the world. Scores of awards are given out at an orchid conference, but the one an orchid person would really dream about is the award given to the single best orchid in the show. To win that award at the world’s biggest show, especially in Miami—arguably the capital of American orchid growing
and collecting—would be the equivalent of winning a gold medal at the orchid Olympics. The award for the best orchid at the 1984 World Orchid Conference in Miami went to
Vanda
Deva ‘Robert,’ owned by Bob Fuchs.
Vanda
Deva ‘Robert’ is a brilliant red orchid with a small blackish lip and a speck of yellow in the center and large petals that are tessellated with blood-colored veins. The flower is full and round. Its deep color is luscious and sexy, but at the same time there is something about its shape and aspect that makes it look a little like a teddy bear. ‘Robert’ is unforgettable because it is extremely pretty, and because it won the biggest award at the biggest show in the world when the show was last held in this country, and because after it won it was used to breed thousands of other extremely pretty orchids, and because it made Bob Fuchs a star. It is also unforgettable because the success of
Vanda
Deva ‘Robert’ probably marks the moment when ill will between Bob Fuchs and another grower named Frank Smith began.

Frank Smith is a man about Bob’s age who owns his own well-known and successful Florida nursery, Krull-Smith Orchids, which is in Apopka, near Disney World. Frank Smith is an accredited orchid judge and has also won many awards for his plants at shows. He and Bob Fuchs are competitors, but the ill will between them was more than ordinary competition. What had happened after the World Orchid Conference was that Bob had his spectacular win with
Vanda
Deva ‘Robert’ and decided to quit teaching junior high and go into the orchid business full-time. From the beginning he seemed to have a way of getting on some people’s nerves. An elderly female orchid judge once sued him for a million dollars, asserting that he had defamed her in a South Florida Orchid Society memo. People took heightened delight in beating him at shows. One man whose orchid had triumphed
over him at a show came up to Bob later and said, “Fuchs, do you know how
long
I’ve been waiting to kick your fucking ass?” Before he was growing orchids full-time, Bob had been studying to become an accredited show judge in the south Florida region. Getting accredited is a long process that involves studying and student judging for as many as six years. It is a valued position because judges are respected as great orchid authorities and through their choices they can influence trends in orchid breeding. A judge who favors small round petals, for instance, can give his awards to plants with small, round petals, and that in turn will encourage breeders to aim for small, round-petaled plants as well as increasing the commercial value of the ones that have been winners. In 1983 when Bob finished his requirements, he applied to the American Orchid Society’s judging committee for his accreditation in the south Florida region. His application was rejected. He was told that someone had sent a letter to the committee claiming that Bob had tried to bribe show judges by offering them cuttings from his best plants. The letter was written by Frank Smith. In his letter Frank said he knew exactly what he was talking about because he was one of the judges Bob had tried to bribe.

In 1990 the big robbery took place at R. F. Orchids. The police investigated, but because there were no witnesses and few clues they told Bob that it was unlikely that the orchids or the thief would ever be found. About two days after the break-in, an orchid hobbyist named Robert Perry was touring Florida orchid nurseries with his wife. They stopped at Krull-Smith Orchids, and while they were looking around, Robert Perry noticed a bunch of exceptional-looking plants piled haphazardly in the back of a secluded shadehouse. Among them was a plant Perry fell in love with—a silvery-gray flower with a reddish-purple lip. Because of the way the plants were
piled up, Perry couldn’t reach the silvery orchid, but he could see it well enough to know he had never seen anything like it. On the way out he asked a nursery worker if he could buy a pup—an orchid baby—from the plant, but the worker told him that none of the plants in the pile were for sale. A month later Perry was browsing through an old orchid magazine and saw an R. F. Orchids ad featuring a picture of a silvery flower that looked to him exactly like the flower he had swooned over at Krull-Smith. He believed that an orchid that special was unlikely to be found at more than one nursery. He remembered having heard something or other about a robbery at R. F. Orchids. Perry had never met Bob Fuchs but he decided to call him and tell him he’d seen that same rare orchid at Krull-Smith. A few days later a sheriff, Bob Fuchs, Robert Perry, and Bob’s partner, Mike Coronado, drove to Krull-Smith Orchids in the middle of the night. Perry led the men to the secluded shadehouse. It was now empty. The stack of plants, including that silvery one, was gone. Perry was dumbfounded. As the men were leaving, Mike Coronado wandered into another shadehouse. A moment later he ran back to show the sheriff a plant tag from Fuchs Orchids that he said he had found lying on the floor. The sheriff recorded all the information, but in the end there was not enough to charge anyone with anything.