Free The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean Page A

languish. They will produce a flower and a seedpod, maybe, and then rest for months at a time. A pollinated orchid seed will mature into a flowering plant in about seven years. Over time, an orchid will wither away in back but it will keep growing from the front. It has no natural enemies except bad weather and the odd virus. Orchids are one of the few things in the world that can live forever. Cultivated orchids that aren’t killed by their owners can outlive their owners and even generations of owners. Many people who collect orchids designate an orchid heir in their wills, because they know the plants will outlast them. Bob Fuchs of R. F. Orchids has some plants in his nursery that were discovered by his late grandfather in South America at the turn of the century. Thomas Fennell III, of Fennell Orchids, has plants that his grandfather collected when he was a young man orchid-hunting in Venezuela. Some orchids at the New York Botanical Garden have been living in greenhouses there since 1898.
    Orchids first evolved in the tropics, but they now grow all over the world. Most of them spread from the tropics as seeds that were lifted and carried on air currents. A hurricane can carry billions of seeds thousands of miles. Orchidseeds blown from South America to Florida will drop in swimming pools and barbecue pits and on shuffleboard courts and gas stations, on roofs of office buildings and on the driveways of fast-food restaurants, and in hot sand on a beach and in your hair on a windy day, and those will be swept away or stepped on or drowned without being felt or seen. But a few might drop somewhere tranquil and wet and warm, and some of those seeds might happen to lodge in a comfortable tree crotch or in a crack on a stone. If one of those seeds encounters a fungus that it can use for food, it will germinate and grow. Each time a hurricane hits Florida, botanists wonder what new orchids might have come in with it. At the moment, they are waiting to see what was blown in by Hurricane Andrew. They will know the answer around the seventh anniversary of the storm, when the seeds that landed will have sprouted and grown.
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    Nothing in science can account for the way people feel about orchids. Orchids seem to drive people crazy. Those who love them love them madly. Orchids arouse passion more than romance. They are the sexiest flowers on earth. The name “orchid” derives from the Latin
orchis
, which means testicle. This refers not only to the testicle-shaped tubers of the plant but to the fact that it was long believed that orchids sprang from the spilled semen of mating animals. The British Herbal Guide of 1653 advised that orchids be used with discretion. “They are hot and moist in operation, under the dominion of Venus, and provoke lust exceedingly.” In Victorian England the orchid hobby grew so consuming that it was sometimes called “orchidelirium”; under its influence many seemingly normal people, once smitten with orchids, became less like normal people and more like John Laroche. Even now, there is something delirious in orchid collecting. Everyorchid lover I met told me the same story—how one plant in the kitchen had led to a dozen, and then to a backyard greenhouse, and then, in some cases, to multiple greenhouses and collecting trips to Asia and Africa and an ever-expanding orchid budget and a desire for oddities so stingy in their rewards that only a serious collector could appreciate them—orchids like the
Stanhopea
, which blooms only once a year for at most one day. “The bug hits you,” a collector from Guatemala explained to me. “You can join A.A. to quit drinking, but once you get into orchids you can’t do anything to kick the habit.” I didn’t own any orchids before I went down to Florida, but Laroche always teased me and said that I’d never get through a year around orchid people without getting hooked. I didn’t want to get hooked—I didn’t have the room or the patience to have