Free The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean Page B

plants in my apartment, and I suppose I also didn’t want Laroche to feel too smug about his predictive powers. In fact, nearly every orchid grower I talked to insisted on giving me a plant and I was so leery of getting attached that I immediately gave them all away.
    Currently, the international trade in orchids is more than $10 billion a year, and some individual rare plants have sold for more than twenty-five thousand dollars. Thailand is the world’s largest exporter of cut orchids, sending $30 million worth of corsages and bouquets around the world. Orchids can be expensive to buy and expensive to maintain. There are orchid baby-sitters and orchid doctors and orchid boarding-houses—nurseries that will kennel your plants when they’re not in bloom and then notify you when they’ve developed a bud and are ready to take home to show off. One magazine recently reported that a customer of one orchid kennel in San Francisco had so many plants that he was paying two thousand dollars in monthly rent. There are dozens of orchid sites on the Internet. For a while I checked in on “Dr.Tanaka’s Homepage”; Dr. Tanaka described himself as “A comrade who love Paph!” and also as “so bad-looking, I can not show you my photo.” Instead, his homepage had stories about new “splendid and/or marvelous Paphiopedilums in the Recent Orchid Show in JAPAN” and photographs of his greenhouse and his family, including one of his daughter, Paphiopedilum. “Junior high school, 1st year,” he wrote under the picture of a smiling Miss Paphiopedilum Tanaka. “She is at a cheeky age. But I put her name to almost all selected clones of Paphs. First of all, I put ‘Maki’ and the next, ‘Dreamy Maki’, ‘Maki’s Happiness’, etc.” As for his wife, Kayoko, Dr. Tanaka wrote, “Her age is secret. She is worried about developing a middle aged spread as me. She never complain of my growing orchids, Paphiopedilums, and let me do as I like.… Before we have a daughter, I have put my wife’s name to the all of selected clones of my Paphs. But after that, I have forgotten her name entirely.”
    I heard countless stories of powerful orchid devotion during the time I hung around with Laroche. I heard about a collector who had two greenhouses on top of his town house in Manhattan where he kept three thousand rare orchids; the greenhouses had automatic roof vents, gas heaters, an artificial cloud system, and breeze-simulating fans, and he, like many collectors, took vacations separately from his wife so one of them could always be home with the orchids. I heard about Michihiro Fukashima, the man who founded Japan Airlines, who said he found the business world too cruel, so he retired early, turned his assets over to his wife, severed all other ties to his family, and moved to Malaysia with his two thousand orchid plants. He had been married twice before and told a reporter that he felt “he had made his wives unhappy because of his orchid obsession.” Charles Darrow, who invented the game Monopoly, retired with all his Monopolymoney at the age of forty-six to devote himself to gathering and breeding wild orchids. A young Chinese collector, Hsu She-hua, recently described himself as a fanatic and said that even though he had been hauled into court four times for possessing wild orchids he considered it worthwhile.
    Collecting can be a sort of love sickness. If you collect living things, you are pursuing something imperfectible, because even if you manage to find and possess the living things you want, there is no guarantee they won’t die or change. A few years ago, thirty thousand orchids belonging to a man in Palm Beach all died. He blamed methane fumes from a nearby sewage station. He sued the county and received a settlement, but began what his family called “a downhill slide.” He was arrested for attacking his father, then for firing a sixteen-gauge shotgun into a neighbor’s house, then for carrying a concealed knife,