The Orchid Thief

“The wild part of Florida is really wild. The tame part is really tame. Both, though, are always in flux: The developed places are just little clearings in the jungle, but since jungle is unstoppably fertile, it tries to reclaim a piece of developed Florida every day. At the same time the wilderness disappears before your eyes: fifty acres of Everglades dry up each day, new houses sprout on sand dunes, every year a welt of new highways rises. Nothing seems hard or permanent; everything is always changing or washing away.”

The geography of Florida is an important part of the story Orlean tells. Here she notes its opposing qualities of wildness and tameness, which are forever shifting. This echoes the changeability of Laroche’s personality. In the same passage, she refers to Florida as a “hybrid,” a word used throughout the book for new varieties of orchids. Little connections like these help to add cohesion to the text.

“Setting up a nursery can be simple if you want it to be, but Laroche managed to make it complicated. He couldn’t bear the thought of having an ordinary nursery with cactus planters and potted palms and Christmas trees. He wanted the Seminole nursery to be dazzling, full of extraordinary things.” 

This quotation also gets to the heart of Laroche’s character. He is not someone who settles for common or average things. Instead, he always sets his sights on unusual, more exciting—and often riskier—goals. This is a quality Orlean notices with other orchid collectors and hunters, such as Lee Moore. Something about their constitution compels them to seek out the less-traveled roads.

“‘Nah,’ Laroche said. ‘I don’t want to collect anything for myself right now. I really have to watch myself, especially around plants. Even now, just being here, I still get that collector feeling. You know what I mean. I’ll see something and then suddenly I get that feeling. It’s like I can’t just have something—I have to have it and learn about it and grow it and sell it and master it and have a million of it.’”

This passage reflects on The Link Between Passion and Obsession. Laroche is asked by an old friend, another grower, whether he is collecting anything new. Laroche’s response speaks to the undeniable urge—“that feeling”—that pushes some people past a certain line to something they cannot fully control. Laroche has recognized this and, since his orchid phase, has tried to keep himself in control of such a compulsion.

“The Fakahatchee has a particular strange and exceptional beauty. The grass prairies in sunlight look like yards of raw silk. The tall, straight palm trunks and the tall, straight cypress trunks shoot up out of the flat land like geysers. It is beautiful the way a Persian carpet is beautiful—thick, intricate, lush, almost monotonous in its richness.”

This passage is an example of Orlean’s vivid writing style that makes full use of comparisons. Similes and metaphors throughout the book conjure heightened images and fresh details in the reader’s mind. She also uses unusual juxtapositions, like in the last line here: richness is not usually associated with monotony, but she successfully pairs the two together. Her deliberatively evocative writing style is another typical component of immersion journalism (See: Background).

“Everyone I was meeting connected to the orchid poaching had circled their lives around some great desire—Laroche had his crazy inspirations and orchid lovers had their intense devotion to their flowers and the Seminoles had their burning dedication to their history and culture—a desire that then answered questions for them about how to spend their time and their money and who their friends would be and where they would travel and what they did when they got there.”

Here Orlean refers to the theme of The Benefits of Community. Different passions and desires give each group a focus and friends with a common interest. It suggests something that may motivate many collectors. It also brings together a disparate group of what Orlean depicts as misfits and loners, giving them a collective identity. When Orlean feels lonely in Florida amid the vast spaces, she envies the collectors with their built-in community.

“Another orchid secretes nectar that attracts small insects. As the insects lick the nectar they are slowly lured into a narrowed tube inside the orchid until their heads are directly beneath the crest of the flower’s rostellum. When the insects raise their heads the crest shoots out little darts of pollen that are instantly and firmly cemented to the insects’ eyeballs but then fall off the moment the insects put their heads inside another orchid plant.”

This quotation shows the level of detail Orlean includes based on her in-depth research. It is part of a passage that conveys the evolution of orchids and their adaptation to attract insects for pollination. She writes about a delicate botanical process using both specialized terms and clear prose that makes it accessible to lay readers.

“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.”

This passage touches on The Link Between Passion and Obsession. Orlean implies that collecting live things like plants adds an irrational aspect to the obsession because of their transitory nature. Collectors seek perfection but can never attain it, because their idea of perfection will never match reality—at least for long—since plants undergo changes and eventually die. This is one reason Laroche states for moving on from orchids: His new passion, creating websites, deals with something inanimate that is not going to perish.

“In 1901 eight orchid hunters went on an expedition to the Philippines. Within a month one of them had been eaten by a tiger; another had been drenched with oil and burned alive; five had vanished into thin air; and one had managed to stay alive and walk out of the woods carrying forty-seven thousand Phalaenopsis plants.”

The author includes historical details like this throughout Chapter 5 to provide context to the intensity surrounding orchid hunting. The 19th century, especially, was full of adventurous tales like this, and she makes the most of them to paint a vivid picture of the times. She saw Laroche as a latter-day version of the Victorian-era hunters, as he loved the difficulties involved in finding and obtaining orchids as much as the plants themselves. It also reflects The Human Desire for Beauty and Uniqueness, which can sometimes only be achieved at great risk.

“Another hunter in New Guinea found some good orchids growing on human remains. He collected the plants and sent them to England still attached to ribs and shinbones. That same year a Dendrobium from Burma was auctioned off at Protheroe’s of London still attached to the human skull on which it had been found.”

Another aspect of obsession is the lengths to which people will go for their collecting passion. Here the author describes an extreme example of this that took place during the height of the collecting craze in the 19th century. The obsession with collecting orchids trumped good sense and common decency in this bizarre case of disturbing human remains just to obtain a flower.

“In Florida, plants are everywhere, like money. Plants are money. Wherever I drove, I passed greenhouses as long as train stations, and potted palms being sold out of the backs of rust-mottled pickup trucks, and Christmas tree farms, and orchid farms, and houseplant farms, and sod farms, and tree-moving companies (CALL US AT 930-TREE!), and signs on light posts saying PALMS CHEAP FOR SALE AHEAD or THIS WAY: MANGO AND BANANA TREES.”

Orlean depicts the state of Florida as an especially important place for plant lovers and collectors. The context of the state’s thriving tree and flower markets—"Plants are money”—illuminates one of the motives people like Laroche have in pursuing collecting: There are sometimes hefty profits to be made.

“Some orchids have been named for their appearances. The ghost orchid has many roots; its official genus name is Polyrrhiza, which is Greek for many roots. A genus with a droopy head and floppy petals was named Corybas, which is the Greek name for the attendants of the goddess Cybele, who accompanied her in wild dances and orgies.”

Here is one example of the motif of sexual references (See: Symbols & Motifs). The flowers themselves have a sensual nature, which is sometimes reflected in their names. Again, Orlean carefully tracks down details like the etymology of names, noting how physical characteristics of plants and associations contributed to the names assigned to them.

“‘You love it even though it’s an ugly little runt,’ Laroche said. ‘It has no flower, it has no foliage, it probably looks just like it does now when it blooms.’ His voice was warm. She nodded. ‘I know why you love it,’ he said. ‘It’s just part of the sickness.’”

This quotation is something Laroche said to a woman at a flower show in Fort Lauderdale that Orlean attended with him. It reflects two of the book’s themes. First, it deals with The Link Between Passion and Obsession—which Laroche insightfully refers to as “the sickness.” This implies it is something beyond one’s control, something that takes hold of those in the throes of it. Second, it touches on The Human Desire for Beauty and Uniqueness. He calls the orchid an “ugly little runt,” but its strangeness is a form of beauty to some. It could also make it unique, and thus unattainable to all but a select few.

“Wild orchids can take a lot of punishment too. After Hurricane Andrew, people found trees that had been slammed down and were dead as doornails and yet orchids on them were still flourishing. Laroche told me that he and his ex-wife used to drive around on orchid-rescue missions all the time. At construction sites they would hunt through the rubbish to look for orchids on trees that had been plowed down and pitched aside. If Laroche could get to the flowers without getting in trouble, he’d pry them off and take them to some nearby woods and attach them to an upright tree.”

Here Orlean notes that orchids have an unexpected strength given their fragility in other ways. Their flowers bloom fleetingly and the plant easily perishes if not given proper conditions, yet they can survive a hurricane that killed much larger plants, or getting knocked down by a bulldozer. What follows about Laroche is also surprising. Orlean mirrors the unexpected aspects of his character by depicting him in a truly generous act of saving orchids by returning them to the wild, showing him in a different light.

“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.’” 

This quotation indicates the cut-throat transactional nature of some collectors. Orlean describes a conversation she had with a grower who attempted to make interesting mutations in flowers by subjecting them to radiation; instead they were deformed and he had to throw them all out. A passion for flowers can be about their beauty and intangible qualities, but it can also be about the commodification of these qualities.

“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.”

As bizarre as Laroche’s crime seems, Orlean discovers that it is not out of keeping with the plant world or with Florida. In terms of the former, it is more support for The Link Between Passion and Obsession and what this leads people to do. As for the state of Florida, she depicts it as kind of a wild west, full of eccentrics and shady characters drawn there by its uncommon opportunities and freewheeling atmosphere.

“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 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.”

Here Orlean describes the house of Bob Fuchs, a well-known orchid and vanda grower, as an example of why people are jealous of him. Her intent is to indicate that he has everything in great quantity—useful, exotic, and meticulous—and no one could ever match him. Fuchs is another example of The Link Between Passion and Obsession.

“I called Lee one humid afternoon when Laroche and his Seminole crew were out collecting waterweeds. Lee sounded careworn on the phone and gave me painstaking directions to his apartment. When he was done he said, ‘By the way, you better come right away. I’m moving to Peru soon. I hate living here.’”

Here Orlean has just called Lee Moore to discuss the international smuggling of plants and his words to her already portray him as another eccentric collector, someone who has tried to pursue get-rich schemes only to end up disillusioned. The Link Between Passion and Obsession can sometimes lead to disappointment for some of the impassioned collectors Orlean meets.

“More and more, I felt that I was meeting people like Lee who didn’t at all seem part of this modern world and this moment in time—the world of petty aggravations and obligations and boundaries, a time of bored cynicism—because how they lived and what they lived for was so optimistic. They sincerely loved something, trusted in the perfectibility of some living thing, lived for a myth about themselves and the idea of adventure, were convinced that certain things were really worth dying for, believed that they could make their lives into whatever they dreamed.”

This passage describes Lee Moore and others like him. Moore was an international smuggler of orchids, but the author credits him with a certain romantic notion of the world that seemed to be of another time. This highlights the themes The Link Between Passion and Obsession and The Human Desire for Beauty and Uniqueness, as many collectors become so obsessed with orchids that they are willing to break conventions—and even laws—to pursue them. By providing details in Chapter 5 of 19th-century exploits, Orlean gives readers the necessary context to understand her idea here.

“He took the vacation anyway. On the day he came back, there was a severance check waiting for him in the nursery office and someone else sitting at his desk. Then and there, he decided he would leave the reservation forever. It would be another one of his unconditional combustive endings, just like the end to his turtle phase and his Ice Age fossil phase—it would be the absolute end to his Indian phase.” 

Here Orlean shows how the patterns of Laroche’s life keep repeating themselves. Since childhood, he had chased one obsession after another, always abandoning former pursuits wholeheartedly. When he gets fired from his job as nursery manager for the Seminole Tribe’s nursery, Laroche predictably states he would have nothing to do with the Seminoles ever again. He even took to buying the cigarettes he chain-smoked at stores off the reservation, despite having to pay more in taxes—notable for someone as cheap as Laroche.

“From the first time I’d heard of Laroche, I had been fascinated by how he managed to find the fullness and satisfaction of life in narrow desires—the Ice Age fossils, the turtles, the old mirrors, the orchids. I suppose that is exactly what I was doing in Florida, figuring out how people found order and contentment and a sense of purpose in the universe by fixing their sights on one single thing or one belief or one desire. Now I was also trying to understand how someone could end such intense desire without leaving a trace. If you had really loved something, wouldn’t a little bit of it always linger?” 

The author attempts to dissect this aspect of Laroche and his obsessions described in the previous quotation. She admits that she does not have the collecting bug, but states that she is fascinated by people who do and tries to understand their point of view. It strikes her as odd after observing Laroche’s love for orchids—something that gave his life meaning—that he could just abandon his various obsessions so thoroughly.

“It was a matter of pride, of professional respect, of personal satisfaction, to win at a show, and it was a matter of money, because plants with show ribbons command higher prices, and also it was a matter of something unimaginably profound—it was a matter of shaping evolution, because plants that win in shows become popular, and other breeders will use them as parents for new hybrids.”

Here Orlean explains the motivations behind growers’ competition at flower shows. They are a mix of various things, but one she notes that has extra power behind it is the chance to influence the future of flowers by creating “parents for new hybrids.” The winning flowers become popular and influence the direction of growing them for commercial sale, so the winner’s variety is used to propagate flowers in the future.

“[D]usk drifted in, and the time passed, and still we roved around the shadehouse picking up plants, smelling things, rubbing fingers on slick leaves, poking thumbs into dirt, and every couple of minutes Dewey and Laroche would pause and both would light cigarettes and stand in front of some delicate green sprig of something, smoking hard and wordlessly admiring it. I wasn’t in any hurry to leave, even though I should have been.”

Here, Orlean inserts herself into the narrative by reflecting upon how she, too, becomes drawn into the world of flowers and can find aspects of beauty in the collectors’ obsessions. She “wasn’t in any hurry to leave,” suggesting that her quest to understand Laroche’s story has led to some newfound admiration of her own for plants and flowers.

“‘It’s not really about collecting the thing itself,’ Laroche went on. ‘It’s about getting immersed in something, and learning about it, and having it become part of your life. It’s a kind of direction.’”

Here Laroche expounds on collecting. It sheds light on the thematic elements of obsession and The Benefits of Community. The act of obsession takes precedence over the collected item itself, he notes. All his money used to go to plants, and collecting became an addiction. On the other hand, he seems to be commenting on the community aspect when he states that collecting gave him a “direction”—it channeled his energy toward something he had in common with others, giving him community as well as a goal.