Orchid Thief FROM OUR EDITORS
The Barnes & Noble Review
Stealing Beauty
A friend of mine recently summed up the lavish lifestyle of his new boss by revealing that "she employs an orchid consultant!" At the time, this seemed like the strange and decadent quirk of a Silicon Valley millionaire. However, after reading Susan Orlean's engaging and informative The Orchid Thief, I realize that my friend's boss is only one of many swept up by an intense devotion to the fragile blossom. As one besotted collector says, "You can join A.A. to quit drinking, but once you get into orchids you can't do anything to kick the habit."
What is it about this particular flower? Why can a single plant sell for more than $25,000? Why does Kew Gardens "display its orchids behind shatterproof glass, surrounded by surveillance cameras the way Tiffany's displays its jewels"?
Perhaps it's sex. Orlean describes orchids as the Brad Pitt of blossoms — "the sexiest flowers on earth!" As early as 1653, the British Herbal Guide warned that orchids are "hot and moist...under the dominion of Venus, and provoke lust exceedingly." Victorian women were forbidden to own the suggestive-looking treasures.
Or perhaps it's strength. Charles Darwin studied his "beloved orchids" as the pinnacle of evolutionary transformation.
Whatever the reason for their particular appeal, orchids, since their arrival in America in 1838, have come to symbolize elegance. Yet Orlean uncovers the rough drama behind the display of a flower associated with genteel wealth. She recounts tales of paid professional hunters who met their deaths throughdrowning,fever, and murder in locales like Bhamo, Myanmar, Panama, and Ecuador. In Florida, Orlean meets an amusing husband-and-wife poaching team who boast of their illegal pursuits: "We had more situations than Indiana Jones! Butch Cassidy is bullshit compared to the adventures we had!"
Florida, it turns out, is a hotbed for the shady side of orchid mania, and it is there that Orlean meets the "thief" of her title. John Laroche is a reckless iconoclast, a self-described "shrewd bastard," an orchid breeder who joyfully cooks seeds in his microwave. "Every time I'd make a new hybrid, it felt so cool...I felt a little like God!" After the wealthy Seminole tribe hires him to run a nursery, he concocts a grandiose get-rich scheme: get a rare "ghost" orchid from the Fakahatchee Strand State Preserve and clone it. The slight hitch is that, under Florida's Endangered Species law, it's illegal to collect wild orchids. The Seminoles, however, consider themselves at war with America; they call themselves the Unconquerable. Laroche enlists a few members to commit the actual theft, assuming Native Americans are exempt from government law. After stuffing 200 orchids into pillowcases, Laroche and his cohorts are arrested, and Laroche is convicted.
Orlean hopes Laroche will offer her insight into orchid mania, and he makes a lively, contrary companion as he guides her through Florida's often bizarre botanical subculture. In Palm Beach mansions and low-rent bungalows, at conferences, galas, and greenhouses, she is introduced to devotees who regale her with accounts of rivalries and discoveries, of lives both ruined and enlightened by a passion for "the most compelling and maddening of all collectible living things."
Determined not to succumb to the flower lust, Orlean does succumb. In the end, she makes a heart-of-darkness trek into the frightening Fakahatchee swamp. As Orlean reveals her own desire to find the elusive white flower, orchid mania resonates as a metaphor for any obsession. Fanatic behavior, she suggests, is really admirable optimism. "They sincerely loved something, trusted in the perfectibility of some living thing...were convinced that certain things were really worth dying for; believed that they could make their lives into whatever they dreamed."
Margot Towne is a freelance writer living in New York.
—Barnesandnoble.com
FROM THE PUBLISHER
The orchid thief in Susan Orlean's true story of beauty and obsession is John Laroche, a renegade plant dealer and sharply handsome guy, in spite of the fact that he is missing his front teeth and has the posture of al dente spaghetti. In 1994, Laroche and three Seminole Indians were arrested with rare orchids they had stolen from a wild swamp in south Florida that is filled with some of the world's most extraordinary plants and trees. Laroche had planned to clone the orchids and then sell them for a small fortune to impassioned collectors. After he was caught in the act, Laroche set off one of the oddest legal controversies in recent memory, which brought together environmentalists, Native American activists, and devoted orchid collectors. The result is a tale that is strange, compelling, and hilarious.
SYNOPSIS
John Laroche is a sharply handsome guy, in spite of the fact that he is missing all his teeth, has the posture of al dente spaghetti and the nervous intensity of someone who wins a lot of video games. He is also an orchid thief, who, along with three Seminole Indians, was arrested with rare orchids they had stolen out of a place called the Fakahatchee Strand State Preserve, a wild swamp in South Florida filled with extraordinary plants and trees, including some that don't grow anywhere else in the world.
One of those rare plants is called the ghost orchid, which John Laroche planned on cloning and then selling to impassioned collectors for a small fortune. New Yorker writer Susan Orlean was so fascinated by Laroche -- "the most moral, amoral man I've ever met," she writes -- that she
followed him through the swamps and into the eccentric world of Florida's most obsessed plant collectors, a subculture of aristocrats, enthusiasts, and smugglers whose passion for plants is all-consuming. Along the way, Orlean learns the history of orchid collecting, discovers an unusual pattern of plant crimes in Florida, and spends time with Laroche's partners in crime, a tribe of Seminole Indians who are still at war with the United States.
Fascinating, funny, and bizarre, The Orchid Thief is a truly memorable and original work of nonfiction.
FROM THE CRITICS
Steve Silk - Fine Gardening
Thievery is one thing, but any gardener swept away by the beauty of a plant can understand obsession, especially when it takes the form of an absolute, unbearable need to possess some delicate charm. And that obsession to own runs deep in those consumed by the surreal beauty of orchids. Susan Orlean explores the obsessive nature of those passions in this fascinating story of treachery, greed, jealousy, and lust among orchid hunters and collectors in South Florida. It's a tale rife with fascinating characters, exotic locales, and oddities of all kinds.
Sally Eckhoff - Salon
Susan Orlean, a New Yorker essayist, is fond of leafing through small-town newspapers. She knew she was on to something when she tripped over the following odd combination of words in a Florida daily: "swamp," "orchids," "Seminoles," "cloning," "arrest." The tiny news item, about an upcoming hearing for an accused rare-plant poacher, had "cool story" written all over it. And so, Orlean, a pale and completely unpretentious redhead who makes Maxfield Parrish's models look like she-bears, took off for Naples, Fla., to investigate. The scene was not exactly what she expected. Soon she was standing hip-deep in the steaming Fakahatchee Swamp beside the very man the fuss was all about, a driven, eccentrically charming weirdo who struck her as handsome despite his lack of teeth. Their quarry: the rare polyrrhiza lindenii, or ghost orchid, which is federally protected and grows nowhere else in the world.
John Laroche, the orchid thief, had been trying to spirit several pillowcases full of ghost orchids out of the swamp when he was arrested. That's how he first made the papers. His three Seminole assistants were supposed to legitimize the theft, since the Fakahatchee is Seminole land. It's not surprising that he'd risk his neck in order to snag such booty. Propagating and selling ghost orchids -- as the botanically savvy Laroche was fully able to do -- would have made him very rich. What's especially strange about The Orchid Thief -- and it becomes increasingly fascinating as the story progresses -- is what a big deal orchids are. There's a rollicking history of orchidmania in here, if you can imagine such a thing, and a series of cameos depicting nurserymen and international smuggling. Ultimately, Laroche turns out to be just another nut in a long line of orchid nuts.
Orlean's buoyant, self-assured style makes the journey fun, especially when she's looking at the plants themselves, which are astonishing in their variety. "There are species that look like butterflies, bats, ladies' handbags, bees, swarms of bees, female wasps, clamshells, roots, camel hooves, squirrels, nuns dressed in their wimples, and drunken old men," she writes, particularly dazzled by a flower that looks like a pig on a swizzle stick. "People say a ghost orchid in bloom looks like a flying white frog -- an ethereal and beautiful flying white frog." Are we going to get to see one? There's real suspense around this question, and it lasts until the very last page.
Newsday
Damp heat, bugs, wild hogs, snapping turtles, poisonous snakes — and orchids...Wouldn't have missed it.
Ted Conover
Stylishly written, whimsical yet sophisticated, quirkily detailed...It shows Orlean's gifts in full bloom. —The New York Times Book Review
Christopher Lehmann-Haupt - The New York Times
...[A]rtful....her orchid story turns out to be distinctly "something more"....Ms. Orlean's portrait..allows the reader to discover...acres of opportunity where intriguing things can be found. Read all 15 "From The Critics" >
WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING
The finest piece of nonfiction I've read in years: characters so juicy and wonderfully weird they might have stepped out of a novel, except these people are real. — James W. Hall
Orlean's prose is always lucid, lyrical, and deceptively comfortable, but with The Orchid Thief, she's in danger of launching a national epidemic of orchid mania. — Katherine Dunn
Orlean has crafted a classic tale of tropic desire, steamy and fragrant and smart and entertaining. — Bob Shacochis
Susan Orlean writes like a dream. The Orchid Thief is a horticultural page-turner, quite possibly the first of its kind. — Michael Pollan
Hot orchids are the starting point of Susan Orlean's account of plants and
people obsessed with them in the weird world that is south Florida. Along
the way she meets Seminoles, alligators, and a variety of crazy white men.
The Orchid Thief provides further, compelling evidence that truth is
stranger than fiction. In this case, it makes most entertaining reading. — Andrew Weil
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