by Susan Orlean
The orchid family could have died out like dinosaurs if insects had chosen to feed on simpler plants and not on orchids. The orchids wouldn’t have been pollinated, and without pollination they would never have grown seeds, while self-pollinating simple plants growing nearby would have seeded themselves constantly and spread like mad and taken up more and more space and light and water, and eventually orchids would have been pushed to the margins of evolution and disappeared. Instead, orchids have multiplied and diversified and become the biggest flowering plant family on earth because each orchid species has made itself irresistible. Many species look so much like their favorite insects that the insect mistakes them for kin, and when it lands on the flower to visit, pollen sticks to its body. When the insect repeats the mistake on another orchid, the pollen from the first flower gets deposited on the stigma of the second—in other words, the orchid gets fertilized because it is smarter than the bug. Another orchid species imitates the shape of something that a pollinating insect likes to kill. Botanists call this pseudoantagonism. The insect sees its enemy and attacks it—that is, it attacks the orchid—and in the process of this pointless fight the insect gets dusted with orchid pollen and spreads the pollen when it repeats the mistake. Other species look like the mate of their pollinator, so the bug tries to mate with one orchid and then another—pseudocopulation—and spreads pollen from flower to flower each hopeless time. Lady’s slipper orchids have a special hinged lip that traps bees and forces them to pass through sticky threads of pollen as they struggle to escape through the back of the plant. 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. Some orchids have straight-ahead good looks but have deceptive and seductive odors. There are orchids that smell like rotting meat, which insects happen to like. Another orchid smells like chocolate. Another smells like an angel food cake. Several mimic the scent of other flowers that are more popular with insects than they are. Some release perfume only at night to attract nocturnal moths.
No one knows whether orchids evolved to complement insects or whether the orchids evolved first, or whether somehow these two life forms evolved simultaneously, which might explain how two totally different living things came to depend on each other. The harmony between an orchid and its pollinator is so perfect that it is kind of eerie. Darwin loved studying orchids. In his writings he often described them as “my beloved Orchids” and was so certain that they were the pinnacle of evolutionary transformation that he once wrote that it would be “incredibly monstrous to look at an Orchid as having been created as we now see it.” In 1877 he published a book called The Various Contrivances By Which Orchids are Fertilised by Insects. In one chapter he described a strange orchid he had found in Madagascar—an Angraecum sesquipedale with waxy white star-shaped flowers and “a green whip-like nectary of astonishing length.” The nectary was almost twelve inches long and all of the nectar was in the bottom inch. Darwin hypothesized that there had to be an insect that could eat the unreachable nectar and at the same time fertilize the plant—otherwise the species couldn’t exist. Such an insect would have to have a complementarily strange shape. He wrote: “In Madagascar there must be moths with proboscis capable of extension to a length of ten to twelve inches! This belief of mine has been ridiculed by some entomologists, but we now know from Fritz Müller that there is a sphinx-moth in South Brazil which has a proboscis of nearly sufficient length, for when dried it was between ten and eleven inches long. When not protruded the proboscis is coiled up into a spiral of at least twenty windings … some huge moth with a wonderfully long proboscis could drain the last drop of nectar. If such great moths were to become extinct in Madagascar, assuredly the Angraecum would become extinct.” Darwin was very interested in how orchids released pollen. He experimented by poking them with needles, camel-hair brushes, bristles, pencils, and his fingers. He discovered that parts were so sensitive that they released pollen upon the slightest touch, but that “moderate degrees of violence” on the less sensitive parts had no effect, which he concluded meant that the orchid wouldn’t release pollen haphazardly—it was smart enough to save it for only the most favorable encounters with bugs. He wrote: “Orchids appeared to have been modelled in the wildest caprice, but this is no doubt due to our ignorance of their requirements and conditions of life. Why do Orchids have so many perfect contrivances for their fertilisation? I am sure that many other plants offer analogous adaptatior’s of high perfection; but it seems that they are really more numerous and perfect with the Orchideae than with most other plants.”
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The schemes orchids use to attract a pollinator are elegant but low-percentage. Botanists recently studied one thousand wild orchids for fifteen years, and during that time only twenty-three plants were pollinated. The odds are bad, but orchids compensate. If they are ever fertilized, they will grow a seedpod that is supercharged. Most other species of flowers produce only twenty or so seeds at a time, while orchid pods may be filled with millions and millions of tiny dust-sized seeds. One pod has enough seeds to supply the world’s prom corsages for the rest of eternity.
Some species of orchids grow in the ground and others don’t live in soil at all. The ones that don’t grow in soil are called epiphytes, and they live their lives attached to a tree branch or a rock. Epiphytic orchid seeds settle in a comfortable spot, sprout, grow, dangle their roots in the air, and live a lazy life absorbing rainwater and decayed leaves and light. They aren’t parasites—they give nothing to the tree and get nothing from it except a good place to sit. Most epiphytes evolved in tropical jungles, where there are so many living things competing for room on the jungle floor that most species lose the fight and die out. Orchids thrived in the jungle because they developed the ability to live on air rather than soil and positioned themselves where they were sure to get light and water—high above the rest of the plants on the branches of trees. They thrived because they took themselves out of competition. If all of this makes orchids seem smart—well, they do seem smart. There is something clever and un-plantlike about their determination to survive and their knack for useful deception and their genius for seducing human beings for hundreds and hundreds of years.
Orchids grow slowly. They 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. Orchid seeds 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. B
ut 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. Every orchid 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 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 Monopoly money 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, pistol, and shotgun. “It was the death of his orchids,” his son told a reporter. “That’s where it all began.” Beauty can be painfully tantalizing, but orchids are not simply beautiful. Many are strange-looking or bizarre, and all of them are ugly when they aren’t flowering. They are ancient, intricate living things that have adapted to every environment on earth. They have outlived dinosaurs; they might outlive human beings. They can be hybridized, mutated, crossbred, and cloned. They are at once architectural and fanciful and tough and dainty, a jewel of a flower on a haystack of a plant. The botanical complexity of orchids and their mutability makes them perhaps the most compelling and maddening of all collectible living things. There are thousands and thousands of orchid species. New orchids are being created in laboratories or being discovered every day, and others are nearly unfindable because they exist in tiny numbers in remote places. In a sense, then, the number of orchid species on the planet is uncountable because it is constantly changing. To desire orchids is to have a desire that will never be, can never be, fully requited. A collector who wants one of every orchid species on earth will certainly die before even coming close.
A Mortal Occupation
The great Victorian-era orchid hunter William Arnold drowned on a collecting expedition on the Orinoco River, The orchid hunter Schroeder, a contemporary of Arnold’s, fell to his death while hunting in Sierra Leone. The hunter Falkenberg was also lost, while orchid hunting in Panama. David Bowman died of dysentery in Bogota. The hunter Klabock was murdered in Mexico. Brown was killed in Madagascar. Endres was shot dead in Rio Hacha. Gustave Wallis died of fever in Ecuador. Digance was gunned down by locals in Brazil. Osmers vanished without a trace in Asia. The linguist and plant collector Augustus Margary survived toothache, rheumatism, pleurisy, and dysentery while sailing the Yangtze only to be murdered when he completed his mission and traveled beyond Bhamo. Orchid hunting is a mortal occupation. That has always been part of its charm, Laroche loved orchids, but I came to believe he loved the difficulty and fatality of getting them almost as much as the flowers themselves. The worse a time he had in the swamp the more enthusiastic he would be about the plants he’d come out with.
Laroche’s perverse pleasure in misery was traditional am
ong orchid hunters. An article published in a 1906 magazine explained: “Most of the romance in connection with the cult of the orchid is in the collecting of specimens from the localities in which they grow, perhaps in a fever swamp or possibly in a country full of hostile natives ready and eager to kill and very likely eat the enterprising collector.” 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. A young man commissioned in 1889 to find cattleyas for the English collector Sir Trevor Lawrence walked for fourteen days through jungle mud and never was seen again. Dozens of hunters were killed by fever or accidents or malaria or foul play. Others became trophies for headhunters or prey for horrible creatures such as flying yellow lizards and diamondback snakes and jaguars and ticks and stinging marabuntas. Some orchid hunters were killed by other orchid hunters. All of them traveled ready for violence. Albert Millican, who went on an expedition in the northern Andes in 1891, wrote in his diary that the most important supplies he was carrying were his knives, cutlasses, revolvers, daggers, rifles, pistols, and a year’s worth of tobacco. Being an orchid hunter has always meant pursuing beautiful things in terrible places. From the mid-1800s to the early 1900s, when orchid hunting was at its prime, terrible places were really terrible places, and any man advertising himself as a hunter needed to be hardy, sharp, and willing to die far from home.