The Orchid Thief

by Susan Orlean

  I stepped off the shoulder of the road into the swamp without looking; if I had looked, I might not have done it, since stepping off a high bank into deep black water is something I can do only if I don’t think about it too much. I sank up to my knees and then over my knees. Bladderwort and pennywort floating on the water surface looped around my legs. The muck on the bottom was soft, but not soft in a pleasant way—it was mushy-soft, like cereal that had been sitting too long in milk. The ranger set off at a clip, and we waded after her in a line—first me, then Giant #1 and then, a few feet behind him, Giant #2. The ranger mentioned the orchids were in a swamp lake that we would be able to walk through because it was deep but not as deep as some lakes in the Fakahatchee. Deep Lake, for instance, drops ninety-seven feet into the ground. We walked for about ten minutes to a spot where the underbrush opened and you couldn’t see through the water to the floor of the swamp. This was the lake. In the middle of the lake were a few pond apple trees, and the ranger beckoned me over so I could see the orchids that she had attached to them. There were several sawed-off sections of logs attached to branches by baling wire. Laroche had removed the orchids by sawing off sections of the tree limbs they had been attached to because he didn’t want to risk hurting them by prying them off the limbs. The rangers got the orchids back after they had been photographed for evidence, and they left them on their limbs and wired the limbs onto pond apple trees. They’d put them in several locations around the swamp. Here there were two clamshell orchids and one butterfly orchid and one ghost. None of the plants were in bloom—they were just small knots of roots and almond-shaped pseudobulbs, and all but the leafless ghost orchids had light-green tapering leaves. The baling wire was wrapped a couple of times around the trees to hold the limbs securely. It was a crazy-looking concoction, but so far the orchids hadn’t died.

  To get a good look at the orchids we had to walk from thigh-high water into waist-high and deeper. It was a good time for me to recite to myself the section of the Fakahatchee Strategic Plan that states, “The preserve attracts visitors with an affinity for totally undeveloped areas, who enjoy strenuous hikes and have no aversion to wading hip-deep in a swamp.” When the four of us were gathered by the tree, the ranger finally introduced me to the giants and said they were in the inmate work-release program of Copeland Road Prison, just down the road from the Fakahatchee—I had passed it on my way in. Both of the men were bashful and spoke in tiny, mumbly voices. After we were introduced I noticed that both of them were carrying three-foot-long machetes. I’m not sure how I hadn’t seen the machetes before that, but maybe it was because the men had been wading behind me most of the way. I hate hiking with convicts carrying machetes. We stood in the lake for a while and every now and then one or the other or both of them would raise their machetes and then smash them into the water with a frightful, squeamish look on their faces. The speed of their swings was ferocious, and the machetes smashing against the water sounded like someone getting spanked. The ranger leaned over and whispered to me that she had given the men the machetes because they were both terrified of snakes and had refused to get into the swamp without some protection. After she gave them the machetes they had agreed to get in, but even heavily armed they were as jumpy as rabbits and stood holding their hands stiff and high above the water. Every time a bubble would rise to the surface of the lake or a tree would drop a leaf or a bird would peep, the giants and I would panic. When I panicked I froze. When one of the giants panicked he would pop up nervously and then the other one would pop up nervously too, and the water displaced by their combined weight rolled in silky waves across the lake. The cold black water slapped at my belly button every time they would pop up and down. The swamp was hot and hushed except for all the splashing and the smack of the giants’ machetes against the water. You could disappear in a place like this, really disappear, into one of these inky sinkholes or in the warm muck under the thick brush. No one could find you in a place like this once you sank in. Just then I got extremely curious but decided to wait until we were out of the swamp and in a secure government vehicle before I asked the giants what they were in prison for.

  Anyone Can Grow Orchids

  I told a famous Florida orchid man I’d met named Tom Fennell about Laroche’s plan to make and sell millions of ghost orchids. Tom said he thought Laroche’s idea was insane. “Ghost orchids are sure death,” he said. “You can’t grow them. They’ve reduced themselves through reverse evolution into nothing but roots and flowers, and they can only survive in a perfect microclimate that you just can’t reproduce.” I told him Laroche believed that the ghost orchid would make him a millionaire. “That’s crazy too,” he said. “There might be a hundred real nuts in the United States who would want a ghost orchid. Other than that I don’t think you could sell one at a Food Fair for more than a dime.” As it happened, Tom Fennell was himself a millionaire, although not on account of his orchids. In 1994, right before I met him, he and his wife, Trudy, had won $6.76 million in the Florida state lottery. Two weeks later they closed Orchid Jungle, which the Fennell family had operated near Homestead for more than thirty years.

  Orchid Jungle was a plot of hardwood hammock that Tom’s grandfather bought in 1923. He built a house and an orchid nursery on the property, and then in the remaining jungle he wired tropical orchids onto the trees. He meant for the jungle to just be oversized and unusual family garden, but in 1926 The Miami Herald ran an article about the place and nearly two thousand curious visitors showed up the very next day. Eventually the Fennells turned Orchid Jungle into a tourist attraction. In its prime it attracted fifty thousand people a season and the nursery sold sixty thousand plants a year. But by the time Tom and Trudy won the lottery the Jungle was in trouble. Hurricane Andrew had blown up all thirteen of their greenhouses and blown down half the trees in the jungle part of Orchid Jungle, and the tourists who used to come by the busload for package tours of the local attractions like Orchid Jungle and Monkey Jungle and the Coral Castle just didn’t come to Homestead anymore.

  I did go to Homestead one hot day after my hike with the convicts when Tom invited me to see what remained of the Jungle and to visit some of his orchid-growing neighbors. He also wanted me to meet Snake Boy, the young guy who rented a cottage on the Fennells’ property, but the day I was going to come over, Snake Boy wasn’t around. Tom said that Snake Boy had filled the cottage with interesting reptiles and spiders he had collected. As impressive as Tom made this sound, I was only partly sorry we wouldn’t be able to stop by. I wasn’t crazy about a cottage full of reptiles and spiders, but the part of me that was sorry was the part that was beginning to understand where Laroche fit in the universe. When I had first heard about Laroche I had thought of him as an extremist, a madman with a passion for orchids that was far removed from the average way that people feel about plants, about anything. Then I met more and more orchid people in Florida who were utterly devoted to, utterly engrossed in, their plants. Then I heard about people like Snake Boy, who lives in his little shack with his snakes and bugs, and the old man out on the Tamiami Trail who has a private museum of cypress knees, and the Miami drug dealer named Mario Tabraue, who had been collecting specimens of every endangered plant and animal species in the world. Tabraue had a company called Zoological Imports Unlimited through which he acquired a giraffe, two cheetahs, a two-headed python named Medusa, and dozens of rare birds, as well as $79 million worth of cocaine and marijuana. I wanted to talk to Mr. Tabraue about his enthusiasm for rare creatures, but shortly before I went down to Florida, he had chopped a government drug informant into little pieces and then barbecued him on a backyard grill and consequently was sent to jail for a hundred years for murder and racketeering. I wrote to him in prison but I never heard back. Later I did hear that Tabraue had gotten good-behavior points for testifying against a prominent parrot expert and endangered-animal activist named Tony Silva, who had partnered with his mother to smuggle inside perforated plastic pipes hundreds of very rare hyacin
th macaws from Brazil to the United States. It seemed as if there were hundreds and hundreds of people who were wrapped up in their special passion for the natural world. I still considered Laroche and his schemes exceptional—actually, something beyond exceptional—but he had started to seem more like the endpoint in a continuum. He was the oddball ultimate of those people who are enthralled by non-human living things and who pursue them like lovers.

  —

  The Fennells’ house and what is left of Orchid Jungle are on a quiet road in Homestead with no sidewalks. The house is low and wide. Even though the hurricane had swept so much of the jungle away, everything around the house was still bushy and green and crowding forward toward the street. All the plants were supersized. Giant palm fronds formed a curtain around the house. The foliage plants in the front yard had leaves four feet long and as wide as my thighs. As you come up the Fennells’ driveway it looks as if the jungle is about to gift-wrap the house. Tom met me at the door and led me inside. He is the tallest or second-tallest orchid man I met while I was in Florida, and he has excellent posture and a sort of patrician bearing that makes him look even taller. He is sixtyish and has a forthright jaw and a flurry of thick white hair and an unhurried manner of speech. Since becoming millionaires, he and Trudy have traveled a lot and bought good paintings for their house and forever given up the painful practice of raising a plant and bringing it to its best only to see it carted away by a customer. There were times when pre-millionaire Tom couldn’t afford to be picky, but he couldn’t bear seeing a favorite plant sold to an unfavorite customer, so he would decide at the last minute that the plant was no longer for sale and turn the customer away. It was a practice that horrified his children; his son told me that as soon as he opened his own nursery he established an unsentimental “all plants for sale always to anyone” policy, the single exception being a cattleya his grandfather had collected decades ago in South America.

  Before we went for our drive Tom showed me around the house and pointed out some of his finest plants and told me the Fennell family history. The story begins in Kentucky after the Civil War, where Tom’s great-grandfather was in the horse-harness business. In addition, his great-grandfather was an inventor—twenty of the twenty-two patented styles of horse boots are his inventions, and so is the Fennell tail set, a harness contraption used to hold up a horse’s tail. Most of his inventions are still in use. Great-grandmother Fennell tended her large rose pit, a conservatory, some rare plants from Mexico, and an orchid a missionary friend had sent to her from Madagascar. When he was growing up, their son Lee (Tom’s grandfather) gardened a little. Then he developed tuberculosis and was told to spend more time in moist places like greenhouses, so he started gardening a lot. He eventually opened his own nursery in Cynthiana, a town in the Bluegrass region of Kentucky. He favored orchids and became the first commercial orchid grower west of the Alleghenies. When Lee Fennell opened his business in 1888 an orchid nurseryman couldn’t place orders for plants—he had to go to the jungle and collect them. Lee took an orchid-collecting trip to Colombia and Venezuela in 1888 and brought back over a thousand cattleyas. He went back again in 1891. He also hired English and German orchid hunters to collect for him in jungles around the world. On his trips to South America he discovered a number of new species but refused to list them with England’s Royal Horticultural Society’s official orchid registry because he was Irish and spurned any association with the English.

  The Fennell Orchid Company greenhouses were on the South Fork of the Licking River in Cynthiana and were damaged badly by floods several times. After one especially devastating flood, Lee had to declare bankruptcy. In 1922 he decided to move himself, his family, and his orchids and bromeliads to Florida. He converted three trucks into orchid moving vans and made two round trips from Kentucky to Florida to bring all his flowers south. When Lee bought the land that became Orchid Jungle, South Dade County was still wild. Lee cut a clearing in the thick of it and built a house and a nursery and a plant lab. In his lab he worked on techniques for germinating orchid seeds and eventually developed the now-famous Cake-Pan Method and the Turkish Towel Method. (The Fennells are an inventive family. Years after great-grandfather’s horse boots and Lee’s Cake-Pan Method, Lee’s son Thomas Sr. developed the Butterball Turkey.) In 1926 a huge hurricane blew through the Homestead area, battering Lee’s house and vacuuming the jungle. The family waited out the storm safely in their Studebaker convertible. Then The Miami Herald ran its article and Orchid Jungle was stormed again, this time by thousands of plant lovers. In 1941 Lee Fennell died. His widow, Dorothy, was convinced he had buried money throughout Orchid Jungle, so she spent the next decade digging holes in the property trying to find the hidden treasure. Dorothy and Lee’s son Thomas Sr., who at the time was working in Haiti for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, was convinced that there was no money at all in Orchid Jungle, underground or otherwise, and proposed that the family sell it. At the time, Thomas Sr.’s son Tom—the Tom I was visiting that day in Homestead—was an undergraduate at Harvard. On a visit home he realized he couldn’t stand the thought of selling Orchid Jungle, so he dropped out of college for a few years to help his mother run it. When he went back to Harvard he switched his major from government to biology. In 1949 he came back to Orchid Jungle full-time.

  Tom’s return happened at the same moment Americans were becoming enchanted with orchids. Soldiers saw fantastic tropical species growing in the Pacific, and many of them received an orchid lei in Hawaii on their way home from the war. Rex Stout was publishing his popular mysteries starring the brilliant detective Nero Wolfe, an orchid fancier who visited the ten thousand orchids he kept on the roof of his New York browns tone twice a day, two hours at a time, accompanied by Theodore Horstmann, his personal botanist. In 1951 The Saturday Evening Post ran an article by Philip Wylie called “Anyone Can Raise Orchids.” In the story, Wylie wrote about visiting “the overwhelming spectacle” of Orchid Jungle and then described Fennell’s easy and inexpensive Cake-Pan Method of orchid cultivation, which made the high-priced hobby available to anyone. At the time, an article saying that orchid growing wasn’t the exclusive province of the rich must have been as startling as an article titled “Anyone Can Raise Polo Ponies” would be. Wylie wrote: “Fennell’s ideas are regarded as heresy.… Even the average amateur goes about the business of cultivating orchids with more and costlier equipment than is required for the raising of the average American baby.” The magazine got more responses to Wylie’s story than anything except an earlier article about Pearl Harbor. The Fennells got so many letters after the story ran that they had to hire three secretaries to answer them all. “Everyone wanted to know how to get orchids and how to come to the Jungle,” Tom said. “About a third of the letters actually had blank signed checks in them and just a little note attached saying ‘Please send me some orchids, anything at all.’ ”

  —

  Tom said he wanted to first introduce me to his neighbors and save my tour of Orchid Jungle for the end of the day. We walked through the front yard to his car. It’s funny to even call it a front yard—it was just an open spot in the midst of opulent growth, a bald spot in a carpet. And even the bald spot wasn’t entirely bald. Here and there those incredible foliage plants had sneaked onto the mowed grass. They were so huge that they were like science-fiction plants with monstrous leaves. When Tom wasn’t looking I tried wrapping myself in one. Snake Boy’s dog was bouncing around in the driveway, so as we were leaving Tom pulled up by the cottage to see if Snake Boy might actually be home. Snake Boy wasn’t Tom’s son, but there was something fatherly about Tom’s regard for him. There are many fathers and sons in the plant world, and some surrogate fathers and sons, too. Maybe the reason the passion for orchids lasted within a family for generations was that the fathers instilled in the sons their love of orchids, or maybe there was some instinct about plants that was passed down through a family, like folktales. Tom Fennell was the son and the grandson and the great-grands
on of orchid men, and his own son Tom III was now an orchid man as well. Snake Boy, with his crazy congeniality with insects and plants, almost seemed like a family member, too. The cottage appeared shut tight, so after a moment Tom shrugged and pulled away.

  Everyone drives everywhere in Florida, and if you are an orchid man you do an extra share of driving. Tom used to go to dozens of orchid shows around the country every year. “One year I did seventeen shows,” he said. “I needed two trailers for all the orchids and the display material. I don’t mean little trailers—I mean big ones about sixteen feet long. I drove one and Trudy drove one, and we drove all day and night without stopping because if you stopped, the trailers would get too hot and the orchids would die. And my displays were really something. Now you’re supposed to limit your display to a hundred square feet although no one really does, but back then you could do whatever you wanted. One year I had a six-hundred-square-foot exhibit with a three-level waterfall and dozens of my best plants. One of them had sixteen hundred blooms on it at one of the shows.” I asked what display he was most proud of. He tapped the steering wheel for a minute and then said, “I did a fantastic display one year with a Jack-in-the-Beanstalk theme. I carved Jack out of Styrofoam and dressed him in my son Tommy’s clothes. It was quite impressive.”