The Orchid Thief

by Susan Orlean

  Savilla interrupted herself and said we should take a walk in the shadehouse. It was boiling outside. Savilla mentioned that her daughter had moved away from Florida and now lives in Anchorage, Alaska. We walked between the benches of plants, ducking to miss the hanging baskets of orchids. A turtledove was nesting in one of the baskets and watched us with its calm round eye, purring like a cat. The bird’s tail had a neon-orange stripe on it that looked unnatural. “I did that,” Savilla said, pointing to the bird. “I spray-painted the stripe on her when she first came to nest, because I want to keep track of the bird and see if she returns to her basket. With her stripe now I won’t mix her up with any other little bird.” We dallied. Savilla pointed out things she wanted me to see—a champion Vanda, an iridescent fern, a frizzy little orchid she’d collected as a teenager. I loved all of them. The leaves on her plants were glossy and full, as if they’d been shampooed and conditioned. The late-day light made the pink and purple blooms look incandescent and the red ones look like emergency flares. Savilla said we should go peek at the ghost orchid, and I got so eager I thought I would burst. We walked under the purring turtledove and around the side of the house to the mango tree. There, I expected to finally see my first ghost orchid flower. The plant’s green roots were spread on the trunk in the kind of starry web pattern that forms when you throw a rock through a window. I could see right away that none of the plants were flowering, and I felt the air leak out of me in disappointment. One clump of roots did have a tiny raised pale-green bump that Savilla said would become a flower in a month or two. I ran my fingers up and down the smooth, rubbery orchid roots and up and down the nubbly mango bark, and then we went back in the house. Savilla opened a small file box and pulled out the index cards on which she records information about all the wild plants she’s collected. She handed me two cards. One said “Tiny Ghost Harrisella porrecta Collected 5/89 Big Cypress” and the other said “Polyrrhiza lindenii 5/89 Collected Big Cypress.” These were the plants that were on her mango tree.

  She put the index cards away and said there was one last chapter in the story of the seedpod. It takes about eight months for orchid seeds to germinate, and eight months after her seedpods were stolen Savilla received a letter from the curious man. “It was around Christmas time,” she said. “But it wasn’t a Christmas card, it was just a note. I first thought it was awful strange not even to say Merry Christmas. It just said, ‘Dear Savilla, I hope you’ve gotten over the tragic loss of your seedpod. Call me when there’s another.’ Isn’t that peculiar?” Her theory is that since she had hesitated before she agreed to sell the man a pod he had suspected that she would change her mind again, so he had decided to steal a pod before that happened. She figures that he had sneaked into her yard one night, stolen one pod and accidentally broken the other, then had tried to germinate the seeds, waited eight months, realized that the seeds weren’t going to grow, and so he had written Savilla a note just to seem friendly and also to con her for another seedpod. She never called him after she got the letter, but she still keeps his business card taped to one of her kitchen cabinet doors. She has asked around about him, and none of the orchid people she knows have ever heard of the man. She assumes that she will never hear from him again.

  —

  One of the most notorious plant crimes in Florida took place in the spring of 1990, when someone broke into a shadehouse at R. F. Orchids and stole $150,000 worth of prize-winning orchids. Many of the stolen orchids were irreplaceable. Many were show plants that had won the American Orchid Society’s highest honors and were used as stud plants—big, vigorous specimens with deluxe pedigrees used for breeding and cloning. The break-in was big news among orchid growers and collectors because it was probably the biggest-ever orchid theft in Florida and maybe the biggest-ever in the United States, and it was definitely the biggest-ever theft of such special plants. The fact that it happened at R. F. Orchids made it even more newsworthy, because R. F. Orchids is one of the best and most successful nurseries in south Florida, and its owner, Robert Fuchs, is a grower everybody seems to know.

  Bob Fuchs has been a full-time commercial grower only since 1985, but the Fuchs family has been involved with plants for three generations. The first Fuchs to come to Florida was Bob’s great-grandfather Charles, who had been a baker in Milan, Tennessee. In 1912, when Charles was forty-eight, he developed malaria. His doctor advised him to move south. A friend of Charles’s happened to be on his way to look at land in south Florida and invited Charles to come along, but he declined because the circus was in Milan that week and he didn’t want to miss it. A few weeks later he changed his mind and caught up with his friend in Homestead, Florida. In 1912 Homestead was not particularly developed. There were hardly any houses, no restaurants, no refrigerators, only a couple of telephones, and whatever telephone wires there were had been strung up on pine trees. Charles and his friend decided to go for a walk around the area. The walk lasted ten days, and they never stepped out of piney woods the entire time. Charles fell in love with the land, so he mailed his family in Tennessee a box of Florida kumquats to show them his enthusiasm. No one in the Fuchs family had ever seen kumquats before, so they thought Charles had sent them strange little oranges. When Charles got back to Tennessee, he and his wife sold most of their belongings and their bakery business and arrived in Miami with just their children, their clothing, and two live chickens. Charles had bought a house for them in Homestead while he was on his trip. When the family arrived they found the house rough, dark, and filled with ants and fleas. The roads around the house were bumpy and narrow. After the family settled in, Charles’s oldest sons, Charlie and Fred, would ride their motorcycles to market every Sunday and go shopping. One time the boys bought some coconuts at the market and were carrying them tucked under their shirts so they could have both hands free to steer their motorcycles. On the ride home they hit some wild coconuts that were lying on the road. They were thrown off their bikes and sustained injuries from the store-bought coconuts under their shirts. Charles tried to make a living as a farmer when they first got to Florida, but the soil in Homestead was just a thin crust of sandy soil on top of hard coral rock. To plant something, you had to first blast a hole in the ground with dynamite. Charles finally gave up farming. He went back to baking and soon developed a recipe for a soft white sandwich loaf he named Cream Bread. Cream Bread became the most popular bread in Florida, and the Fuchs bakery eventually grew into a prosperous national business called Holsum Bakery.

  In the 1920s, when Charles’s son Fred—Bob Fuchs’s grandfather—was first on his own, life in much of America was starting to look modern, but south Florida was still wild, even wilder than the West. It was unexplored and choked with jungle. The minutes of the American Orchid Society’s trustee meeting in 1921 note that a few trustees “gave some interesting accounts of their efforts to locate native orchids [in Florida] and the difficulties in trying to get them out of the dense woods—in some cases far removed from the hearts of men.” Even they regarded the Florida swamp with dread, as if it were an animal that could eat you alive. Only twenty years earlier it was considered reckless to try to cross south Florida. When an adventurer named Hugh Willoughby crossed the Everglades in a canoe in 1898, he was regarded with stupefaction. In his journal Willoughby wrote that he dined on fried blue herons and lobsters and cabbage-palm salads accompanied by the bacon, lemonade, and chewing gum he had brought along. He had planned to sleep on an air mattress, but it didn’t work out. “The experiment was a failure, and ended by my sleeping on [the mattress] without blowing it up, as whenever I would turn over it would roar like an alligator, and it bulged so in the middle that I would constantly fall off.” That he made it out alive at all astonished Willoughby’s friends. “Since returning home I have frequently been asked, Did you not suffer fever? Were you not made ill by your exposure in that terrible, malarious swamp? I reply that during the entire winter I did not have a single ache or pain, with the exception of an accident which befel
l me on the Florida Reefs, in which the bone of my nose was half cut through.”

  Florida was a different kind of wild than Western wild. The pioneers out west were crossing wide plains and mountain ranges that were too open and endless for one set of eyes to take in. Traveling west across those vacant and monumental spaces made human beings look lonely and puny, like doodles on a blank page. The pioneer-adventurers in south Florida were traveling inward, into a place as dark and dense as steel wool, a place that already held an overabundance of living things. The Florida pioneers had to confront what a dark, dense, overabundant place might have hidden in it. To explore such a place you had to vanish into it. I would argue that it might be easier to endure loneliness than to endure the idea that you might disappear.

  —

  Fred Fuchs was as good a baker as his father and occasionally helped out at Holsum, but he really preferred to work outside. As soon as he was on his own he became a farmer and an outdoorsman. He raised hogs and grew okra and developed a hardy and delicious species of avocado called the Fuchs Avocado. He liked to hunt in the Everglades with the Seminoles who lived nearby. He was big and strong and fond of eating raw deer meat. He and a few other men—Tom Fennell, Sr., Bill Osment, Captain C. C. von Paulsen, Raleigh Burney—were the great swamp explorers of their generation and the last generation to have so much of south Florida left to penetrate. Now, especially when I am sitting in line at a tollbooth on the Florida Turnpike, and the tile-roofed town houses spread in every direction look like the world’s biggest casserole of scalloped potatoes, I am astounded by the lives of Fred Fuchs and his fellow adventurers—that they had lives in which they slept on regular mattresses, had cars, and went to the movies, and yet still could walk just a few miles into the swamps behind their houses and find things never before seen or imagined. In the swamps Fred found many unusual things. In the Fakahatchee he found the cannonball that supposedly killed Chief Tallahassee. In the Everglades he found a recording of “Yes, We Have No Bananas” in an old Indian camp in an abandoned grove of sugarcane and banana trees. He began collecting orchids around 1935 and took probably tens of thousands from the swamps, including fifteen or twenty new species. He found and named dozens of new air plant species. He also collected tree snails and trees. He was particularly impressed by royal palm trees, the Fakahatchee’s tufty-topped palm that is seen in this country only in south Florida. Because royal palms hardly ever fall down, Fred decided to plant a row of fourteen on his property. In the hurricane of 1945 most of Fred’s farm was blown away. He and his wife survived by tying themselves to one of those royal palm trees. In 1947, which came to be known in south Florida as the Year It Wouldn’t Stop Raining, gallons of rain fell and washed his farm clean, but Fred didn’t lose a single tree.

  Fred’s son Freddie—Bob Fuchs’s father—also had a knack for discovery. He once tumbled into a deep hole in Sykes Hammock, a hardwood forest that had sprung up when primeval oceans first retreated and exposed south Florida twelve thousand years ago. While Freddie was stuck in the hole he noticed a rare fern that was thought to have become extinct since Dr. Charles Torrey Simpson last sighted it in 1903. Freddie went orchid hunting with his father, Fred, as soon as he was able to walk. Usually Fred would tie a rope around Freddie’s waist so he wouldn’t lose him in the mud. When Freddie was a teenager he helped out on the family farm by stuffing ground pork into sausage casings. When he grew up, he became the postmaster of Naranja, the town next to Homestead, and ran an orchid business on the side. By that time much of the Homestead area had been cleared and cultivated and you couldn’t even dream anymore about walking ten days through unbroken pine woods. Orchid hunters who came to south Florida had to pierce deeper and deeper into the woods to find anything unusual. Freddie was tall and strapping and adventurous. He was happy to tramp through the inner acres of the Fakahatchee, the Big Cypress, and the Everglades to find orchids, and he later went orchid hunting in almost every single country in South America and the West Indies.

  Bob Fuchs, Freddie’s son, is now fifty years old. He started with plants when he was little—he had his own bench of orchids in his father Freddie’s greenhouse and his own collection of African violets. When Bob was thirteen, he went on his first international orchid-hunting trip with Freddie in the Dominican Republic. The trip was supposed to begin in Santo Domingo, but their plane ran low on fuel and landed in Santiago instead. Authorities were suspicious of this unplanned landing, so they sent fully armed soldiers to meet the plane. When the Fuches climbed down to the tarmac, Freddie offered the soldiers a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken as a goodwill gesture. This apparently pleased them because they allowed Freddie and Bob to stay and collect for three days. When Bob was nineteen he discovered a new species in Nicaragua, which he registered as Schomburgkia fuchsii with the Royal Horticultural Society. His parents gave him a greenhouse as a high school graduation gift. Bob didn’t go directly into the orchid business. Instead he went to college, got an art degree, and became a junior high school art teacher in Homestead, In 1970, while he was still teaching, he set up a small orchid business in Naranja on his grandparents’ property. He called it R. F. Orchids, because his father, Freddie, was still operating his business, Fuchs Orchids. In 1984, a flower of Bob’s called Vanda Deva ‘Robert’ won the grand champion award at the Miami World Orchid Conference and brought him fame in the orchid world. After that victory Bob retired from teaching and went into the orchid business full-time.

  The first time I met Bob was the night before the annual South Florida Orchid Show was going to open at the Miami Convention Center. Exhibitors build their displays the night before the show opens, and I was at the Convention Center with Martin watching him put together the Motes Orchids display. Martin and Bob Fuchs don’t like each other, largely because both are vanda men and they have very different philosophies about petal shape and size and because businessmen are naturally competitive, and because they just don’t like each other. Nonetheless Martin said I should meet Bob because Bob is an important orchid person. During a break, Martin led me over to the R.F. display and made the introductions. Bob turned out to be a striking person. He looked as if he was at least six feet tall and had a fit, husky, high school linebacker’s build. He was absolutely, completely not tan. His hair was peach-colored and brushy, and he had a fluffy mustache and squinty blue eyes. He was the only person in the south Florida orchid world who was regularly described to me as being very handsome.

  Just then, in fact, several women were twittering around trying and failing to get his attention. One of them was saying, “Bob, Bob, did you know the word ‘fuchsia’ came from the name of your family?” and another one was calling out, “Bob, Bob, I need to ask you about that vanda.…” Bob ignored them because he was watching his mother, who was heading toward us dragging a three-foot-long piece of driftwood that he wanted to add to his display. The women kept chattering. He kept ignoring them and instead turned and pointed to the side of the display and said, “Mother, please. I want the driftwood here.”

  Everyone I met in the orchid world knew of Bob Fuchs. Some raved about him and said they considered him the king of the orchid world. Other people I asked would take deep breaths and release the air very slowly and then say that Bob was controversial. After a while I began to see this as a polite way to say that these people hated him, or at the very least that he made them unhappily jealous. I figured out right away why some people hated him—he is brassy and opinionated and has at times gone out of his way to be argumentative, and apparently his philosophy about orchid breeding is not everyone’s cup of tea. The list of what is jealous-making about him is also long—that he is from a family of Florida orchid aristocracy, that his business is very successful, that he wins a lot of awards, that the public loves his flowers and loves his displays, that he knows how to cultivate customers almost as well as he cultivates orchids. Or just go to his house! 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 beautiful wooden grandstand where you can sit and watch the waterfall and the fish, or a dramatic, airy house filled with antique Limoges and Royal Worcester orchid porcelains and fine furniture and trophy heads of African game and a Fabergé egg of gold and rubies with a tiny jeweled orchid sculpture for its yolk, 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. One afternoon after the Miami show I went out to Bob’s, and after he showed me around he led me over to a grassy patch beside one of the shadehouses where there was a huge chikee hut—the hut must have been the size of four hotel rooms—and we sat down at some kind of lovely table on some lovely chairs, and beside us were terra-cotta pots of ‘Miss Joaquin’ orchids with their pencil-thin leaves, and above us were a couple of ceiling fans going chuk-chuk-chuk as the blades flicked around, and the ice in our lemonade was clicking and sparkling, and behind Bob was a flow of green grass and green palm fronds and the blur of green in his shadehouses and above all that green was the blank blue Homestead sky, and from the west a breeze lifted and dropped pieces of Bob’s blond hair like an idle shopper, and from behind us came the sound of cars rumbling over the gravel of his driveway and then sighing to a stop, and then came the clunk of an expensive car door opening and shutting, and then, not too long after, the tweeting of a cash register inside the shop, and for a long time I didn’t want to say anything—I just wanted to sink into the greenness and the accidental melodies and the rich, hot laziness of the day. Bob finally started talking, and said he didn’t know what made people so jealous of him, but at that moment, in that big breezy chikee hut, with that green plushness all around us, I did.