Death in the Orchid Garden

by Ann Ripley

  With a commanding air only enhanced by his good-looking safari outfit, Dr. Bouting was booming out his closing argument: “Of course we must preserve our endangered plants, but that doesn’t mean tropicals aren’t going to be the star plant of the future in the horticultural world, tropicals that are being bred to grow even in zone five! Tropicals that will flourish in pots in northern gardens. . . tropicals that will awaken conservation feelings in home gardeners and are an avenue through which we can educate the public to . . .”

  Matthew Flynn threw in with Bouting for the most part, but said Bouting’s view of tropicals was too commercial and “exploitative.”

  Louise had a quixotic mental picture of Bouting and Flynn in some jungle environment, fighting to the death over a new plant discovery: “For home gardeners,” Bouting would cry. “For the future of medicine,” Flynn would argue. Today, Flynn’s clothes represented a slight upgrade: the shirt not quite as wrinkled as the day before, though just as worn. On the back of his head he wore a jaunty cream-colored explorer’s hat that looked brand new, as if bought expressly for the taping. Yet he was more subdued today than he was yesterday, seeming to search for the right words and vigilantly observing the responses of others.

  “Man will always be in search of new plants in exotic places,” he said, “but caution must be taken when we pluck these species from the wilds. All plants need analysis so we can tell whether or not they will have value to mankind beyond commercial values. We need to keep searching, because in the face of population pressures, many species are disappearing, along with the indigenous people who know how to use them . . .”

  The audio engineer had to move up quickly with his microphone boom to catch the quiet, ascerbic remarks of Charles Reuter. “Of course man will always search out new plants on this earth. But we know things now that we didn’t know even fifty years ago . . . that the introduction of exotics into helpless, foreign environments”—he dramatically waved his thin arms—“Kauai and the other beautiful islands of the Hawaiian chain could not be a more perfect example of this phenomenon—these introductions can create environmental nightmares, with native plants literally smothered, as they have been here by these intruders. Testing. Trials. These are the responsible things to do before moving any plants into a new environment.”

  Reuter stopped momentarily on his muscular legs, bringing the entire on-camera group to a halt. He looked dramatically up at Matthew Flynn and Bruce Bouting for another parting shot. “Needless to say, we’re one world enough to know that we no longer can steal plants away from guileless countries, even under the guise of saving humanity with a new wonder drug, not unless we in the United States wish to bear the stamp of horticultural conquerors who have no consciences.”

  Louise was amazed to learn that this slight man had such emotion in him and could express it so well. Now they had turned into one of the botanical garden’s “rooms,” the finish line for the shoot. Around them were walls of pandanus trees. Above them was the garden room’s roof, a huge monkeypod tree that spread its large arms across the sky. In the center of this space, a serene fountain burbled, as it had for almost seventy years since being created by Allerton.

  “We thank our guests for this lively discussion,” she said. “I know it will provoke us all to think . . .” A few more closing words, with John chiming in to say, “And this has been a perfect place to have such a wonderful exchange of ideas.”

  “That’s a wrap, then,” called Marty. “Take ten, no, fifteen, so you can get up to the john. Next up are Bouting, Bailey, and Lansing, for a brief interview. Louise is doin’ the interviewing.” He turned to confer with Joel Greene for a minute; Louise knew her producer hadn’t decided where he was going to tape this segment.

  She went over to Tom Schoonover. “Sorry for the delay, Dr. Schoonover.”

  “For heaven’s sake, call me Tom,” he said, with a smile that elevated his eyebrows and put those forehead wrinkles into play.

  “We’ll be shooting your and Henry Hilaeo’s trek through the native plants soon. The segment that Marty’s doing next shouldn’t take more than a few minutes.” She could feel her face coloring. “It’s something Dr. Bouting kind of insisted on doing, a little summary of what Bouting Horticulture is all about.”

  Schoonover shoved his cap back on his head and a couple of gray curls fell onto his forehead. “Seems as if it would make more sense to do a program on Bouting Horticulture back in Philadelphia, where they have all those vast research gardens.”

  “I know,” said Louise, as her shoulders slumped a little. Her producer had given in to pressure. They probably wouldn’t be able to use the little piece. “Where do you think they should go to tape this? There are so many wonderful spots to choose from.”

  Schoonover casually pointed down the road. “How about the next garden room beyond this one? It has a long, serpentine pool and there’s a bench where the four of you could sit. It would make a nice background.”

  “Thanks, Tom. And sorry you and Henry have to wait.”

  His hazel eyes looked down on her perspiring face. “No problem for me,” said Schoonover. “But Louise, maybe you better powder your nose before they begin taping. Nobody cares here on Kauai whether you have a shiny nose, but that producer of yours might when he sees the tape.”

  She grinned. “Thanks for the beauty tip.”

  With a big smile, he said, “If you’re going to keep thanking people, you’d better use the Hawaiian ‘mahalo.’”

  “Oh, yes, of course. Mahalo, Tom.” She pulled her compact and lipstick from her SportSac. As she quickly dabbed makeup on her face, she said, “So what did you think of our three visiting botanists?”

  Schoonover shoved out his bottom lip in an expression of bafflement. “Y’know, all of us in this business tend to know each other pretty well. Other botanists from that conference have visited the gardens in the past two days. Nice lot of people—Ralph Pinsky, people of his stature. I could see that you and your producer were pleased with the combination of Reuter, Bouting, and Flynn—one zealous ecologist and two combative jungle cowboys.”

  “You think of Dr. Bouting as a jungle cowboy?”

  “Sure do,” said Schoonover. “He’s just older than Flynn, but cut from the same cloth. One, he’s got that hyperbole thing going—always exaggerating his claims. And two, he’s not always interested in the consequences of his actions. Putting the three of them together is truly an explosive mixture.”

  She snapped her compact closed, put the top back on her lipstick and returned them to her bag. “That’s why we were so happy. They didn’t explode, they just politely collided.”

  “So that’s how you saw it.”

  “How did you see it?”

  “For professional scientists, those three have a thin veneer of civilization about them. Let’s put it this way—I wouldn’t want to leave them in a room together without proper supervision.”

  11

  Friday noon

  When doing a weekly TV gardening show, it was hard for Marty Corbin or Louise or the associate producer to predict who would make a great on-camera guest. Marty, of course, wanted scintillating guests who would banish any fears that a show would bog down in too much garden minutiae.

  Dr. Tom Schoonover, with his shaggy haircut, his lanky gait, and his professorial manner, had proved to have star power. Louise could tell this by watching Marty’s growing enthusiasm as the shoot proceeded.

  Why the scientist was so good on camera, she couldn’t quite fathom, for he was a scientist through and through, given to exchanging dry jokes about “endemic subspecies” with his colleagues that one without a background in botany found hard to interpret. But he was an impressive guide, as he led Louise and the camera through a grove of native plants, explaining that the Hawaiian islands originally contained only one hundred species and that these had multiplied ten times over during centuries of isolation. Today’s challenge, he said, was that the islands were crowded with hundreds of introduced pl
ants that came by double canoe, sailboat, steamship, and airplane and tended to crowd out the natives.

  As the videocam slowly circled it, he’d described a newly discovered species as if he were describing the Hope diamond. “We recently found it on an islet off Maui. This is the only plant of its kind that exists on earth. It’s been named Kanaloa, after the Hawaiian god of the ocean.”

  Schoonover went over to an Ohia lehua tree and told of the latest methods scientists used to fight the extermination of this valuable native specimen. By using high-altitude planes with infrared imaging spectroscopy, they could measure the nitrogen and water in a Hawaiian forest canopy and discover where invasive plants were crowding it out.

  Eyes bright with enthusiasm, he talked about revolutionary new ways of classifying plants and animals. “Where we used to do it through intuition, we now unravel their relationships with great accuracy, using DNA, cladistics, and high-speed computers. In case you’re not familiar with the word cladistics, it’s a logical system that allows us, in systematic steps, to classify and then put plants in their evolutionary sequence.”

  Smiling, he added, “Darwin would love the logical clarity of cladistics. It helps us understand the evolutionary history of these plants.” His goal now, he said, “is to encourage scientists working in this field to find out how the flowers and trees of the Hawaiian islands fit into this picture of life on the planet.”

  After Schoonover’s turn, Henry Hilaeo showed off his prowess. With tabis on his feet and Schoonover up top handling the ropes, Henry belayed down the cliff rich with native species and plucked a few plant samples, the videocam following his every move.

  A few things went awry. Hilaeo’s rope got fouled and it took a while to untangle it. The grip stumbled and nearly fell into one of the elegant garden ponds. The ID flap on Schoonover’s hat was hanging out during the shoot, but it added a humanizing absent-minded-professor touch, so Louise hadn’t mentioned it.

  Now, the work was done and it was time for lunch for all who took part in the program. And not a moment too soon for Louise. Traipsing over cliff and dale with a camera-ready smile in that last segment had taken it out of her. She was exhausted, her on-camera denim dress sweat-soaked and wrinkled, her hair expanded by the humidity into an unruly swarm of curls. But still she was happy, for they were picnicking in a historic spot, the front yard of Emma’s cottage by the sea. From her seat at the large picnic table, she looked up into the waving palm fronds, then lowered her gaze and stared across the emerald lawn into the calm Pacific. All the complicated history of these islands seemed encapsulated in this moment.

  “Let’s drink to the queen,” proposed Tom Schoonover, “and to Sam Folsom, who arranged this nice box lunch event—and to Tim Raddant, who rustled out a few bottles of wine he’d stashed at controlled temperatures with the plants in the herbarium.” Sam and Tim took a bow.

  Marty Corbin lifted his glass and said, “I want to make my own toast, to all of you here who took part in a successful shoot, with three very diverse segments.” His gaze settled on the attractive Anne Lansing. “You folks from Bouting Horticulture did a good job of relating what you’re doing at your giant nursery to a setting here in Hawaii. It was not an easy task.” He turned his attention next to Tom Schoonover. “Then we have Tom, here, who’s turned out to be a real star. He’s as good as Carl Sagan at explaining the obtuse—if anyone remembers Carl Sagan.”

  Laughter greeted this remark. “I still don’t know what cladistics is—only that it’s something good.” He turned to Henry Hilaeo. “And thanks to you, Henry, for risking life and limb for us.”

  Hilaeo’s browned face cracked with laughter. “Not hardly, Marty. It would take a lot more than that to kill me.”

  As Louise looked around the table, she saw that almost everyone was worn out and grimy from the morning’s efforts. But not Anne Lansing. She held her head high and looked cool and dignified, while others seemed ready for an afternoon nap. Anne, thought Louise, had the air of a queen herself. In fact, she was a queen, in that rarified little world of garden writers in which she flourished.

  The woman had chosen a place between Marty Corbin and Dr. Bouting, two men guaranteed to give her constant attention. Bouting intermittently whispered in her ear, then turned and spoke softly to Christopher Bailey; Louise decided this was the way he conveyed instructions to his aides.

  While they munched their sandwiches and drank their wine, attention turned to the sun-burnished Sam Folsom. His aspect immediately changed from the bantering scientist into the dedicated professor, as he gave them a brief but poignant history of the queen and the cottage. Louise loved hearing about the cosmopolitan monarch. Here was a woman who’d traveled across the world and been received by both Queen Victoria and President Andrew Johnson. After both her husband and only child died, she visited the beautiful Lawai Kai valley, fell in love with it, and built the cottage on the seaside cliff above where they now sat; it was later reverentially moved down into the valley near the stream.

  “She admitted she had a mania for planting,” said Sam, eyeing them over his half-glasses, “and the evidence is all around us. Her nurseries, one here and one in Honolulu, provided the parent stock for many of the plants you see today in the islands. But she cared for the people as much as she did for the plants, establishing the first public hospital, a girls’ school, and a cathedral. She was never too queenly to relate to people. When she was here in Kauai, she would go out and work with them in the taro patches.”

  On a historic trip to the mountains, said the historian, Queen Emma traveled a perilous, muddy trail until she reached the overlook to the rugged Waimea canyon. “She was accompanied by a retinue of one hundred people,” he said, “including hula girls, retainers, and musicians. After that trip, she insisted that a proper trail be built to reach this wild spot.”

  What touched Louise most was Emma’s love of nature. Sam read from a letter she’d sent from Kauai: “The cattle have so often played music to my ears. The lowing comes so sweetly on the air when the calf is called back to its supper of sweet milk at twilight.”

  When he recounted another note that the queen wrote to a friend in Kauai after her links with the island were severed, it brought tears to Louise’s eyes. “Tell me the old and new things of Koloa,” wrote the queen, “from natives, haoles, wild plants, animals, your flowers, and all. I do not hear of our place these days.”

  In her enthusiasm for plants, it sounded to Louise as if Emma had an innocent role in imperiling the species of her precious island retreat. She had brought in bougainvillea, as well as many other eager, exotic plants. Some grew lavishly and overwhelmed the native species.

  While the rest of the people at the table paid rapt attention, Anne couldn’t seem to stay focused. She began talking to Marty Corbin in a low voice—probably thanking the producer for the interview. Louise shot her boss a shocked look and he didn’t continue the disruptive conversation.

  But Sam Folsom kept his history lesson brief. He ended with a joke about how if people actually understood history, they wouldn’t keep repeating the bad parts.

  As she looked down the table, Louise noticed a couple of interesting things: Bruce Bouting behaved like Anne Lansing’s doting father, laying an occasional hand on her bare shoulder, almost as if he were protecting her. And perhaps this was warranted—the woman emanated a sexual aura only partially masked by her businesslike “scientist” repartee. Louise wondered if it was that bright red retro lipstick that did it. Many men responded to her, John Batchelder among them—and Matthew Flynn and his assistant, George Wyant, but in quite a different way. The Amazonian specialists observed her warily, like animals either on the hunt or being hunted. They no doubt lumped her with their professional enemy, Bruce Bouting. On the other hand, they seemed to be old friends with Bouting’s other assistant, Christopher Bailey.

  Louise turned her attention to Tom Schoonover and the other resident scientists, as well as the able young crew members from the unive
rsity. They were busy talking of other things and laughing it up with Marty’s jovial wife, Steffi. For a moment, Louise felt a pang of loneliness, wishing that her husband had come on the trip.

  Tom blessedly leaned over and said, “C’mon, Louise, stop being shy and join our conversation. We want to know the inside skinny on this. Do cameramen never trip up when they’re walking backward for miles during these shoots, or is it only grips?” He laughed. “We’ve decided that if so, they must constitute a different subspecies.”

  12

  Friday afternoon

  Louise, Marty, and Steffi were conducting their post-mortem in the orchid garden over drinks. After forty-eight hours on Kauai, Louise decided that half of the island’s income from tourism came from drinks with umbrellas in them.

  “Don’t worry, Marty,” she told her producer, “we have plenty of B roll, with fabulous vistas—giant banyans, huge, wormlike cacti crawling up walls, plenty of shots of blooming plumeria and pandanus . . .”

  “How is B roll gonna help us integrate those three segments?” grumped her producer and took a big gulp of his mai tai.

  “It probably isn’t,” Louise admitted. “I think we should take the Bouting Horticulture people’s interview tape and shelve it. Then we schedule an early summer trip to Pennsylvania and do it right. Maybe the Kauai interview can be used, but I doubt it. We’ll start afresh and do a whole program there, including all those great research gardens Bruce Bouting likes to talk about. That business is well worth a special trip. We both know we’d have done it before, except that Bouting has been so publicity shy.”