I call my mother every Friday on the phone. We usually talk about books, family, and her garden. Last Friday I’m afraid I startled her a bit by huffing in annoyance in the middle of her account of a cousin’s trip to Dubai. “I’m apparently killing another house plant,” I told her. The massive thing—bequeathed to me by a sister-in-law who no longer had room for it in her apartment—was showing alarming signs of spotted, yellow leaves and drooping branches. “What is it?” Mom asked. “Like I would know,” I said hopelessly.

I am a talented person. I read fast, I can draw, I’m reasonably good at math and I can cook. But houseplants continually defy me. I forget to water them, then water them too much to make up for the neglect. I rarely remember to feed them, and I’m never positive they are getting any light. It’s ridiculous. Especially considering that my mother is a natural expert on anything with roots and leaves. She’s been a docent at a botanical garden, for heaven’s sake, something she was chattering on about while I stared morosely at my dying plant. “They’ve decided to let the Amherst Orchid Society take over the care of the orchid wing,” she was saying. That caught my attention. “Mom,” I interrupted, “you do know that orchid people are all nuts?”

In 1994 a man named John Laroche was arrested with three members of a Seminole tribe for allegedly stealing wild and endangered orchids from the Fakahatchee Strand State Preserve in Florida. Laroche claimed in his defense that he had intended to help the Seminole tribe of Hollywood, Florida, establish an orchid nursery as a money-making industry for the tribe, and that the nursery would include a laboratory for cloning, and thus the preserving, rare species of orchids (some of which were in Laroche’s bags when he was caught).

The incident rated a few minor inches in the New York Times, where it caught the eye of journalist Susan Orlean. As she later explained, she often scans newspaper articles for odd combinations of words, and in this case the words “orchids,” “Seminole,” and “cloning” piqued her interest. That initial news report led to an article for The New Yorker and eventually to a bestselling book called The Orchid Thief (1998), an expose of sorts on the orchid industry and the general weirdness of orchid people. Orlean won wide acclaim for her balanced account of the biology and sociology of orchid growing and orchid collecting. Sections of The Orchid Thief recall the best of John McFee, in Orlean’s ability to tackle scientific and psychological subjects with equal confidence and aplomb. She also earns authenticity when she wades waist-deep through black, alligator-infested swamp water guided by a ranger and two convicts doing community service—something she vows never to do again.

The Orchid Thief proved that orchids were as unique and bizarre as the people that collected them and cared for them. The book’s rapidly-blossoming success also proved that there was a market not just for orchids, but also for stories about orchids—the weirder the better. And naturally this success spawned a new genre (genus?) of books about the stranger aspects of orchids, plants, and collectors. Riding on the wake of the Orlean’s account, hoping to take advantage of the public’s newly germinated interest in difficult plants came Orchid Fever: A Horticultural Tale of Love, Lust, and Lunacy (2000) by Eric Hansen. 

Unlike Orlean, who freely admitted that she hated to get dirty, Hansen built his journalistic reputation on surviving drastic conditions in faraway places. His first book, Stranger in the Forest, was a travelogue of the year he spent with the Penan people, a tribe indigenous to the inaccessible jungles of Borneo. Where Orlean minced her way through a Florida summer and bemoaned the ineffectiveness of commercial insect repellents, Hansen reveled in the fetid jungles and shrugs off the hazards of snakes and leeches. 

It should have made Orchid Fever the more interesting book; there is even a casualty on the first page. But despite numerous jungle treks, rumors of plant smugglers, and a shadowy account of an even more shadowy war between the “orchid police” and the “orchid mafia,” Hansen’s book never quite came into bloom. Each chapter tended to feature a single character in the orchid community that Hansen has unearthed. “Unearthed” is definitely the word. These are people who spend thousands on nurturing beautiful and often illegal collections of rare species. They—these rebel growers and breeders and collectors—live in fear of the heavy hand of the U.S. Customs agents, or the fascist tactics of the Fish and Game Service. Indeed, the threat seems so real that even Hansen learned to be paranoid. He began taping computer discs with his research to the backs of cereal boxes, and didn’t let the poor bottled-water deliveryman in the door.

Any one chapter is a funny, illuminating essay, with elements of freak-show strangeness. He meets a biker who pollinates thousands of Pragmipedium by hand and raises emus in his spare time. He hears about a collector who brought in dozens of rare specimens, only half-legally, for the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew only to be turned over to the police by the director while the best of his private collection was confiscated by the institution. In the two years Hansen spent researching and writing this book, he never met the collector, but he corresponded with him via email. The man, secretive and only recently out of jail, would leave him clues at odd intervals, dangling possible information in front of Hansen like a carrot or a Cattleya. In the end, despite all the fascinating people, this book reads like a series of cocktail stories—reveling in the strange but doing very little to bring the wild and wonderful world of orchids and orchid enthusiasts to light.

Although Hansen largely relies on the strange people of the orchid underground to carry his book, in many places he falls back on the strangeness of the flowers themselves. His descriptions skirt the edge of the pornographic: 

The shiny, candy-apple-red staminode that covered the reproductive organs was shaped like an extended tongue identical to the Rolling Stones logo.  This shocking protrusion nestled in the cleavage of two blushing petals then dropped down as if to lick the tip of an inverted pouch that looked like the head of an engorged . . .

Well, you get the idea. The picture of this beauty, a small flower with the large name of Paphiopedilum Magic Lantern is thankfully rendered in black and white pen and ink drawings as are the other orchids that Hansen thought worth mentioning: Paphiopedilum greyi Thunder Thighs, Paphiopedilum hookerae, and a cute little beauty called “Fox’s testicles” which apparently makes great ice cream.

The most noticeable aspect of Orchid Fever is the author’s own feverish condemnation of CITES—the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Flora and Fauna. This is the group that decides what species go on the “endangered list.” Over the last few decades they have placed entire genera on their Appendix I and Appendix II lists effectively making it illegal to collect, own, transport or trade any plant or part of a plant in the genus. These sweeping decisions have the result of turning some collectors’ entire life’s work illegal with the stroke of a pen. Collections that they have invested thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars in amassing are subject to confiscation by the relevant authorities in any country that signed the CITES agreement (and most have). Once taken, the orchids almost always die from neglect, and their former owners are subject to large fines and even imprisonment.

Hansen points out that CITES policy does not distinguish between kinds of endangered species. The plants are treated the same as animals although it makes sense to take the seeds of rare orchids and try to propagate them in a laboratory—something you can not do with the cubs of a giant panda. Nevertheless, his argument fails to convince, if only because it is so extremely one-sided in favor of the orchid growers. The reader is left with the idea that all orchid collectors are altruistic people only interested in preserving the flowers from extinction, an impression at odds with the apparent drive these people have to own the largest collection, or the competition among breeders to produce the rarest of the rare.

In the end, The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean remains the better and more balanced book. Hansen himself admits at the end of his book that he had fallen prey to “orchid fever” and that the habit was going to be a hard one to kick. Orlean was wiser; throughout her research and many interviews she steadfastly refused to own an orchid. The ones that were given to her she in turn gave away. And although one would never call her book a “sedate” tale, it is positively clear-headed compared to Hansen’s account. 

I just wonder—is she any good with house plants?

Nicki Leone showed her proclivities early when as a young child she asked her parents if she could exchange the jewelry a well-meaning relative had given her for Christmas for a dictionary instead. She earned her B.A. in Russian and Middle Eastern History from Boston College, supporting her college career with a part-time job in a bookstore. Since then, she has been in and out of academic institutions, but has always managed to work with books no matter what. She began working for Bristol Books, an independent bookstore in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1993, and three years later became its manager, which is where she stayed for the next fifteen years. Currently she works for the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance, developing marketing and outreach programs for independent bookstores. Nicki is a book reviewer for several magazines, an occasional on-air book reviewer and commentator for the Wilmington public radio station WHQR, and a co-host on the television program “Let's Read” on UNCW. She is one of the founders of The Cape Fear Crime Festival, an annual book festival for mystery readers and writers, and currently serves as President of the Board of Trustees of the North Carolina Writers Network. Plus she will read for food—almost. She manages all this by the grace of a very patient partner and the loving support of two dogs and one-and-a-half cats. Contact Nicki.