Orchidelirium Edition

The Orchid Thief
by Susan Orlean

I have never bought any orchids nor have I ever attempted to grow any in my spare time. The only time I went to Florida was to go to Disney World when I was in the fifth grade. I have never seen an alligator and I have never walked into a swamp. I am unaware of how many different types of palm trees there are in Florida.

I have only lived on this earth for a mere thirty years and, because of this fact, I have only gotten around to reading only the smallest fraction of available non-fiction books and literature that have been written. I cannot say what will change in regards to my tastes as I get older but as of right now only Anna Karenina ranks higher than the The Orchid Thief on my list of all-time favorite books. For the past three years I have read this book every Spring because, well, it just seems wrong to not start the warm weather season by reading this odd little book about flowers, Florida, and one of the eternal questions of life: what really drives people?. This is one of the most fascinating books I have ever read.

That last statement is not hyperbole either because almost every facet of The Orchid Thief is comprised of endlessly interesting facts about orchids (that some can be glued to trees via Liquid Nails and still live), interesting facts about Florida (the land scams of the ’50′s and the number of plants, trees, and animals that have found their way there, just to name two), while also tying in the orchid shows, orchid businessmen, plant crimes, and, of course, Orelan’s own style of writing that blends everything together and creates a book so consuming that you may find yourself (like Orlean) seeing all of those orchid people possessing a passion about something that renders you envious of caring so much about something. What really makes the book exceptional is Orlean’s writing style as she has a way of molding her natural journalistic style with an almost literary point of view. For instance, here is how Orlean describes how orchids may have evolved and what shapes they possess:

“Orchids are considered the most highly evolved flowering plants on earth. They are unusual in form, uncommonly beautiful in color, often powerfully fragrant, intricate in structure, and different from any other family of plants. The reason for their unusualness has always been puzzled over. One guess is that orchids might have evolved in soil that was naturally irradiated by a meteor or mineral deposit, and that the radiation is what mutated them into thousands of amazing forms. Orchids have diverse and unflowerlike looks. One species looks just like a German shepherd dog with its tongue sticking out. One species looks like an onion. One looks like an octopus. One looks like a human nose. One looks like the kind of fancy shoes that a king might wear. One looks like Mickey Mouse. One looks like a monkey. One looks dead.”

In that excerpt, it is posited that orchids may have been irradiated by meteors–which is something that could make for an interesting tangent on its own–but Orlean leaves it by the wayside so that she can expand on the different looks. After all, it is crazier on some level to believe that an orchid looks like Mickey Mouse than the idea that orchids might have been irradiated by meteors.

The rest of the book follows John Laroche (the basis for Orlean’s first article about orchids and the “star” of the novel) and a cast of other orchid enthusiasts and growers, while also inadvertently opening a new perspective on life and death, individuality, conformism, fraud, addiction, and the dynamic and wild frontier that is Florida. This is the kind of book that makes you think and look at life differently, however small or insignificant it may seem at first. Before Orlean enters the Fakahatchee Strand for the first time she almost breaks down in to tears when she entered the ranger’s station before departure. As she wrote afterwards, places that are really scary tend to be decrepit and dead-looking whereas the Fakahatchee is overflowing with life–innumerable amounts of snakes, insects, plants, trees, panthers, alligators, flowers, eels, scorpions, and spiders take up residence there.

I always seem to forge a fondness for books that dispel your preconceived notions and make you look at something in opposite terms. Before I read The Orchid Thief I thought plant and flower enthusiasts were a little off-kilter, that Florida was just a weird little sandbar attached to America, and, on some level, that people driven by odd passions were hopeless slaves to odd whims. To a degree, I still believe a little piece of all three of those statements but after reading about how someone like John Laroche can pick up a hobby (ice age fossils, turtles, etc.) and just drop them arbitrarily and never again revisit them (“Laroche’s passions arrived unannounced and ended explosively, like car bombs”) it made me realize that what drives people to obsession and danger is something that resides in all of us. We may not have grand hopes to clone a ghost orchid or win an award at a huge orchid show in Miami but something drives us to be a little crazy about other things; things that outsiders would view as nonsensical or pointless too. Within the context of this story you could substitute things like “ghost orchid in bloom,” “perfectly red orchid with a white lip,” or “black orchid” with things like “God” or “success” and the end result would be the same: we all aspire to do, find, or create something and the orchids here are simply the metaphor for all of our struggles during our time on earth. And to have Susan Orlean explain it all and point it out makes for an extremely entertaining and fascinating read.