The Orchid Thief: A True Story of Beauty and Obsession

by Susan Orlean

SO: Did you know anything about the script while it was being developed? SO: All I knew was that the producers had hired a screenwriter who had just written a movie called Killing John Malkovich. At least that’s what I thought it was called. It sounded pretty odd, but the producers were very excited about this guy and told me that I should be excited, too, so I was. SO: You mean Being John Malkovich. SO: Yes, that’s what the movie is really called, but it wasn’t released yet, and I mistakenly thought it was called Killing John Malkovich.

The producer gave me the script at lunch. I went back to my office after lunch, shut the door, turned off my phone and started reading. I had to put it down several times to catch my breath. I think it was at the point in the script when I—I mean the character Susan Orlean in the movie—gun down one of the Fish and Wildlife officers in the Fakahatchee that I began to appreciate what an unusual experience this was going to be. The producer asked me to call as soon as I finished reading the script. I waited a day to let it sink in and then called him and said, “It’s not what I expected but it’s terrific, and please just change my name.”

SO: I spent about a year pretend-casting the movie. I considered everyone from Julia Roberts to Nicole Kidman to Holly Hunter to Jodie Foster to Cate Blanchett but I never settled on who my dream choice would be. My friends made suggestions, too—usually they thought of actresses with red hair, since I have red hair. Maybe people don’t realize that hair dye is available in Hollywood. Interestingly, no one ever suggested Meryl Streep, probably because she seems larger than life.

SO: It was fun and it was also very weird. The first thing I noticed was that the crew was looking askance at me. Finally one of grips walked over to me and asked if I was really me, and if I had really done all the things being portrayed in the movie. It was an out-of-body experience. I guess the crew had begun to think Meryl Streep was the real Susan Orlean, and I was … I’m not sure who they thought I was. In the movie, I have a walk-on part as an anonymous shopper. Maybe that’s who they thought I was.

SO: Is Charlie Kaufman a friend of yours? SO: No, he’s not. I met him once, for about two minutes, on the set of Adaptation. We were both tongue-tied. SO: Does he look like Nicholas Cage? SO: No, he looks like Charlie Kaufman. You don’t get it, do you? Movies are movies. Life is life. They aren’t the same thing.

John Laroche is a tall guy, skinny as a stick, pale-eyed, slouch-shouldered, and sharply handsome, in spite of the fact that he is missing all his front teeth.

When I first met him he lusted only for orchids, especially the wild orchids growing in Florida’s Fakahatchee Strand. I spent most of the next two years hanging around with him, and at the end of those two years he had gotten rid of every single orchid he owned and swore that he would never own another orchid for as long as he lived. He is usually true to his word. Years ago, between his Ice Age fossils and his old mirrors, he went through a tropical-fish phase. At its peak, he had more than sixty fish tanks in his house and went skin-diving regularly to collect fish. Then the end came. He didn’t gradually lose interest: he renounced fish and vowed he would never again collect them and, for that matter, he would never set foot in the ocean again. That was seventeen years ago. He has lived his whole life only a couple of feet west of the Atlantic, but he has not dipped a toe in it since then.

Sometimes I think I’ve figured out some order in the universe, but then I find myself in Florida, swamped by incongruity and paradox, and I have to start all over again.

I still found the story improbable, so I asked Laroche about it several other times, including once when we were on the phone and I knew his father was in the room with him. I had counted on his father to act as a sort of lie detector, but instead the two of them launched into a discussion of whether the carved Seminole was life-size or larger than life-size, and whether it had a penis, and what the scale of the penis implied about Laroche’s father’s penis. This was not what I was hoping would happen, so I dropped the topic and never brought it up again.

As soon as word got out that he had mastered the cultivation of Polyrrhiza lindenii, he would be celebrated in the plant world. The nursery would sell millions of the plants and make millions of dollars, which would please him and impress the tribe. His success with the ghost orchids would also ruin the black-market trade in them because once the species became available commercially there wouldn’t be any reason to buy those that had been poached from the wild. This was Laroche’s traditional dash of altruism.

Finally, the plan would end with a flourish: He would time everything to take place during the Florida legislative session so that as soon as he had gotten what he wanted out of the woods, he would address the legislators and chide them for leaving laws on the books that were too loose to protect endangered plants from cunning people like him. The legislators, shamed, would then change the laws to Laroche’s specifications, and thus the woods would be locked up forever and no more ghost orchids would be spirited away. Environmentalists who had despised him for poaching would be forced to admire him. At first he would seem like a demon, but he would end up looking like a saint.

Is what I did ethical? I don’t know. I’m a shrewd bastard. I could be a great criminal. I could be a great con man, but it’s more interesting to live your life within the confines of the law. It’s more challenging to do what you want but try to do it so you can justify it. People look at what I do and think, Is that moral? Is that right? Well, isn’t every great thing the result of that kind of struggle? Look at something like atomic energy. It can be diabolic or it can be a blessing. Evil or good. Well, that’s where the give is—at the edge of ethics. And that’s exactly where I like to live.”

Laroche said the owner of the nursery was a man he met when he and his wife still owned the Bromeliad Tree. He mentioned that the man was gay. “You don’t have any problems with homosexuals, do you?” he asked me. “Of course not,” I said. “What are you talking about?” “I just needed to check,” he said. “Because whatever your personal issues are, when you’re in the plant business you realize that gay people are your friends.”

“Hey, John,” he said. “You know, I have hardly any orchids anymore. You know, I decided that orchid people are too crazy. They come here and buy an orchid and they kill it. Come, buy, kill. I can’t stand it. Fern people are almost worse, but the orchid people are too—oh, you know. They think they’re superior.”

“Nah,” Laroche said. “I don’t want to collect anything for myself right now. I really have to watch myself, especially around plants. Even now, just being here, I still get that collector feeling. You know what I mean. I’ll see something and then suddenly I get that feeling. It’s like I can’t just have something—I have to have it and learn about it and grow it and sell it and master it and have a million of it.” He shook his head and scuffed up some gravel. “You know, I’ll see something, just anything, and I can’t help but thinking to myself, Well, Jesus Christ, now that’s interesting! Jesus, I’ll bet you could find a lot of those.”

In fact, the hours I spent in the Fakahatchee retracing Laroche’s footsteps were probably the most miserable I have spent in my entire life. The swampy part of the Fakahatchee is hot and wet and buggy and full of cottonmouth snakes and diamondback rattlers and alligators and snapping turtles and poisonous plants and wild hogs and things that stick into you and on you and fly into your nose and eyes. Crossing the swamp is a battle. You can walk through about as easily as you could walk through a car wash.

The swamp’s stillness and darkness and thickness can rattle your nerves. In 1885 a sailor on a plume-collecting expedition wrote in his diary: “The place looked wild and lonely. About three o’clock it seemed to get on Henry’s nerves and we saw him crying, he could not tell us why he was just plain scared.”

I kept my mind busy as we walked out by wondering if the hard-to-find, briefly seen, irresistibly beautiful, impossible-to-cultivate ghost orchid was just a fable and not a real flower at all. Maybe it really was a ghost. There are certainly ghosts in the Fakahatchee—ghosts of rangers who were murdered years ago by illegal plume hunters, and of loggers who were cut to pieces in fights and then left to cool and crumble into dirt, and for years there has been an apparition wandering the swamp, the Swamp Ape, which is said to be seven feet tall and weigh seven hundred pounds and have the physique of a human, the posture of an ape, the body odor of a skunk, and an appetite for lima beans. There is also an anonymous, ghostly human being whom the Fakahatchee rangers call the Ghost Grader, who brings real—not imaginary—construction equipment into the swamp every once in a while and clears off the vine-covered roads.

I wanted to want something as much as people wanted these plants, but it isn’t part of my constitution. I think people my age are embarrassed by too much enthusiasm and believe that too much passion about anything is naive. I suppose I do have one unembarrassing passion—I want to know what it feels like to care about something passionately.

Many species look so much like their favorite insects that the insect mistakes them for kin, and when it lands on the flower to visit, pollen sticks to its body. When the insect repeats the mistake on another orchid, the pollen from the first flower gets deposited on the stigma of the second—in other words, the orchid gets fertilized because it is smarter than the bug. Another orchid species imitates the shape of something that a pollinating insect likes to kill. Botanists call this pseudoantagonism. The insect sees its enemy and attacks it—that is, it attacks the orchid—and in the process of this pointless fight the insect gets dusted with orchid pollen and spreads the pollen when it repeats the mistake. Other species look like the mate of their pollinator, so the bug tries to mate with one orchid and then another—pseudocopulation—and spreads pollen from flower to flower each hopeless time.

I didn’t want to get hooked—I didn’t have the room or the patience to have plants in my apartment, and I suppose I also didn’t want Laroche to feel too smug about his predictive powers. In fact, nearly every orchid grower I talked to insisted on giving me a plant and I was so leery of getting attached that I immediately gave them all away.

Being an orchid hunter has always meant pursuing beautiful things in terrible places. From the mid-1800s to the early 1900s, when orchid hunting was at its prime, terrible places were really terrible places, and any man advertising himself as a hunter needed to be hardy, sharp, and willing to die far from home.

After boasts and threats and a display of side arms they nearly ended up in a duel. Once Arnold arrived in Brazil he wrote to Sander about the incident. According to his biographer Arthur Swinson, Sander wrote back to Arnold: “This makes me very excited and gives me much pleasure for I love these battles very much.” He advised Arnold to stop hunting for orchids immediately and instead start tracking Lowe’s orchid hunter to see what kinds of plants he was collecting and to get any he might overlook. Then Sander told Arnold to try to urinate on his competitor’s plants when they were packed for shipping because the urine would cause the plants to bolt and die on the boat ride home.

Because orchid hunters hated the thought of another hunter’s finding any plants they might have missed, they would “collect out” an area, and then they would burn the place down. Even hunters working for the same grower were dog-eat-dog. Competition between them was so intense that it could even take their minds off orchids. Whenever some of Sander’s hunters came upon each other they would stop looking for orchids and spend days or weeks pursuing each other through the jungle for no reason at all.

On the brink of World War I, Micholitz wrote to Sander that he worried about the approaching conflict but just for one reason, one that Sander certainly understood: “I suppose if it comes to a universal war, there will be very little demand for orchids.” A few years later Sander was on his deathbed. Just before he fell into his final coma, he sent a note to a garden director in Frankfurt and signed off with a few lines Micholitz would have appreciated: “This illness will be the end of me. Tell me, how are the plants I sent you? Are they still alive?”

Cattleya labiata vera was, at one time, common in European greenhouses, but then one by one each mysteriously died until there was only a single plant left in all of western Europe. No nurseryman or plant hunter could remember where the flower had originally been found. Then the greenhouse with the sole surviving specimen burned down, incinerating the final domesticated Cattleya labiata vera. Hunters pined for it without luck for seventy years and finally more or less abandoned the search. One evening, seven decades after the last one had burned, a British diplomat spotted a woman at an embassy dinner in Paris with a corsage that reminded him of Cattleya labiata vera. He traced the flower to Brazil and confirmed that it was the lamented Cattleya, and soon hunters were able to restock Europe’s greenhouses.

What they brought out of the roughest jungles was not just gorgeous and astonishing but also essential to science. They saw more of the world than most men of their time, but finally the world forgot them. I used to think that John Laroche was irascible and self-reliant and enterprising enough to have been the perfect Victorian orchid hunter, but I think it would have galled him too much to have no one remember his name.

The English were horrible orchid growers at first, and they usually killed every orchid they got their hands on. The director of the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew in 1850 became so exasperated that he declared England “the grave of all tropical orchids.”

Joseph Paxton was responsible for probably the most important advance: the English believed that orchids thrived in jungle-like environments, so they kept their greenhouses—what they called their “stoves”—suffocatingly steamy and hot. In fact most orchids prefer temperate perches above the jungle floor, on trees and rocks in the mountains. Until Paxton experimented with cooler, drier greenhouses, English orchids were being boiled to death.

The breeders, the botanists, the hunters, and the collectors of orchids were all men. Victorian women were forbidden from owning orchids because the shapes of the flowers were considered too sexually suggestive for their shy constitutions, and anyway the expense and danger and independence of collecting in the tropics were beyond any Victorian woman’s ken.

When I got there he was leaning against the door of the van looking ashen-faced and skinny. I said hi and asked if he was feeling okay. “Of course I’m not,” he said impatiently. “I’m fucking dying.” He refused to specify what was killing him, so we just stood there quietly until he finished his cigarette and then walked to the auditorium entrance.

I collected ferns for a while. They’re hard to grow. They like to die. That’s what they like to do the most. ‘What should we do today? Hey, let’s die!’

I believe in botany by imagination. I try to put myself in the plant’s point of view and try to figure them out. The only ones with features that have no real purpose are the hybrids, because someone put them together and came up with an unnatural thing. That’s the cool thing with hybridizing. You are God. You do the plant sex. It’s a man-made hobby.” “Are there any hybrids that occur naturally?” “Hardly any,” he said. “Why?” He snorted. “Well, you wouldn’t, even in a fit of boredom, decide to have sex with a gorilla, right?”

As we walked around the Fort Lauderdale show he said the most awful things—for instance, I asked him what his current girlfriend did and he said, “She’s a bitch”—and then a minute later he bragged that she was incredibly smart and had been in medical school before she took her current sales position at Miami Subs. As usual he was sarcastic about everyone and everything, but then he would become lyrical and sad as he described a trip he took into the Fakahatchee with his late mother, when they had hiked to a clearing and suddenly the swamp opened onto this: a pond filled with bright yellow water lilies, an otter, a piliated woodpecker, and a scarlet ibis staring into the pond. I was getting used to his contrariness but he still puzzled me. He was always daring me to mistrust him, and then surprising me by being reliable, and he was always daring me to think he was a creep, and then he would unveil something that belied any creepiness.

I asked if he was considering becoming a palm rustler. “Of course not,” he said peevishly. “It’d be a great little business, but bottom line, I’m on the side of the plants. See, with the ghost orchids, I wanted to make a dollar but I really want the plants to be saved from extinction. And even then, when we were taking them out of the Fakahatchee, in my own sick little morality I felt kind of guilty”

Melaleuca leaves are oily and burn intensely. A melaleuca-leaf fire in 1985 left two million people in Florida without electricity because the fueled-up flames reached as high as the main power-transmission lines. No one has any sentimental feelings about the species, and most people now consider them a spreading evil. The problem is that melaleucas hate to die. If a melaleuca tree is frozen or starved or chopped or poisoned or broken or burned, it will release twenty million seeds right before it dies and resow itself in every direction, so in a sense it ends up more alive than dead. The trick is to kill the tree gradually, because the shock of dying is what causes it to shoot out its seeds.

The world is so huge that people are always getting lost in it. There are too many ideas and things and people, too many directions to go. I was starting to believe that the reason it matters to care passionately about something is that it whittles the world down to a more manageable size. It makes the world seem not huge and empty but full of possibility. If I had been an orchid hunter I wouldn’t have seen this space as sad-making and vacant—I think I would have seen it as acres of opportunity where the things I loved were waiting to be found.

For a fee of one thousand dollars, tourists were guided through the safari and could take home whatever they killed. The outcry was speedy and loud. Chief Billie told a reporter that Seminole kids were even being taunted in school as Bambi killers. Moreover, the tribe had to construct big, expensive fences around the safari—not to keep the imported animals in but to keep native animals out, because Florida panthers and alligators had discovered a taste for exotic meat and had killed dozens of the safari animals within the first few weeks.

It was a weird unquiet stillness, and yet the place had a weird overfull emptiness. It was more ghostly than a ghost town. In a ghost town only the people are missing. Here the buildings were missing, too. It didn’t seem like a peaceful place where nothing ever happened—it was full of the feeling of a million things planned on and never done.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Laroche believed that if he could poach a few plants from the swamp—protected from federal endangered-species law by the Seminoles’ immunity—he could clone them using his secret cloning technique and end up with millions of ghost orchids and clamshell orchids and crooked spur orchids that would be legal for him to market anywhere in the world because they would have been produced in a lab and not taken from the wild. Collectors would then have no reason to buy from poachers because they could get a ghost orchid from Laroche, and thus he would scuttle the black-market trade in the species.

One of those disasters happened to be another plane crash in Peru in which seven friends of his died. Once again he had intended to be on the flight, and this time he missed it because he got delayed en route. Because his name was on the airplane’s manifest he was listed as one of the casualties. His friends and family were surprised when he showed up alive.

As we were getting into his truck I asked him if he happened to know John Laroche. They seemed as if they were cut from the same flammable cloth, but I suspected they had never met, only because I believe the universe would have exploded if they had ever been in a room together.

More and more, I felt that I was meeting people like Lee who didn’t at all seem part of this modern world and this moment in time—the world of petty aggravations and obligations and boundaries, a time of bored cynicism—because how they lived and what they lived for was so optimistic. They sincerely loved something, trusted in the perfectibility of some living thing, lived for a myth about themselves and the idea of adventure, were convinced that certain things were really worth dying for, believed that they could make their lives into whatever they dreamed.

He had the same emotional pitch as the kind of guy who would permanently misplace his ex-wife’s phone number, which as a matter of fact Laroche had done: he had no idea of where his ex-wife was living and no clue of her phone number and he claimed he didn’t care. He really seemed to mean it, although he made a habit of insulting her favorite flowers whenever we saw them at orchid shows.

In the time between his dismissal by the Seminoles and the powwow, he had taught himself everything there was to know about computers and was now making money by building websites for businesses and, as a private sideline, posting pornography on the Internet. He was in love with computers. He even loved the pornography part of his computer work. This was not because he loved pornography; it was because being an Internet pornography publisher was, in his mind, another opportunity to profit from human weakness, something he especially liked to do. He said that he couldn’t believe people were paying him to post pictures of naked fat people on the Internet, just the way he couldn’t believe people had paid to buy the worthless guide to growing marijuana he was selling when we first met.

“People spend a fortune on this junk, and I just keep charging them more and more,” he explained to me one morning on the phone. “Maybe at some point it will dawn on these shitheads that they’re wasting their money posting these lousy pictures and they’ll cut it out. I’m doing them a favor by helping them realize how ridiculous it is. That’s why the more I charge, the more helpful I’m being. Anyway, in the meantime, I’m making a shitload of money.”