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The orchid thief12/24/2022 ![]() ![]() Orlean knew nothing about orchids and she was confused about how a flower could so consume someone that they’d feel compelled to steal it. Sometimes, when pressed for ideas, she would walk to a newsstand near her office and buy a stack of magazines. Orlean, a staff writer for The New Yorker, had a penchant for finding stories in unsuspected places. “I read lots of local newspapers and particularly the shortest articles in them, and most particularly any articles that are full of words in combinations that are arresting,” Orlean says at the start of The Orchid Thief. Orlean had developed an interest in the ghost orchid after reading a short article in the Miami Herald about a wiry man named John Laroche who’d been arrested for poaching endangered orchids from the Fakahatchee Strand. Spend enough time looking for - and failing to find - the ghost orchid, and you might begin to doubt it even exists. When it blooms, its delicate white flower appears to be floating, suspended like a phantom above the swamp’s floor. Its roots blend in with whatever offshoot from which it grows. The ghost orchid is an epiphyte, meaning it grows on another plant but is not a parasite. On average, five percent of these flowers get pollinated because only one insect on earth, the giant sphinx moth, has a proboscis long enough to extend down the ghost’s six-inch nectar spur. It can take 16 years before a plant produces a single flower. It blooms only once a year, for just 10 days. No flower may have a story as tortuous as the ghost orchid. Last year, I waded into the Fakahatchee wanting very badly to find what Orlean had spent her whole book looking for, but never found: a ghost orchid in bloom. In her masterwork of nonfiction The Orchid Thief (1998), Susan Orlean cautions, “You would have to want something very badly to go looking for it in the Fakahatchee Strand.” ![]() During the rainy season, when the air is cool and the swamp reaches its peak depth, alligators, cottonmouths, and fish-eating spiders teem beneath the surface, just out of view. In midsummer, the air hangs thick with mosquitos that can carpet a bare arm in seconds. I’M NOT SURE I would recommend visiting the Fakahatchee Strand swamp in south Florida. ![]()
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