16 December 2004
Obsession: Summary
The Orchid Thief is Susan Orlean’s personal account of John Laroche and his obsession with orchids. She discovers as a narrator that this flower obsession is rather common, traced back to a long history of infatuated orchid hunters and collectors. The story begins describing John’s habit of randomly falling in and out of fascinations from turtles as a child to orchids as an adult. Orlean describes him with a character that seems to be corrupt but simultaneously moral. This is shown through his offense of robbing the Fakahatchee land of plant life and of possessing an endangered species of flowers. His motive was to become rich and famous for growing and cloning ghost orchids, but as soon as he obtained this “million-dollar plant” (27), he would address to Florida legislators about reinforcing the protection of these species, making ghost orchids unavailable to all others but also protecting their existence as well. He is a man of both good and bad. Orchids prove to be highly valued due to their rare characteristics, long survival, and thousands of species. In this manner, orchids were signs of wealth. The never-ending varieties of orchids cause people to continually search for new species that may be even more valuable than the ones known. Perhaps the most renowned Victorian orchid grower was Frederick Sander who hired twenty-three orchid hunters at various locations of the world to bring back to him the plants that would occupy sixty greenhouses on his estate. This mad rush for orchids placed hunters and collectors against other hunters and collectors. Even Susan Orlean was afraid to become absorbed in this craze, giving away any plants that were given to her during her visits to these orchid collectors.