ORCHIDS LOOK TO BECOME MY next obsession. I do not, I think, qualify as a truly obsessive personality, but I do like to have an obsession going from time to time. For a while I was obsessed with finding the perfect fountain pen, which I believe I’ve now found. Books were a more enduring obsession, lasting decades: I wanted to own and read all the good books. That, too, is well behind me, and all I care about now is having a few well-written books around the house that I haven’t yet read.
As an obsession, orchids, though, are very different, coming out of nowhere. A city man, an apartment dweller, I have never kept a garden, nor do I desire to do so now. I have never taken a course in botany, and the pistil and the stamen exhaust my knowledge on the subject. If a grandchild were to ask me to explain photosynthesis, “Kid,” I’d have to say, “lemme get back to you on this one.”
My interest in orchids began roughly a year or so ago, when a friend, in commemoration of his wife’s death, sent my wife and me and a few other of his friends a grand double-orchid plant, species Phalaenopsis, whose large but delicate white flowers, sitting in the middle of our dining-room table, lasted nearly four months. Looking at them refreshed my spirit; and when they finally withered, I felt a genuine subtraction.
Not long after, at our local farmers’ market, an orchid grower set up a stand. I began buying orchids from him, at $25 for a six-inch pot, usually keeping three or four such pots in the apartment. When the farmers’ market closed in the autumn, I discovered that Home Depot, in its gardening department, carries a good supply of orchids, and I now buy them there ($20 for a six-inch pot). Standing in the checkout line, holding my single potted orchid, behind two guys with eighty-pound sacks of concrete, and in front of a guy with a heavy cart filled with insulation, I feel like Oscar Wilde, freshly arrived in America, posing with a long lily in his hand.
I mention prices because orchids were once thought to be a luxury available only to the very rich. Anthony West, the natural son of H.G. Wells and Rebecca West, and a man with a keen interest in orchids, reports that in the 1880s and ’90s, keeping and growing orchids was the sport of the very rich in England: “The mark of arrival, beyond having a town house and country place, a shoot in Scotland, or a string of race horses, was having an orchid house–and having in it something from the heart of Brazil, or darkest New Guinea, or upper Burma, that they hadn’t got at Chatsworth, or in the Rothschilds’ orchid house at Tring Park.” This is but another instance of how those of us who are mere members of the schleppoisie can now enjoy pleasures once available only to the very rich.
The actor Raymond Burr is said to have been mad about orchids, and so is the historian John Hope Franklin, who grows them. Rex Stout’s detective Nero Wolfe was another orchidizer, and for him the more exotic the species the better. Hercule Poirot used sometimes to wear a small orchid of subtle color in the lapel of his exquisitely tailored suits.
Part of the attraction of orchids is their color. When it comes to orchids, my vocabulary isn’t subtle enough to register the astonishing range of their colors. I have a plant now with no fewer than eleven blooms and three more in bud, all in what I call a washed yellow, turning to lightest green, faintly pink in the middle, with extraordinary brown markings that, close up, resemble Chinese hieroglyphs.
The exoticism of these flowers supplies another part of their pleasure for me. With them in my house I feel I have a butterfly collection, on loan for as long as they live, which is usually roughly three months. But it is a butterfly collection not pinned to velvet but instead shown in perfect stop-action, or, if you prefer, tableau vivant. There are some 30,000 species of orchid that grow wild around the world, and, if Vladimir Nabokov were alive, he could tell me whether there are more or fewer species of butterfly. After he did, I would tell him that the nice thing about the orchids is that at least one doesn’t have to run around in shorts with a net to capture them.
We couldn’t keep flowers in our apartment until the decease of our highly civilized cat, Isabelle, whose only flaw was to treat all flowers as her personal salad bar. I don’t plan ever to grow orchids–mine is an obsession with clear limits–but I do like to acquire them with as many buds as possible, allowing myself to believe that my careful watering–three ice cubes in their terra cotta pots every other morning–is what causes them to bloom and flourish. So please, in the future, do not send small plaques, tall trophies, or jeroboams of champagne. Orchids will do splendidly.
–Joseph Epstein
