PLANT CRIMES

The strange things people will do for the orchids they love.

BY SUSAN ORLEAN

NOTHING in science can account for the way people feel about orchids. Those who love them love them madly. Orchids arouse passion more than romance. They are the sexiest flowers on earth. The word "orchid" derives from the Latin orchis, which means "testicle." This refers not only to the testicle-shaped pseudobulbs of the plant but also to the fact that it was long believed that orchids sprang from the spilled semen of mating animals. An orchid's appearance is, in fact, ravishing. One species looks like a German shepherd with its tongue hanging out. One looks like an octopus. One looks like a human nose. One looks like a pair of fancy shoes. One looks dead. There are species that look like butterflies, bats, ladies' handbags, swarms of bees, clamshells, camels' hooves, squirrels, nuns wearing wimples, and drunken old men. The smallest orchids are nearly microscopic, and the biggest ones have masses of flowers as large as footballs. The petals of some orchids are as soft as powder; others are as rigid and rubbery as inner tubes. They can be freckled or mottled or veiny or solid, their colors ranging from nearly neon to spotless white. Some look like the results of an accident involving paint.

A British herbal guide of 1653 advised that orchids be viewed with discretion: "They are hot and moist in operation, under the dominion of Venus, and provoke lust exceedingly." There is something delirious about orchid collecting. There are orchid babysitters and orchid doctors and orchid groomers and orchid boarding houses and orchid heirs designated in wills. A magazine recently reported that a customer of one orchid kennel in San Francisco had so many plants that he was paying two thousand dollars in monthly rent. A young Chinese collector, Hsu She-hua, who was not long ago described in newspaper reports as a fanatic, said that even though he had been hauled into court seven times for possessing illegal wild orchids he considered it worthwhile. Collecting orchids is a sort of lovesickness. Once afflicted, seemingly normal people become less like normal people; they become orchid addicts, orchid zealots. The most seriously afflicted cross the line: ever since people first began collecting orchids, some have been driven to smuggle them, poach them, and steal them—to become orchid traffickers and orchid rustlers and orchid thieves.

IN Victorian England, the orchid hobby became so consuming that it was sometimes called "orchidelirium." It began in 1833, when William George Spencer Cavendish, the Sixth Duke of Devonshire, fell in love with a slender, branching spray of dappled yellow doll-faced flowers—an oncidium—that he saw at an orchid exhibition staged by the Horticultural Society of London at one of his own estates, Chiswick, in Middlesex. Cavendish was deaf and depressed and was suspected of being a changeling, because his father had lived with his wife and also with his wife's best friend and had impregnated them both. Nonetheless, Cavendish received the family title. He lived alone and came to be known as the Bachelor Duke. He loved plants, and in 1838 was elected president of the Horticultural Society. At that time, however, tropical orchids were still mere curiosities. A few had been brought to England from the West Indies by colonial administrators, but by 1813 the orchid collection at the Botanic Gardens, in Kew, consisted of only forty-six tropical species. Once the Duke had been smitten by the oncidium, however, he instructed Joseph Paxton, the head gardener at his estate Chatsworth, in Derbyshire, to begin acquiring orchids. Within ten years, Paxton had assembled the largest collection in England.

The Bachelor Duke's obsession ignited a fashion for tropical orchids in English high society which was similar to the Dutch tulip mania of the sixteen-thirties. People were captivated by the strangeness of orchids—their intricacy, their boggling diversity. An average Englishman couldn't afford a greenhouse or a gardener, but the longing for these bewitching plants seemed to have no class distinction. In 1851, a nurseryman named Benjamin Williams began a series of articles advocating orchid ownership for everyone through the use of new cultivation techniques. The series, called "Orchids for the Millions," was eventually published as a book that became so popular it was reprinted seven times.

Some Victorian orchid collectors went to the tropics themselves, but most stayed home and paid professional hunters to travel around the world and collect orchids for them. Having tropical orchids therefore indicated that you were rich enough to hire a man to do a task that might kill him. No one in England was very good at cultivating or breeding tropical orchids, so hunters were the only way to get nursery stock, and the big nurseries employed whole crews of them. In 1894, for instance, a preeminent Victorian orchid grower named Frederick Sander had sixty greenhouses at his estate, in St. Albans, and employed twenty hunters, who collected around the world for him, among them a man in Mexico, two in Brazil, two in Columbia, two in Peru, one in Madagascar, one in New Guinea, and others in India, Burma, and the Straits Settlements.

Being an orchid hunter meant pursuing beautiful things in terrible places. From the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth, when orchid hunting was in 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. The great orchid hunter William Arnold (who often worked for Sander) drowned during a collecting expedition on the Orinoco River. The hunter Schroeder fell to his death while hunting in Sierra Leone. The hunter Falkenberg was lost while orchid hunting in Panama. David Bowman died of dysentery in Bogota. The hunter Klaboch died in Mexico. Endres was shot dead in Ríohacha. Gustave Wallis was murdered in Ecuador. Digance was gunned down by locals in Brazil. Osmers vanished without a trace. The linguist and plant collector Augustus Margary survived toothache, rheumatism, pleurisy, and dysentery while sailing the Yangtze, only to be murdered when he completed his mission and travelled beyond Bhamo, in Burma.

At the peak of the Victorian orchid fever, scores of orchid hunters were crisscrossing the world for different growers and collectors. The history of their expeditions was recorded informally, if at all. According to one version of one story, in 1863 a ship sailing to South America had among its passengers John Weir, of the Royal Horticultural Society; John Blunt, a hunter for a well-known collector named Hugh Low; and a hunter named Schlim, who was working for Frederick Sander's arch-rival, Jean Jules Linden, a distinguished Belgian nurseryman. All three men were heading for the same part of the Andes to search for the same odontoglossums, and each had promised his employer that he would be the first to bring the plants home. When men working for rival growers crossed paths, they sometimes killed each other, or at least came close.

Sometimes orchid species were discovered and brought back to Europe but then couldn't be found again in the wild. These were known as lost orchids, and every orchid fancier and every ambitious commercial grower and every prideful hunter was determined to find one of them. In the nineteenth century, Cattleya labiata vera was common in European greenhouses, but then, according to Tyler Whittle, an Anglican priest and the author of "The Plant Hunters," one by one the cattleyas 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. Hunters pined for the cattleya without luck for fifty years and eventually more or less abandoned the search for it. Then, one evening, 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 lost cattleya, and soon hunters were able to restock Europe's greenhouses. Most other lost orchids, though, have never been seen again.

IN 1975, global traffic in wild orchids was outlawed by the Convention of International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, which is known as CITES. The treaty has now been signed by a hundred and forty-four countries, but it has not entirely ended the world trade in exotic plants and animals. Many smugglers ply their trade through the Port of Miami, which is one of the nation's biggest points of entry for contraband living things. The devices that smugglers use are manifold. In recent years, customs inspectors in Florida have arrested a woman trying to smuggle in a rare woolly monkey by hiding it in her overcoat, and a man wearing a vest with special pockets to carry his Australian-palm-cockatoo eggs, and a man carrying a toy Teddy bear stuffed with live tortoises, and a man with a live boa constrictor under his shirt, and a man with pygmy marmosets in his fanny pack. Inspectors have also found falcons hidden in milk cartons, parakeets tucked in hair curlers, monkeys under people's hats. Recently, they arrested a Venezuelan smuggler who had a bird-eating tarantula, two hundred baby tarantulas, and three hundred thumb-sized poison-arrow frogs in his carry-on bag. He also had fourteen juvenile boa constrictors in his pants. Orchids and other exotic plants are often smuggled from Asia to buyers in the United States. A few years ago, federal agents landed a catch of two thousand rare lady's-slipper orchids being illegally shipped into Miami from China. The federal government handed over the coveted plants to the Marie Selby Botanical Gardens, in Sarasota, and after they arrived the director of Selby installed new locks in the orchid compound.

Domestic-plant crimes are common in Florida, too. Here are a few of the dozens I found on the Miami police blotter, in among the usual reports of assaults and stickups and stolen vehicles:

April 30, 1992—Someone jumped the fence of a home in the 700 block of East 43rd Street Saturday afternoon and stole several orchids. The plants were valued at more than $1000.

Feb. 6, 1992—Burglars attempted to enter a home in the 6500 block of West 27th Court sometime over the weekend but couldn't open the front door. Instead, they cut open a rear screen and stole eight orchids.

July 18, 1985—Frank Labate had $1800 worth of plants stolen from the patio of his home. Labate said he lost an eight-foot-tall palm tree, a six-foot white bird of paradise, a fern, six orchids, and two bonsai plants.

Sept. 2, 1984—More than $2000 worth of plants and patio furniture were taken from the backyard of Barry Burak. Burak reported 35 orchids totaling $1400, a $200 staghorn fern, 10 hanging plants totaling $150, five potted plants totaling $200, and three metal patio chairs totaling $150 missing.

May 6, 1984—Six show orchids, worth more than $700, were stolen from the backyard of Barbara Carter's house.

By contrast, the thievery that goes on in the bountiful wilderness areas of South Florida—the Everglades, the Big Cypress Swamp, the Loxahatchee Slough, and the Fakahatchee Strand— goes mostly unreported. Although it is illegal to take any plant or animal out of state or federal preserves, the Florida backwoods have been plundered for their botanical wealth since the day they were discovered. When the swamps were first being explored, orchid hunters, in the hope of protecting the plants, would sometimes refuse to say where they'd found new species. A prominent orchid grower who regularly explored the Fakahatchee—a swampy lowland preserve, near Naples, that is one of the richest orchid sites in the country—discovered Bulbophyllum pachyrhachis in Pond Apple Slough in 1956 but tried to keep the site secret. Eventually, though, collectors figured out where the cache was, and by 1962 they'd swept it clean.

The prettiest plant in the Fakahatchee is Polyrrhiza lindenii, known as the ghost orchid, which is a leafless species with a milk-white bloom, a lip as long and fluttery as the tail of a kite, and pale-green roots that form on tree bark the sort of starry pattern that you get when you throw a rock through a window. Ghost orchids are found in the United States only in the Fakahatchee, and they are now classified as endangered. It is illegal to collect them and it is also hopeless, because the plants rarely thrive outside the strand. Nevertheless, people will walk through the swamp for mile after miserable mile to find them.

THE orchid community in South Florida, which grows most of the commercial orchids for sale in the United States, is a tight, tangled world. Some nurseries have been in the same families for several generations. Everyone knows everyone else, and people have opinions about one another, about one another's flowers and greenhouses and techniques and families and fertilizers and letterheads and ethics and irrigation systems and personalities and talents and predilections. I didn't have to ask around the orchid community very long before I found someone who knew someone who had ghost orchids. I obtained an introduction through another grower to a woman named Savilla Quick, who was famous for having a lucky touch with Florida orchids.

Savilla has long, Cleopatra eyes and a button nose and a round, drawly voice. She told me that she had grown up west of Boynton Beach, when west of Boynton Beach was still nothing but cypress stands and acres of sawgrass. On Sundays, she used to go riding around the swamps looking for interesting things— in particular, leafless orchid species like the ghosts. At the time, it was still legal to collect wild orchids. She would bring the wild plants home and attach them to trees in her yard. That was decades ago. Since then, the woods west of Boynton Beach have disappeared, and Savilla has grown up, married twice, moved several times, had three children, and retired from her job as a lab technician, but the orchids she collected when she was young are still growing in her back yard.

Savilla invited me to her home, in Boynton Beach, to see her ghost orchids. I had to come right away, she told me, because she and her husband, Bob, were packing to go to Arkansas for the summer. From her dining room, I glanced out into her shade house, a kind of greenhouse made of wire mesh, perforated cloth, and clear plastic. It was about the size of a tractor-trailer and was bristling to the ceiling with plants. A little gust was pushing its hanging baskets around and rustling the green shade cloth and making pieces of a wind chime tick against each other with a lazy sound. When Savilla got off the phone, she rushed into the dining room and perched on the edge of a chair. "So, you want to know about the ghost orchids?" she asked. "Oh, I don't know! Should I really tell you my secrets? Oh, I suppose I should. It's good for the orchids, isn't it? Everybody's always trying to get my secrets out of me, because I'm one of the only ones who seem to be able to grow them."

Many people in the orchid world know about Savilla's success with ghost orchids, and she gets calls all the time from people who want to buy one of her plants. That week, she had already got a call from Tampa and a call from California. The woman in California had told Savilla that she was desperate for a ghost orchid and asked how much Savilla wanted for one. "I told her a hundred dollars," Savilla said. "Honestly, I could have said a thousand dollars! She had gobs of money! She said she was desperate! But I could tell she wanted it only so she could brag about it I think it was just a statusy thing for her."

I asked her what she had decided to do.

She frowned and said, "I told her I'd call her if I had some seeds. I'll probably do that, but I bet a nickel I never give her one. I can tell she was one of those people who would love the orchid for a minute and end up letting it die."

Sometimes Savilla and Bob sell their surplus orchids at plant shows. At one of the shows, a man lingered at the Quicks' table and then struck up a conversation with Savilla. Maybe they talked about ghost orchids and maybe they didn't. Maybe he said he had a friend who wanted to buy one and maybe he didn't. The one certainty is that the man bought one little orchid from the Quicks and left. Two days later, the man called Savilla and said he wanted a few more orchids. "He'd been so sweet and so nice and so this and so that," she said. "That's why I let him come over to the house, even though he'd only bought one little bitty orchid at the sale." The man was especially curious about her ghost orchids, so she showed him a cluster of them on her mango tree. Most of them weren't blooming at the time, but one of the plants had started forming three seedpods—an infrequent and precious occurrence for an orchid, especially for a moody one like the ghost.

That evening, the man called Savilla and offered her a hundred dollars for one of those pods. She couldn't decide whether she should sell one, but the next day she called him and said she'd decided that she would, and then explained that the pods weren't ready to pick, so he couldn't have it quite yet. She said she would call him as soon as his pod was ready. She had his business card, which had only a post-office box instead of a regular address.

A few days later, Savilla went to check on the ghost-orchid seedpods. She walked over to the mango tree and bent down to take a look. Two of the pods were missing. The other was broken in two. Half of it was lying in the grass around the bottom of the tree. Savilla describes herself as an extremely emotional person. She says that she now wishes she hadn't let herself get so upset about the seedpods, but she did. She went berserk. Then she gathered the pieces of the broken pod and took them to the woman who germinates seeds for her, and the woman confirmed that the pod was ruined.

Savilla called the curious man for some sympathy. She asked him if he thought that his friend might have got impatient and come and stolen the seedpod. The curious man said that he was awfully sorry about the pods but that she'd misremembered: he hadn't been buying the pod for a friend; he wanted it for himself. He said some other ghost-orchid fancier must have heard that Savilla had seedpods and had stolen them.

Right after the pod theft, someone broke into the Quicks' shade house and stole almost three hundred plants, including twenty-three that were more valuable than beautiful—plants that only an orchid person could love. The Quicks installed video cameras in the shade house and an alarm system in the yard. Some time later, Savilla spotted the curious man at a plant show. It was the first time she'd seen him since the pods disappeared. She hardly recognized him, because he had completely changed his looks. "When I first met him, he was blondy-headed. This time, his hair was dark," Savilla said. "When I met him, he was wearing glasses, but now he had gone to contact lenses. And even his clothes had changed! He had been real casual when I met him, and when I saw him again he was in this sort of macho attire." They didn't speak; in fact, the curious man went out of his way not even to show Savilla his face.

Just then Savilla interrupted her story and said we should take a walk in the shade house. It was boiling hot outside. Savilla mentioned that her daughter had moved away from Florida and now lives in Anchorage, Alaska. We walked between the benches of plants, ducking to miss the hanging baskets of orchids. A turtledove was nesting in one of the baskets and watched us with its calm round eye, purring like a cat. The bird's tail had a neon-orange stripe on it that looked unnatural. "I did that," Savilla said, pointing to the bird. "I spray-painted the stripe on her when she first came to nest, because I wanted to keep track of the bird and see if she would return to her basket. With her stripe, now I won't mix her up with any other little bird."

We dallied. Savilla pointed out things she wanted me to see—a champion vanda, an iridescent fern, a frizzy little orchid she'd collected as a teenager. I loved all of them. The leaves on her plants were glossy and full, as if they'd been shampooed and conditioned. The late daylight made the pink and purple blooms look plushy and the red ones look like emergency flares. We walked under the purring turtledove and around the side of the house to the mango tree. The green roots of Savilla's ghost orchids were spread across the trunk. None of the plants were flowering, although one clump had a tiny raised pale-green bump, which Savilla said would be a flower in a month or two. I ran my fingers up and down the flat, rubbery orchid roots and up and down the nubbly mango bark, and then we went back into the house. Savilla opened a small file box and pulled out index cards on which she records information about all the wild plants she has collected. She handed me two cards. One said "Tiny Ghost Harrisella porrecta Collected Big Cypress," and the other said "Polyrrhiza lindenii Collected Big Cypress." These were the plants that were growing on her mango tree.

She put the index cards away and said that there was one last part of the seedpod story. It takes about eight months for orchid seeds to germinate, and eight months after her seedpods were stolen Savilla received a letter from the curious man. "It was around Christmastime," she said. "But it wasn't a Christmas card, it was just a note. I first thought it was awful strange to not even say 'Merry Christmas.' It just said, 'Dear Savilla, I hope you've gotten over the tragic loss of your seedpod. Call me when there's another.' Isn't that peculiar?"

Her theory is that, since she had hesitated before she agreed to sell the man a pod, he suspected that she would change her mind, so he decided to steal a pod before that happened. She figures that he sneaked into her yard one night, stole two pods, accidentally broke another, then tried to germinate the seeds, waited eight months, realized that the seeds weren't going to grow, and wrote Savilla a note just to seem nice and also to ply her for another seedpod. She never called him after she got the letter, but she kept his business card taped to one of her kitchen-cabinet doors. She asked around about him, and none of the orchid people she knows had ever heard of the man. She assumes that she will never hear from him again.

ONE of the most notorious plant crimes in Florida took place a few years before the theft of Savilla's seedpods—in June of 1990, when someone broke into a shade house at R. F. Orchids and stole a hundred and fifty thousand dollars' worth of prize-winning orchids. Many of the stolen orchids were irreplaceable show plants, which had won the American Orchid Society's highest honors and were used as studs—big, vigorous specimens with deluxe pedigrees which were bred and cloned. The break-in was big news among orchid growers and collectors because it was probably the biggest-ever orchid theft in Florida and maybe the biggest-ever in the United States, and it was definitely the biggest-ever theft of such special plants. The fact that it happened at R. F. Orchids made it even more newsworthy, because R. F. Orchids is one of the best and most successful nurseries in South Florida, and because the owner of R. F. Orchids, Robert Fuchs, attracts more opinions than most.

I met Bob a few years ago, the night before one of the annual South Florida orchid shows. At the time, he was about fifty and looked at least six feet tall, and he had a fit, husky, high-school-linebacker build. He was absolutely, completely, not tan. His hair was peach-colored and brushy, and he had a fluffy mustache and squinty blue eyes. He was the only person in the South Florida orchid world who had regularly been described to me as being very handsome. Everyone I met knew Bob Fuchs or knew of him. Some people said they considered him the king of the orchid world. Other people I asked would take deep breaths and release the air very slowly and then say that Bob was controversial. After a while, I began to see this as a polite way of saying that the person hated him, or, at the very least, that he made the person unhappily jealous.

I figured out right away why some people hated him: he is brassy and opinionated and has at times gone out of his way to be argumentative, and apparently his philosophy about orchid breeding is not everyone's cup of tea. The list of what is jealous-making about him is also long: he is from a family of Florida orchid aristocrats, his business is very successful, he wins a lot of awards, the public loves his flowers and loves his displays, he knows how to cultivate customers almost as well as he cultivates orchids. Or just go to his house! If you like flowers, or fluorescent-feathered exotic birds, or a perfect turquoise swimming pool with an orchid mosaic in the middle, or a pond with a waterfall and a special kind of dappled fish that flash to the surface of the pond when you feed them, or a beautiful wooden grandstand where you can sit and watch the waterfall and the fish, or a dramatic, airy house filled with antique orchid porcelains and fine furniture and trophy heads of African game, or a front yard that opens onto a path leading to a pristine nursery filled with thousands and thousands of candy-colored flowers, you would probably like his house.

One afternoon, I went down to Homestead to see Bob, and he led me over to a grassy patch beside one of the shade houses where there was a huge chickee hut—the hut must have been as big as four hotel rooms—and we sat down at some kind of lovely table on some lovely chairs, and above us were a couple of ceiling fans going chuk-chuk-chuk as the blades flicked around, and the ice in our lemonade was clicking and sparkling, and behind Bob was a flow of green leaves and palm fronds and a blur of green in his shade houses, and above that green was the blank, blue Homestead sky, and from the west a breeze lifted and dropped pieces of Bob's blond hair like an idle shopper, and from behind us came the sound of cars grumbling over the gravel of his driveway and then sighing to a stop, and then came the clunk of an expensive car door opening and shutting, and then, not too long afterward, the chime of a cash register inside the shop, and for a long time I didn't want to say anything—I just wanted to sink into the greenness and the accidental melodies and the rich, hot laziness of the day. Bob finally started talking, and said he didn't know what made people so jealous of him, but at that moment, in that big, breezy chickee hut, with that green plushness all around us, I did.

BOB FUCHS'S fame began in 1984, at the eleventh World Orchid Conference, which was held in Miami. World conferences take place every three years and have been staged in Glasgow, Tokyo, Honolulu, St. Louis, Singapore, Long Beach, and Auckland, among other cities. Miami has been host to the conference only once, and 1984 drew a record number of exhibitors, from Florida and from all over the world. The award for the best orchid that year went to Vanda Deva "Robert," owned by Bob Fuchs—a brilliant-red orchid with a small, blackish lip, and a speck of yellow in the center, and large petals that are tessellated with blood-colored veins. The award made Bob Fuchs a star, but it also marked the beginning of ill will between Bob Fuchs and another orchid man named Frank Smith.

After the spectacular win of Vanda Deva "Robert," Bob Fuchs decided to quit teaching junior high and go into the orchid business fulltime. He had already completed all the course work and student-judging requirements to become an accredited orchid judge in the Florida/Caribbean region. But when he applied to the American Orchid Society's judging committee his application was rejected. It was turned down, he was told, because Frank Smith had sent a letter to the committee charging Bob with having tried to bribe show judges by offering them cuttings from his best plants. Smith is a man of about Bob's age who has a well-known and successful Florida nursery of his own—Krull-Smith Orchids, which is in Apoplca, near Disney World. He has also won many awards for his plants and is an accredited orchid judge, and in his letter he claimed that he was one of the judges whom Bob had tried to bribe. When the big robbery took place at R. F. Orchids, the police investigated, but, they told Bob, because there were no witnesses and few clues, it was unlikely that the plants or the thief would ever be found. About two days after the break-in, an orchid hobbyist named Robert Perry was touring Florida orchid nurseries with his wife, and they stopped at Krull-Smith Orchids. While they were looking around, Perry noticed a bunch of exceptional-looking plants piled haphazardly in the back of a secluded shade house. Among them was a plant he fell in love with—a silvery-gray flower with a reddish-purple lip. Because of the way the plants were piled up, Perry couldn't reach the silvery orchid, but he could see it well enough to know that he had never seen anything like it. On the way out, he asked a nursery worker if he could buy a pup—an orchid baby—from the plant, but the worker told him that none of the plants in the pile were for sale.

A month later, as Perry was browsing through an old orchid magazine, he saw an R. F. Orchids ad featuring what looked like the silvery flower he'd seen at Krull-Smith. He knew that an orchid as special as that one was unlikely to be found at more than one nursery. He remembered having heard something or other about a robbery at R. F. Orchids. Perry had never met Bob Fuchs, but he decided to call him and tell him he'd seen what he thought was that same rare orchid at Krull-Smith. A few days later, a deputy sheriff, Perry, and Bob Fuchs and his business partner drove to Krull-Smith Orchids in the middle of the night. Perry led the men to the secluded shade house. It was now empty. The stack of plants, including that silvery one, was gone. Perry was dumbfounded. As the men were leaving, Bob's partner, Mike Coronado, wandered into another shade house. A moment later, he ran back to show the sheriff a plant tag from R. F. Orchids which he said he had found lying on the floor. The sheriff recorded all the information, but in the end there was not enough evidence to charge anyone with anything.

That fall and winter, someone started making threatening phone calls to several Florida orchid growers. Frank Smith claimed to have received a few of the calls in the course of several weeks. During the morning of February 20, 1991, he said he got two calls in an hour. The first call was answered by a friend of Frank's named Jane Daugherty, who was at the Krull-Smith office that morning feeding pet birds that belonged to her and Frank. According to her later testimony, the man on the phone told Jane Daugherty that if she cared about Frank Smith at all she should stop him from going to the 1991 Miami International Orchid Show, which was being held the following week. Then, she later testified, the caller identified himself as Bob Fuchs.

The next time the phone rang at Krull-Smith, Frank himself answered, and he later testified that he recognized Bob's voice, and that the caller threatened to harm him if he attended the Miami show. Smith said that the call scared him, because he knew Bob was angry about the letter that had wrecked his chances of becoming an orchid judge, and he also knew that Bob was still suspicious about the stolen plants. Frank was nevertheless determined to attend the four-day-long orchid show, so he hired two bodyguards to accompany him as he walked through the flower displays.

In Florida, the crime of telephone harassment is defined as more than one call placed in one day specifically to "annoy, abuse, threaten or harass any person." Since Frank Smith claimed to have received two calls in one day, Bob Fuchs was charged with second-degree-misdemeanor harassing communication, and on August 27, 1991, the case went to trial.

No one likes to talk about the case these days. When I listened to a tape of the proceedings, I discovered that the witnesses spent very little time talking about phone harassment or business competition. Instead, the trial became a speculative romance free-for-all. The prosecutor tried to show that Mike Coronado was in love with Bob Fuchs and therefore could not be trusted as a witness; Coronado dismissed the suggestion. Fuchs's attorney cross-examined Jane Daugherty, who had been feeding pet birds at Krull-Smith on the morning of the phone calls. Some of the birds were Frank's, she told the court, and the rest were hers. The defense counsel suggested that Daugherty was in cahoots with Frank Smith, since they were so intimate that even their birds commingled:

COUNSEL: Would it be fair to say you love Frank Smith?

DAUGHERTY: No sir, I'm a friend.

COUNSEL: No, you do not?

DAUGHERTY: I'm a good friend.

COUNSEL: A good friend. And you have no romantic connection with him whatsoever?

DAUGHERTY: No, sir.

COUNSEL: You don't travel with him?

DAUGHERTY: I help him put in orchid exhibits but I do not travel with him.

COUNSEL: Uh-huh. Well, how long has this ... this mutual bird ... hobby been going on?

DAUGHERTY: About six years.

COUNSEL: And you keep your birds at his place?

DAUGHERTY: I keep some of my birds at his place.

COUNSEL: Well, how many birds do you keep at his place?

DAUGHERTY: Approximately twenty-five of the English budgies are mine.

COUNSEL: You keep twenty-five of your personal birds at his place! Is this a business that you and he are in together?

DAUGHERTY: No, sir. This is a hobby.

COUNSEL: So you have a hobby, a mutual hobby with him that you devote . . . twenty-five of these birds that you keep with him, and you're just friends?

No one ever suggested that Robert Perry, the man who'd seen the plants mysteriously stashed in a corner at Krull-Smith and had then got in touch with Fuchs, was motivated by being in love with anything other than the silvery orchid. Bob Fuchs didn't testify. In closing arguments, both his attorney and the prosecutor admitted wearily that the history of suspicion between the two men was so enmeshed that it was hard to draw out any individual thread. Did Bob threaten Frank Smith because he was convinced that Smith had robbed his nursery? Did Frank Smith interfere with Bob's application to be an orchid judge out of jealousy or because he really knew Bob to be dishonest? Did Bob actually try to frame Smith for the robbery as revenge for his rejection by the judging committee?

The jury found Bob Fuchs not guilty, but the verdict didn't do much to clear things up. At the orchid show where I first met Bob Fuchs, I also met Frank Smith. He seemed pleasant and polite, but when I asked him to talk about the trial he looked at me as if my hair were on fire. He said that he didn't want to discuss the case at all, ever. He said the whole thing had come about because he'd been "talked into something" and that he had been "misled," and anyhow it was way in the past and everything was now all patched up. He agreed to talk to me about orchids sometime if I promised I wouldn't ask him about the case.

The feud between Fuchs and Smith lasted almost a decade. Probably no one except Bob and Frank will ever know what really happened, and it's possible that even they don't know exactly what did. Bob is now an accredited orchid judge in a different region of the country, and both he and Frank are continuing to do well in orchid shows. The plants that disappeared from Fuchs's nursery, including the one with the silvery flower, are still missing. As with all the world's lost or stolen or vanished orchids, people will undoubtedly continue to long for them, but they will probably never be found.