Let’s imagine you are a professional thief, complete with your own equipment, with your own team of experts and a vast and deep knowledge of what you are about to steal. So, you and your team go on the most daring heist of the century. What will you be stealing, the crown jewels of the queen of England, precious diamonds from some obscure part of Africa, an ancient artifact from a long forgotten past, or perhaps an exceptional work of art from one of the classical masters like Michelangelo?
Well, you’d be surprised to learn that none of that would be appealing to a notorious plant dealer by the name of John Laroche. He grew up as a weird kid in Miami who’s shown a keen interest in collecting orchids ever since he was a child and set up a greenhouse in Florida to sell plants as an adult. So, he was practically surrounded with plants and he has sunk his teeth into every bit of knowledge he can learn out of orchids. So, you can say that he has a vast knowledge on a certain subject. He also has made friends with Seminoles in the southern region of Florida, locals who have a great expertise in the surrounding location. So now we got those covered, what’s next? Well, the heist of the century, obviously.
The prize: The very elusive Ghost Orchid that sits in the heart of Fakahatchee Strand State Preserve, a place of immense beauty but at the same time full of wild and inhospitable dangers. In what seems to be an endless labyrinth of twisting vines and murky shallow waters, the white flowing petals of this orchid must seem like a jewel to those who have beholden it. What made this beauty so special is that, aside from being already beautiful and rare, it is highly sensitive to lab conditions making difficult to study, much less to clone. But Laroche’s obsession to this orchid drove him to think otherwise. He took the risk, partly for money and partly for the chance to clone it for the purpose of pure research and the advancement of knowledge. It’s a pretty romantic notion, certainly romantic enough to capture the attention of Hollywood film makers and a journalist from The New Yorker who made a book about Laroche’s quest.
Long story short, Laroche and his team of Seminoles were captured and were sent to trial. But through a loophole in the laws he was able to get a plea deal that got him sentenced with only 6 months of jail time and a fine. Their main defense that tipped the trial to their favor was that Seminole Indians were allowed to remove endangered species from the swamp.
At the end of all this one must question what drives a person to go through such lengths just for a mere plant. We believe that Susan Orlean, the journalist I mentioned earlier, has succinctly expressed this in her article about this, “Collecting can be a sort of lovesickness. If you begin collecting living things, you are pursuing something imperfectible, and even if you manage to find them and then possess them, there is no guarantee they won’t die or change. The botanical complexity of orchids and their mutability makes them perhaps the most compelling and maddening of all collectible living things. There are nearly twenty thousand named species of orchids—it is the largest flowering-plant family on earth. New orchids are being created in laboratories or discovered every day, and others exist only in tiny numbers in remote places. To desire orchids is to have a desire that can never be fully requited. A collector who wants one of every orchid species will die before even coming close.”
