The Orchid Thief
A True Story of Beauty and Obsession
by Susan Orlean
The recap
In 1994 a fast-talking plant dealer named John Laroche was arrested along with three Seminole men for removing rare orchids from a protected swamp in southwest Florida. Susan Orlean went south to report on the case and found herself drawn into something much larger: the strange intensity that orchids inspire in otherwise reasonable people. Laroche, a man of serial passions and ingenious schemes, becomes her guide to a world of collectors, smugglers, growers and show judges, all chasing flowers that can command fortunes. Orlean ranges from the Victorian orchid hunters who vanished into jungles in search of new species, to the legal tangles of Seminole land rights, to the heat, mud and snakes of the Fakahatchee Strand, where she sets out to find the elusive ghost orchid. Beneath the reporting runs a quieter, more personal question that gives the book its glow: what does it feel like to care about anything that much, and could she?
Why read it
For readers who love character-driven reporting and want to understand obsession from the inside, even if they have never owned a houseplant.
Fun facts
- 01
The book began life as "Orchid Fever," an article Orlean wrote for The New Yorker in 1995.
- 02
Laroche was running a plant nursery for the Seminole Tribe at the time of his arrest, and he believed that working with tribal members would keep the collecting legal.
- 03
Charlie Kaufman's attempt to adapt the book turned into Adaptation (2002), a film largely about a screenwriter struggling to adapt it; Meryl Streep played Orlean and Chris Cooper won the Oscar for best supporting actor as Laroche.
- 04
Speaking at a Harvard screening, Orlean agreed the book was very hard to film, for many of the same reasons the movie's version of Kaufman complains about.
