March 24th, 2010 Orchid Fever: A Horticultural Tale of Love, Lust, and Lunacy
Product Description
The acclaimed author of Motoring with Mohammed brings us a compelling adventure into the remarkable world of the orchid and the impossibly bizarre array of international characters who dedicte their lives to it.
The orchid is used for everything from medicine for elephants to an aphrodisiac ice cream. A Malaysian species can grow to weigh half a ton while a South American species fires miniature pollen darts at nectar-sucking bees. But the orchid is also the center of an illicit international business: one grower in Santa Barbara tends his plants while toting an Uzi, and a former collector has been in hiding for seven years after serving a jail sentence for smuggling thirty dollars worth of orchids into Britain. Deftly written and captivatingly researched, Orchid Fever is an endlessly enchanting and entertaining tour of an exotic world.
“A wonderful book, I’ve been up all night reading it, laughing and crying out in horror and clucking at the vivid images of bureaucracy with the bit in its teeth.” —Annie Proulx
“An extraordinary, well-told tale of botany, obsession and plant politics. Hansen’s vivid descriptions of the complex techniques some orchids use to pollinate themselves will raise your eyebrows at nature’s sexual ingenuity.” —USA TodayAmazon.com Review
At first blush, the subtitle of intrepid traveler Eric Hansen’s floral account might seem, well, hyperbolic. After taking this whirlwind tour of the hidden world of rare orchid collectors, the reader will find the words well chosen. Hansen invites us into a strange demimonde of intrigue and desire, at the center of which is the orchid, that shadowy and somewhat sinister parasitic oddball of the plant kingdom. Orchid raising and trading is big business. Worldwide, the retail economy in orchids adds up to some $9 billion; in the United States, wholesalers ship nearly 8.5 million plants a year, while in Holland a single nursery produces 18 million. “Several million people worldwide now grow orchids,” the author notes, “and this botanical craze has already eclipsed both the nineteenth-century frenzy for orchids as well as the tulip madness that gripped the Netherlands in the seventeenth century.”
With such willing customers, it’s no wonder that a thriving black market now exists. To serve it, orchids are taken illegally from sensitive ecological areas in places like Thailand, Borneo, and darkest Minnesota. In scenes reminiscent of Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief, Hansen follows the trail of orchid smugglers, pursuing money and plants in a whodunit tale that involves botanical gardens, scholars, scientists, ordinary enthusiasts, and “plant cops”–international eco-police whose job it is to stop the traffic in rare and often endangered plants. Those vigilantes have their work cut out for them, Hansen writes, especially because some of the current laws may be misguided, causing more harm than good and equating honest breeders with botanical desperadoes. The laws are bound to fail in any event, he suggests, if only because the plant trade, like that of the drug trade, is simply too big to curtail.
Orchid enthusiasts and admirers of good journalism alike will find plenty of interest in Hansen’s vivid, richly anecdotal investigation. –Gregory McNamee
Orchid Fever: A Horticultural Tale of Love, Lust, and Lunacy
Tags: Fever, Horticultural, Love, Lunacy, Lust, orchid, Tale
March 24th, 2010 at 11:07 pm
Hansen is a reporter who makes a guy boading a plane with orchids hidden inside his clothes sound like a nice man, while making environmental agencies sound evil. He spends many pages letting likely criminals tell their stories, while providing only a brief and biased view of the people trying to stop them. It’s an entertaining story, but it’s false. Please read Susan Orlean’s “Orchid Thief” instead.
Rating: 1 / 5
March 25th, 2010 at 12:43 am
There’s probably a good book about orchids and the recondite subject of international orchid policy in “Orchid Fever.” In fact, I’m sure of it. Unfortunately, Eric Hansen spoils his effort with a lubricious, snarky brew of exaggerations, sneers, dubious anecdotes and invented suggestions.
One example can stand for a multitude of sins. Hansen attends a three-day conference and trade show of orchid fanciers, trying to set up the idea that these people are wild, crazy, risk-taking guys and gals — not far from sociopaths is the general view. His evidence: The conferees sang karaoke and after that, “What went on in the hotel rooms after dark between the orchid growers was anybody’s guess.”
You could write the same thing about an Amway convention. So?
The serious issue behind this unserious book is how (or if) to conserve orchids that may (or may not) be threatened by collectors, habitat destruction or whatever it is that threatens orchids.
The antagonists are, on one side, amateurs, businessmen and independent scholars; and, on the other, academics and international bureaucrats, who are accused of self-aggrandizement and appropriation. It is not an issue just with orchids or even just about plants. It comes up concerning ancient artifacts, fossils, sunken treasure, even — in a non-material sense — myths and legends. See my review of “A Dinosaur Named Sue” for an example with fossils.
A friend of mine who runs an orchid nursery confirms the difficulty. Under a treaty called CITES that purports to protect endangered species, he must prove that his commercial stock (450 species) does not derive from wild-collected plants. Of course, ultimately, any orchid derives from such stock, but CITES has rules. My friend got much of his stock from his teacher, now dead. How can he prove where the teacher obtained it?
My friend could have his business shut down. In the worst instance, he could be shut up in a prison. It has happened to others.
“Orchid Fever” has obtained wide publicity and wide sales. It was aimed at the thoughtless, the sensationalistic and the lascivious, and there are plenty of those people out there. It’s sad that probably the most-read book about orchids turns out to be a piece of low-rent crap.
Rating: 1 / 5
March 25th, 2010 at 3:29 am
“Orchid Fever” is a book with a mission to inform its readers about the evil (or misguided and blundering) bureaucracy of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) and its mistreatment of orchids and orchid collectors. Eric Hansen makes his case over and over again about CITES’ blunders into the rarified world of orchidists, including the confiscation and slaughter of thousands of rare, nursery-grown orchids under the auspices of conserving them.
“Blind rage, crippling jealousy, and wild exaggeration are commonplace in the quirky and insular world of orchid growing…” but Hansen still manages to make a good case against CITES’ mishandling of endangered (and not so endangered) flora. He also intersperses his polemic with tales of wonderfully eccentric orchidists, monstrous orchid judges, and of course, the outrageously beautiful courtesans of the plant world themselves: the orchids.
If you think of orchid growing as an octogenerian’s hobby in league with quilting or stamp collecting, here is Hansen’s description of a wholesale orchid grower’s catalogue: “I thumbed through the pages to familiarize myself with the range of flower forms. Immediately I was confronted with centerfolds showing downy, smooth petals and moistened, hot-pink lips that pouted in the direction of tautly curved shafts and heavily veined pouches.”
By all means, read this book if you want to learn why your great-auntie Em ditched her crochet-work and is now growing those weird-looking flowers on her sun porch.
Rating: 3 / 5
March 25th, 2010 at 5:14 am
Easy reading,interesting,and educational.After reading Orchid Fever,I read a comment in Orchids at Home,and having read Orchid Fever,I realized that ugly,just like beauty,is in the eye of the beholder.
Rating: 5 / 5
March 25th, 2010 at 6:51 am
I loved this book and read it in one day. It is everything the other reviewers have stated. It also spurred me on to identify all the wild orchids that grow around my vacation place. Because of this book I have a new appreciation of them.So thank you!
Rating: 5 / 5