Orchid Fever

Hansen knows how to get the reader's attention. Orchid Fever opens with a human body falling through a rain forest canopy. His guide, Tiong, seemingly fell out of the sky. Hansen was on the island of Borneo to help build an upriver plant nursery for the Penan people. How is this for a cryptic meeting time and place: "The message was for them to meet us at the junction of the Limbang and Medalam rivers on the full moon of the fourth month of 1993" (p 8)?
He approaches his subject of orchid crime with a sense of skepticism at first. He calls these orchid-obsessed horticulturalists, "orchid people" as if they are some kind of alien race and yet, he travels the globe to meet them and start using words like racket, exploitation, trafficking, show more plunder, pirating, and smuggling to describe their behavior. Soon Hansen realizes these "orchid people" are so passionate about their orchids some can be driven to actual violence if provoked. It also seems that every time a legitimate researcher gets a shipment of orchids no matter how lawfully or innocently, that's when the trouble starts. But orchids are not just for flower shows and smuggling. Hansen travels to Turkey and learns about how orchid ice cream is made from the tubers of a specific orchid. A flour made from the dried tubers creates a chewy, almost elastic texture. He also learns of the medicinal properties of orchids with such claims as the ability to heal a damaged spleen, prevent cholera and tuberculosis, facilitate childbirth, and improve sex life. Orchis in Greek does mean testicle...Along those lines, you will be introduced to the term 'phyto-necrophilia.' It is the "abnormal fascination or love of a dead plant material. Yes, it's a thing. Hansen also travels to Minnesota, an area you don't readily think of for orchids, to meet a man who tries to save orchids from being bulldozed in developing areas. show less

Caution: Do Not read the opening passages of this book while drinking. Or in public. Or anywhere you would be embarassed to be caught laughing out loud.

I ran around from coworker to coworker and forced them to listen to me read passages aloud. I read to myself and giggled audibly (I also chuckled, chortled, and snorted, but I don’t like to talk about that.). I knew a tiny bit about orchids and orchid growers from reading The Orchid Thief (which I also recommend), but I believed that it was an isolated incident. Boy was I wrong.

These people are crazy! It’s a flower, for pete’s squeak, not diamonds or gold. But Hansen does an excellent job drawing you in and introducing you to the orchid people. You’ll become fascinated with the show more intricacies of orchid law and lore, but mostly with those who flout the (admittedly wacky) rules all for the love of a flower.

There’s the sweet little old lady with tens of thousands of dollars in contraband orchids in her basement. There’s the orchid lawmakers, most of whom wouldn’t recognize an orchid if it ran up and bit ‘em on the ankle. There’s the vicious infighting and competition for the rarest bulbs. There’s the passel of government agents, armed with machine guns, no less, who tear up some guys flooring because they believe he smuggles orchids.

Who knew the passions one little flower could arouse? Do yourself a favor and check this one out. Hansen clearly is as enthralled with his subjects as they are with orchids, and that makes for a very entertaining read indeed show less

Hansen spent six years delving into everything orchid-related, which began as a simple desire to help an indigenous tribe in Borneo earn some needed money before their land was stripped. A few phone calls into the "orchid world" looking for answers led to mysterious phone calls from people wanting to know who Hansen was. Feeling he had stumbled into more intrigue than expected, Hansen pursued a chain of hobbyists, breeders, scientists and government heads and discovered along the way that the laws intended to protect wild orchids from poachers were actually being used by some high ranking personnel to raid competing greenhouses, halt scientific research, and in case after case, have thousands of rare plants confiscated and left to show more die.
Not that the entire book is an expose of the corruption or ineptitude of European agricultural lawmakers, or "the orchid police" as they are known. Hansen travels the world to meet interesting orchid collectors and find out why they have devoted much of their life to a plant with such specific requirements. In Paris he met a teenage, award-winning collector whose strange life made him the target of rumors among the orchid world, and in Seattle he met an elderly woman whose basement has been filled with her beloved orchids for forty years. In New York he was able to observe and interview the top "nose" at Shiseido and in Turkey he ate elastic orchid tuber ice cream. This book really does cover every aspect of the orchid world- the businessmen, the conservationists, the weirdos, and lots of back-stabbers. show less

I love books that combine crime & nature and this one does so nearly flawlessly.
It is entertaining throughout, with tales of colorful characters in the orchid world. While I know CITE's and the fish & wildlife service have their faults, I thought a journalist would have given a more balanced view, but all in all an informative and entertaining read

An adventure into the world of the orchid and the array of international characters who dedicate 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.

Eric Hansen's Orchid Fever: A Horticultural Tale of Love, Lust, and Lunacy is comprised mainly of a series of profiles of some real orchid oddities - book people may be weird, but these guys would give us a run for our money for sure.

Like Susan Orlean's The Orchid Thief, Hansen's book takes us deep into orchid culture, offering glimpses of well-known orchid growers, competition judges, perfumers, smugglers, scientists, and conservationists (in fact, more than a few of his subjects fall into two or even three or four of those categories at once, which makes them all the more interesting). Over the course of the book, Hansen's own fascination with orchids grows, as does his impatience with what he sees as overly-bureaucratic rules show more governing orchid export, propagation and trade.

A good read, with some fascinating anecdotes and episodes. Hansen's prose lacks the surreal qualities of Orlean's, but his subjects are almost as mind-bogglingly offbeat.

http://philobiblos.blogspot.com/2007/04/book-review-orchid-fever.html show less

This book really piqued my interest in orchids and also the culture that surrounds orchids. The author of this book is a journalist who by chance enters the world of orchid growers and collectors and becomes fascinated by what he discovers. He meets with everyone from backyard growers, to makers of orchid ice cream in Turkey, to the officials that make and enforce laws regarding orchid trade.

First of all, as plants, orchids are so interesting. The flowers are so intricate, and the ways different species have evolved to attract insect pollinators is so fascinating.

I also did not realize how crazy the orchid world is, and the conservation laws that are supposedly designed to protect orchids. The author tells stories of growers who have show more their greenhouses raided by conservation officials with attack dogs because the growers don't have the proper documentation for their plants. The officials confiscate all the rare species of orchids, and because they don't know how to care for them, the orchids die. He tells about orchid collectors who are not permitted to collect orchids even though their habitat is scheduled to be destroyed for development and the orchids are going to die anyway. I suppose I understand the point of conservation laws. You can't just let people go and dig up all the endangered species of plants to sell them, but there has to be a better way to protect endangered species. I could go on and on about all the things in this book that completely fascinated me, but I'll leave it at that. show less