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Stolen Beauty

By Jeannette Batz Cooperman

Bill Mayhan had seen plenty of what he now calls “Wal-Mart orchids.” But on a trip to South Carolina, he was invited into a greenhouse that was a steamy tangle of exotic orchids. “Oh my God, I’d never seen flowers like this before,” he says. “The colors, the shapes—one, a Phragmipedium, had back petals that fell about 2 feet, like a big Fu Manchu mustache that twirled as it went down.

“I was hooked.”

He started collecting, and he made one mistake after another. “I’d fall in love with one because it was so beautiful, and then I’d get it and read more and find out it could only grow in the upper Andes, where the temperature never rose above 60 degrees and the humidity was always 80 percent,” he says ruefully. “You get seduced by this gorgeous picture ... like life, I guess.”

He learned never to suffocate an orchid in potting soil—orchids are epiphytes; they grow on tree bark and crave air. He bought his very own Phragmipedium in a 3-inch pot (it would have cost hundreds of dollars if he’d bought a larger one) and nursed it up to a 10-inch pot. “It took me 10 years to get the damn thing to bloom,” he says. “When it did, I threw a party.”

Soon 200 orchids filled his apartment—in the shower, in the kitchen, hanging in baskets from a rod in his bedroom. “There’s one where the spike descends, and from it a cartwheel of a blossom, each petal long and striped with red, and a hinged tongue in the center that bobs up and down when the wind hits it, and a hairy little cap on the top,” he says blissfully. “It’s such an intricate design. They all do these bizarre things to get little moths to come and mate with them.”

Some orchids’ blooms last for months; with others, you wait a year for a moment of beauty. “I have a Bulbophyllum medusae,” Mayhan says, “a puff­ball blossom of about 1,000 thin white hairs. It lasts about three days in its prime.”

Mayhan teaches literature at the University of Missouri–St. Louis; he specializes in the Victorians, who, as it turns out, “were absolutely nuts about orchids.” For Mayhan, part of the pleasure is aesthetic: “It’s an almost impossible beauty.” The other draw is the absurdity of exotic creatures from Thailand or Belize growing in his living room. “They found a new orchid just north of Moyobamba, Peru,” he says in a rush. “When they went back to the mossy slope where it grew, people had raided all the orchids. You would pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for such an orchid.”

Mayhan saw the film The Orchid Thief, of course. “It was all about passion, more than about orchids themselves,” he muses. “The orchid was the metaphor for obsession.”

Pick of the Orchids

Phragmipedium kovachii: The Peruvian discovery every orchid lover in the world covets right now.

Phragmipedium caudatum: The creamy, green-striped slipper orchid with the spiraling, reddish Fu Manchu petals that can hang down a foot and a half. It grows on wet, mossy hillsides.

Dracula vampira: People want it just for the name. Dracula, literally “little dragon,” inspired by the two long tails on each sepal—and vampire, because this particular dracula orchid is black and spooky looking. Found in Ecuador, it lives in the cold shadows.

Masdevallia coccinea: Another cool grower with masses of large magenta, fuchsia, yellow or white flowers on long stems, found covering the upland slopes of the Sierra Nevada de Chita.

Dendrobium spectabile: Spectacular. The flowers on this baby are weirdly twisted and turned, each distinct. It blooms in clusters of up to 20 in the steamy forests of New Guinea, Bougainville or the Solomons.