The kindness this surgeon displays to his patients, family, friends and colleagues? He doesn’t extend it to his plants
By Christy Marshall
Photography by R. Todd Davis
During the day, Dr. Ira Kodner, a colorectal surgeon, does his best to cure the weak, the ill, the suffering. As director of Washington University’s Center for the Study of Ethics and Human Values, he grapples with serious dilemmas—from genocide in Darfur to the ethics of using children in pharmaceutical trials.
But then he gets home. Then he strolls into his greenhouse.
Hope? Charity? Forgiveness? Forget about it.
Pity the poor cymbidium orchid that dares not bloom. Or the Phalaenopsis that’s more peaked than pretty, the Miltonia that’s more mottled than magnificent.
R.I.P.
“If they grow, they grow. If they don’t, they get pitched,” Dr. Kodner says in a decisive albeit ice-cold tone. “It is an interesting philosophy, because my real job involves taking care of sick people, deformed people, and I have no choice. Everyone who comes through the door has to be taken care of—beautiful or not. But with the orchids, if I don’t like them, I pitch them … What works, works; what doesn’t, doesn’t.”
It’s hard to imagine Dr. Kodner has trashed many. More than 700 orchids crowd the shelves of the two-story greenhouse attached to his West County house. He dismisses the term “obsession,” insisting that growing orchids is a mere hobby.
“I love to be here,” he says, looking around. “My goal today is to spend time in the greenhouse. It is my thinking place. It’s relaxing.” His fascination with orchids began four decades ago—with a few measly African violets.
“They got to be kind of a bore,” Dr. Kodner says. Then Barbara, his wife for the past 44 years and the founder of Kodner Gallery, gave him a few orchids. “We grew them in a box—that Barb’s dad made—in what turned out to be our baby’s bedroom. They were fun.”
Then the Kodners headed to Germany, where Dr. Kodner served as a battalion surgeon, working on casualties of the Vietnam War. While based there, the couple traveled throughout Europe and Africa searching out orchids and their growers.
And then they came home.
“Our big social activity in Germany had been traveling around the world and talking to people concerned with issues in Africa and India,” Dr. Kodner says. “We got back to St. Louis, and no one really cared about what was going on in Africa and India except this weird group of orchid growers, because they traveled all over the world collecting orchids, and they knew what the political issues were.”
Today his collection is packed with plants that generate fond memories of people now dead—like the orchid he purchased for 75 cents from a missionary in Mexico or the plants a young botanist in Africa took out of the Amazon rain forest—when that was still allowed.
“I have plants from people who are long gone, but their plants are still hanging around, and their memory is still hanging around,” Dr. Kodner says. “So a lot of them have special meaning.”
The orchids also have considerable value. A number of the species Dr. Kodner tends are extremely rare. “Twenty years ago there was a contaminant in Central and South America, and it wiped out a huge portion of the orchid industry,” he says. “Hurricane Andrew wiped out a lot of the orchid growers in Florida, and we just keep bopping along. We have a lot of the old plants here, so now it has become a very important gene pool.”
Due to regular cuttings, these orchids are not headed to extinction anytime soon. “We share them,” Dr. Kodner says. “That was [the growers’] problem. They didn’t share. I don’t care. I’ll share with anybody.”
But simply giving a plant away certainly doesn’t ensure success or longevity. Dr. Kodner’s greenhouse is divided into zones—arid upstairs, cooler below. Misters, heating elements and all sorts of lights that mimic the sun and moon hang about the greenhouse. “The challenge is, there are all kinds of different environments,” he says. “You move the orchids around and see what works.”
In the spring, Dr. Kodner hauls all the orchids outside. Then in the fall, he reverses the process. But he’s not complaining. He has no desire to stop.
“From the time you buy a seedling to the time they bloom is five years,” Dr. Kodner says. “So the orchid grower’s admonition is: ‘Never stop buying seedlings. If you do, it’s an admission that you are growing old.’”
