The Orchid Thief

The eighth chapter describes a visit the author takes to another Florida orchid grower, named Tom Fennell. He and his wife ran a business called the Orchid Jungle, and he invited Orlean out to take a look.

Fennell inherited the land from his family, which had been in the orchid business since the late-19th century. He built a greenhouse to raise orchids, which he then wired onto trees on his property. It was intended to be private, just for the family, but a newspaper article about it sparked interest and they soon opened it to tourists and ran it as a business. This ended when Hurricane Andrew destroyed much of it, and the Fennells closed it for good a few years later, after they won a multimillion-dollar lottery.

After a tour of his house and yard, Fennell took Orlean to meet some of his neighbors, who were also in the flower business. They first went to see Martin Motes, owner of a nursery that focused on vandas. Motes, a former academic with a PhD in literature, was a jovial, poetry-quoting man. He was working on creating a vanda hybrid that was closer to the older varieties found, for instance, in the Philippines.