The Orchid Thief

The main theme of the book has to do with the nature of obsession and how a passion for something can turn into obsession. The main character, John Laroche, personifies this phenomenon. His obsession borders on being a compulsion; he does not seem able to function without channeling his passions into something all-consuming.

Orlean describes how, over the course of many years, Laroche flitted from passion to passion: tropical fish, photography, orchids, fossils, and others. He first fixated on turtles as a child. Orlean describes it developing from a normal fascination with turtles to a state in which “life wasn’t worth living unless he could collect one of every single turtle species” (4). For Laroche, the obsession itself became foremost rather than the object of his passion, as he would quit one interest abruptly and have nothing more to do with it—moving on completely to a new collecting interest.

The book focuses on an obsession with orchids by those who hunt and collect them. “Those who love them love them madly,” Orlean writes (50). She shows how this is not a new phenomenon. In Chapter 5, she details the lengths people have gone to when collecting orchids. The wealthy in Victorian-era Britain became highly interested in them, hiring explorers to comb the world for new and rare species. One such orchid hunter employed by a British collector barely escaped with his life when an earthquake struck the Philippines, where he had gone to seek new species. He wired his sponsor when he escaped, saying he had spotted a new variety but the earthquake intervened before he could collect it. Instead, he was coming home, he said. The collector ordered him to return to the devastated area to get the orchid or else find alternative funding for his trip home. As Orlean writes, “[o]rchids seem to drive people crazy” (50).

In the main story of the book, Laroche is only one of the many obsessed. The author meets many others, though perhaps none quite as eccentric. Likewise, Laroche’s theft is not an isolated occurrence. Orlean describes the case of Bob Fuchs, one of Florida’s most prominent orchid growers. Only a few years earlier, $150,000 worth of orchids were stolen from Fuchs’s nursery. Though there were suspicions that the thief was a rival grower, the case was never solved and the stolen plants were never found. The passion that inspires obsession in turn inspires risky and illegal deeds like this. Hence the use of the word “sickness” to describe it several times in the book, suggesting that obsessions can sometimes have dangerous consequences.