The Orchid Thief

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1998

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Download PDF

Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-4

Chapters 5-7

Chapters 8-10

Chapters 11-13

Key Figures

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Symbols & Motifs

Florida Swamps

Much of the story takes place in, or revolves around, the swamps of south Florida, which symbolize the difficulties inherent in pursuing an obsession. Laroche’s theft, of course, takes place in the swampland of the Fakahatchee Strand State Preserve, so that becomes central to the story. Orlean visits the swamp several times to look for orchids and to try to see the elusive ghost orchid.

The swamp is the natural habitat of orchids in Florida, providing a home to the flowers since its existence. Orlean disliked it, noting that her time there was “probably the most miserable I have spent in my entire life” (35). It spooked and disgusted her: “Spooky places are usually full of death,” she writes, “but the Fakahatchee is crazy with living things” (36). This is its signature quality. It is teeming with life, fertile and febrile, full of strange characters, and rather mysterious. In the Fakahatchee, for example, a person the rangers call “the Ghost Grader” shows up occasionally with equipment to clear the roads of vines. He is anonymous, however, as no one has ever seen him; they only see the results of his work.

Parasites

Parasites are a motif running throughout the book, alluding to both plants and people. Some plants live parasitically off of trees, and one huge flower that Laroche describes eventually kills the tree to which it is attached. Others, like some species of orchids, may appear to be parasites but are actually epiphytes. They attach themselves to a tree but take nothing from it. The purpose is just to raise itself off the ground, where many other plants compete for nutrients and water.

Laroche himself can be seen as a parasite. He had no problem plundering the biological resources of Florida’s swamps to satisfy collectors’ urges for rare plants. The collectors themselves can be viewed, in turn, as parasites. At the end of the first chapter, Laroche tells Orlean: “When I had my own nursery I sometimes felt like all the people swarming around were going to eat me alive. I felt like they were that gigantic parasitic plant and I was the dying host tree” (19, emphasis added). These references play off each other, with the phenomenon in the natural world being mirrored in the human world.

Sexual References

The book also contains many sexual references that create an overall motif of sensuality. The very word “orchid” has its roots in the Latin word for testicle (orchis), referring in part to the shape of the root structure known as a tuber. Orlean calls orchids “the sexiest flowers on earth” (50), and in past centuries they were thought to incite lust because they were under the domain of Venus. The words “lust” and “passion” and “obsession” are used throughout the text in the context of collecting, but their semantic connection to love and sex is hard to ignore. Flowers have long been depicted in art as sensuous and erotic, both for their beauty and for their structure, which is often seen as analogous to human anatomy. The flower paintings of Georgia O’Keefe are just one famous example. In fact, in the interview that forms the publisher’s “Reader’s Guide” in the paperback edition of the book, Orlean notes that “it was a bit of a challenge to find a photograph of an orchid for the cover that wasn’t too sexual” (n.p., following p. 284). The power orchids have over collectors is depicted as, in a sense, utterly seductive.