I had been away from the National Chi Nan University campus most of the summer. Now I returned to discover a favorite orchid of mine ripped from its tree by an orchid thief. Having no land of my own, I avail myself of this beautiful mountain campus to grow my treasured epiphytes, happy to share my choice collection with others and to have a place where it might survive me, to benefit future orchid enthusiasts.
As I stood there surveying the scene of the crime, I saw that the despised fiend had struck in the same way he always did. The tracery of roots was still intact on the tree, the orchid itself ripped rudely off for his private greed.
I cannot say how many prize specimens I have lost in this way. Every one hurt. This one had been a Brassavola, native like myself to the Western Hemisphere — it brought back memories of my childhood collection in Cuba.
You would think that I would be more understanding of people’s shortcomings because many long years ago in Miami, Florida — I could not have been more than seven or eight years old — I began my career in orchids by stealing.
My friend Ricky claimed that a certain plant that we found growing on a tree was an orchid. I did not see how he could be so sure. To settle the matter, we ripped it off the trunk and took it to Ricky’s mother.
Sure enough, she pronounced, it was an Epidendrum tampense, the signature native orchid of Southern Florida, but when she inquired closely, we had to admit that the tree it was growing on had been in a neighbor’s yard.
She had us march right back there, ring the doorbell and give it back.
When, a few years later, we moved to the Isle of Pines, Cuba, orchids became an obsession of mine. In Cuba they grew wild and were readily had. Incessantly I hunted them down in the woods, planted them in a nature preserve I established on our farm, published a paper on the orchids of the island and even discovered a new species.
Not too many years after the Communist Party of Cuba expropriated our farm and my nature preserve of orchids, I was an undergraduate at Duke University in North Carolina and got a chance to go on an expedition to Puerto Rico where I discovered six new species of Lepanthes orchids.
I was on my way to becoming the big new orchid person; but, like so much in my life, it did not work out as planned.
Many years later I slipped clandestinely back into Cuba, through Mexico, and went to see what had become of my orchid nature preserve. The communists had bulldozed it. What they had planted in its place did not grow. The whole place lay barren. All the orchids I thought I had so carefully saved from extinction were dead.
I am guessing that is why, when I came to Taiwan some decades afterward and got a position at this mountain university, I began buying orchids and planting them along a scenic path through the woods on campus.
Something inside me needed to remember what things had once been like.
So I was a sitting duck for the orchid thief. I fixed him, though, by buying a tall ladder and planting the prize orchids higher and higher in the trees. Now and then he still managed to jump up and snatch one for himself, but mostly he was foiled.
The human race has its con artists and opportunists. You have to guard against the likes of a former Cuban president Fidel Castro or a US President Donald Trump.
Shortly after I discovered the Brassavola had been stolen, I noticed another orchid was broken off and was dangling by a single root.
To my astonishment, by the time I returned with my ladder and wire, someone had already tied it back up in place with plastic. I subsequently found other orchids that I had planted back in May had been similarly secured with plastic.
A typhoon had come through while I was away. When one strikes too soon after I plant an orchid, the plant can get ripped right off the tree. In my absence, some unknown person had been saving the fallen orchids.
The next day I spotted a battered orchid stuck down tight in the crook of a branch. I went over to have a closer look. It was the missing Brassavola.
Whoever had saved the other fallen orchids had picked it up from where the typhoon had flung it and stuck it in a safe place.
Yes, you have your Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平), your Russian President Vladimir Putin and your Koch Brothers. There is certainly no shortage of undeveloped individuals in positions that allow them to operate furtively behind the scenes to just benefit themselves.
You do have your orchid thieves. No denying that, but that is not all there is. There is all the rest of us. Therein lies the hope.
William Stimson is an adjunct professor at Tunghai University and National Chi Nan University.
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