By CRAIG PITTMAN

© St. Petersburg Times, published October 10, 1999

If you write a popular book involving Florida orchids, it’s a safe bet those who have dedicated their hearts to the flowers are going to pay close attention . . .

Susan Orlean, magazine writer and sometime author, is riding high.

Her latest book, The Orchid Thief, about an attempt to steal some rare ghost orchids from a Florida state preserve, has gotten the right kind of reviews, the New York Times praising it as “artful,” USA Today calling it “compelling.”

Billed as “A True Story of Beauty and Obsession,” it has sold so well that just 10 months since publication, the $25 hardback is in its seventh printing. The paperback is due in January.

The 43-year-old author has plugged her book on Martha Stewart Living, and the National Geographic Society interviewed her for a documentary. An Oscar-winning director bought the movie rights.

“It has been a total thrill,” Orlean bubbles.

But lurking in the background is trouble. His name is Paul Martin Brown.

Paul Martin Brown, editor of the North American Native Orchid Journal, has plopped down on his stomach to appreciate up close this long-horned rein orchid growing wild in a hardwood hammock near Brooksville. [Times photo: Maurice Rivenbark]

Paul Martin Brown knows his orchids.

Brown grabs the cheap metal broom handle he uses as a walking stick and steps off the roadside into a wooded area near downtown Brooksville.

Sunlight slants through the tall pines and oaks. Brown’s straw hat cuts the light into a cross-hatch of shadows that flicker across his owlish face as he turns his head this way and that, scanning the terrain.

Brown is hunting for the long-horned rein orchid, one of 113 orchid species native to Florida. You can find the long-horned rein in three counties in the state. This hardwood hammock bracketed by a major intersection is home to the largest colony.

“Brooksville is probably one of the best hot spots for orchids in the United States,” he says.

Among the magnolias and sweet gum trees, he spots a tiny green sprout with a few delicate blooms and lets out a shout: “Ah-HA!” He crouches, sticking his face inches from the orchid. The top of the flower looks like the open hood of a ’57 Chevy, the bottom like a white-bearded old man caught in mid-yawn.

Eulophia alta — wild coco

“Those are absolutely exquisite flowers! They’re absolutely perfect.”

Brown is working with the University of Florida herbariam to document the state’s wild orchids, collecting DNA samples from each species he finds. His research will be turned into a guidebook. The last time anyone put together a book on Florida’s wild orchids was 1972, and the state has changed a bit since then.

Brown combs through letters, maps and records to find where orchids grew decades ago, then tries to see if he can find them again, or if a shopping center has sprouted in their stead.

“As long as the land has not been destroyed, the plants are usually still there.”

Looking for orchids, he put 40,000 miles on his Ford Taurus wagon last year. He climbed 35 feet up a tree and sank waist-deep in a swamp. He also stepped into a field of thousands of orchids just five minutes from his front door in Ocala.

A closer look at the long-horned rein orchid (Habenaria macroceratitis) reveals an exotic beauty that thrives in an unexpected place: a Brooksville forest.

He carries the broom handle “because it’s the cheapest thing that you can forget in the woods. It’s better than $25 for a good walking stick.”

Hunting orchids, he often takes his partner, illustrator Stan Folsom, and their two dogs. In 1997, when Cornell University published Brown and Folsom’s guidebook to orchids of the northeastern states, Brown dedicated it “to Susie, Tommy and the late Brandy, who have hunted for and seen more wild orchids than any other Pomeranians in Northeastern North America.”

Brown, 54, fell in love with orchids as a 5-year-old, when he ventured into the yard of a neighbor the kids thought was a witch to pluck a few blossoms for his sick mother. His mother ordered him to march back and apologize.

Instead of turning Brown into a toad, the neighbor, Hazel Bourne of Foxboro, Mass., took him into her yard and patiently explained what he had picked and why it mattered. Fifty years later, he still remembers the orchid: It was a yellow ladyslipper.

He spent a lot of time with Hazel Bourne, learning about plants. They eclipsed all other interests.

Paul Martin Brown -- please never refer to him as just Paul Brown -- edits a quarterly journal called the North American Native Orchid Journal. It has a small (500) circulation, but the subscribers can fairly be described as devoted. Sometimes the journal carries book reviews. When Orlean’s book was published, Brown penned the first negative review in his career.

Sacoila lanceolata — scarlet ladies'-tresses

“The entire tone for the book is set by the cover illustration,” Brown wrote. Not only is the photo on the front upside-down, it depicts a flower that is not a native of North America, much less Florida.

“This lack of attention to detail and concern for accuracy pervades the entire book,” Brown wrote.

Orlean’s book says there are 60,000 orchid species; the accurate number, Brown says, is half that, at best. He criticized Orlean for having a “misconception of what species are and how they relate to the entire hybrid scheme.” He was incensed by her description of the Fakahatchee Strand State Preserve, home of the rare and valuable ghost orchid that the thieves tried to steal.

She called it “a green hell.”

“Those of us who know the Fakahatchee know it to be just the opposite -- an absolute paradise with an unending number of exciting and beautiful species,” Brown wrote. “You may get a little hot or wet, but that is no price to pay for the result of a day in the swamp.”

His negative review might have gone unnoticed beyond the little old North American Native Orchid Journal, except for the Internet. Brown posted his review to the Amazon.com Web site for Orlean’s book, where his scathing comments have been seconded by others.

It’s not just orchid people who are upset about the book, which branches out from the story of the theft to sketch quirky portraits of orchid fanciers, Seminole Indians and South Florida.

Triphora trianthophora — three birds orchid

Longtime Everglades activist Joe Browder says Orlean is wrong about geography (she located the Fakahatchee 25 miles south of Naples, when the only thing 25 miles south of Naples is the Gulf of Mexico), wrong about history (she reports a turn-of-the-century traveler caught lobsters in the freshwater Fakahatchee, an impossibility) and wrong about math (she says 50 acres of the Everglades dry up a day, which would mean more than 365,000 acres had dried up over the past 20 years -- also impossible).

Some enthusiastic readers have compared The Orchid Thief to Carl Hiaasen’s zany Florida crime thrillers. Browder says that’s unfair -- to the novelist. “Hiaasen’s fiction is more accurate about Florida than her so-called facts.”

Another critic is Ned Nash of the American Orchid Society, who holds a dubious distinction: In Orlean’s acknowledgements, she thanks Nash for checking the book’s accuracy.

Cleistes divaricata — large nodding pagonia or rosebud orchid

“We did not have a final fact-checking on that book,” Nash fumes. “If we had, there would’ve been far fewer or none of the egregious errors that occurred.”

Nash’s phone has been ringing with complaints from angry orchid collectors, blaming him for the book.

“It made me look like a jerk,” he says. “To be portrayed as a bunch of simps, well, you can imagine how orchid people reacted. I’ve attempted to contact the publisher and author to ask them to remove my name from future editions, but I’ve gotten absolutely nowhere.”

Some people mentioned in the book are more forgiving. Mike Owen is the park biologist at “the Fak,” as the state preserve is known. He takes good-natured exception to scenes in which Orlean describes him toting a gun -- he is unarmed -- and sending her into the Fak accompanied by two machete-wielding convicts.

“I don’t ever remember leaving her with convicts,” he says. “I think she combined some things there.”

Owen still hopes to get Orlean back out in the Fak some day. When she was researching her book, he says, “I couldn’t get her out in the swamp too far.”

He’d like to take her wading through the muck sometime this week. As it happens, Orlean will be back in Naples, speaking at a prestigious orchid symposium. Among the other speakers are Owen -- and Brown.

“I will not get into a shouting match,” Brown says. “But I will defend the Fakahatchee.”

Serving coffee to some guests at her New York City apartment, Orlean takes some time out to agonize over the flaws in her book. No one has confronted her directly, she says, but she has heard the grumbled accusations third-hand.

She has tried to correct what she calls the “minor” mistakes in successive editions of the book, she says, such as fixing the spelling of species names. If Ned Nash wants his name out of the acknowledgements, she’ll be happy to accommodate him.

Orlean is a staff writer for the New Yorker, a magazine legendary for its rigorous fact-checking. “I wonder whether I got so used to the painstaking fact-checking at the New Yorker, if I was sort of relying on people (at Random House) triple-checking me more than I should have,” she says.

“The bottom line is, I’m a literary journalist. My desire is to tell people, ‘Come see this amazing world you never knew existed.’ I don’t dismiss the errors . . . but the spirit of what I was doing was entirely successful.”

She is working on her next two books -- a collection of her magazine pieces and an exploration of the world of gospel singers -- and preparing the paperback edition of The Orchid Thief.

The cover will carry the same upside-down photo of the wrong orchid. She says the public’s reaction to the hardback version has been, “ ‘God, what a beautiful cover.’ So if it makes you insane that it’s upside down, I’m sorry.”

She allows that she is a little worried about going into the lion’s den in Naples this week, but she believes her salvation lies in her book’s booming sales, which even some orchid collectors acknowledge has boosted the popularity of their hobby.

Susan Orlean

“Lots and lots and lots of people bought the book,” she says. “I think it will be okay. If not, I’ll just burst into tears and run.”

She says she’s also a little worried about what will happen if director Jonathan Demme -- who won an Oscar for The Silence of the Lambs and has bought the rights to her book -- turns her tale into a movie.

“I’m a character in it, so I’m going to have the experience of seeing myself portrayed,” she says. “If they turn my character into a kleptomaniac murderess, I’d probably not be happy. It will be interesting to see what someone else’s mind does with that story.”

-- Times researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report.

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