For the Love of Orchids

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Daniel Porecki still remembers the first time he saw an orchid bloom. In his Maryland residence, he watched the green buds of his dendrobium orchid he ordered from a horticulture magazine split and, over the course of a few days, expand to reveal its white petals and purple heart. Already an anthophile who built a greenhouse outside his home and attached it to his house, the moment he bloomed his first orchid was the beginning of a lifelong love affair with orchids. His wife Mary Alice, who was not his wife yet at the time, saw the orchid sitting in his kitchen when she came to visit him one time during their conversations about cuttings and plants. She likewise became overcome with what Victorians call orchidelirium: flower madness. “It was fast,” Daniel said. “The house started filling up with orchids.” Following that first bloom, Daniel and Mary Alice traveled the world in search of orchids and orchid treasures. They rented a Jeep in Jamaica and searched for fallen trees, which are the most obvious signs that a fallen epiphytic orchid might be nearby. On a trip to Trinidad and Tobago, Daniel and his friend George, a doctor and body-builder, were hiking and saw an orchid growing on the side of a gorge in a tree, two hundred feet above the ground. Daniel’s friend climbed up the gorge to pluck the orchid from its hiding place. He applied for permits to bring the orchids back, bundled in his suitcase. This twenty-five year old butter yellow orchid still blooms now in Daniel’s patio garden, although his friend is gone now. During their travels, Daniel and Mary Alice collected not

only living orchids, but paintings and artifacts of orchids too. In a flea market, Daniel’s eye was immediately drawn to a painting of a orchids large white orchid. Once he started looking for orchids, he saw them everywhere. “My wife knew I had it bad when I looked at the painting and saw the orchid, but didn’t notice the naked woman in the background,” Daniel said, by Caylee Weintraub and laughed. His house is filled with ephemera from his travels with Mary Alice. Wooden eggs painted by French prisoners display lady’s slipper orchids and cattleyas. Daniel’s favorite painting is above his bed, where a mirror on the opposite end reflects its image to him. Daniel falls asleep and wakes to the image of an orchid. The walls of his home are lined floor to ceiling with orchid paintings, orchid-painted plates, orchid vases and tables, orchid tea cups and plates. His iPhone screen is a photograph of an orchid, and the light switches are hand painted with lady’s slippers and foxtail orchids. Above his shofar and menorah hangs an orchid painting. “Some people prefer the minimalist approach,” Daniel told me. “But every time I move around it — it’s beautiful to me. I want to see it. When people come to do any services in the house, they look around, and I tell them, today no charge.” Daniel laughs. Daniel has been a collector since his childhood in Tel Aviv, when he and friends, on each Shabat, would bicycle to archaeological dig sites and look for ancient oil lamps or malachite figures. Digging has always been his instinct. But as Daniel got older, he began digging not to excavate, but to plant. As a child, he remembers drinking sahlab: a creamy drink made from the crushed roots of orchids. Although he would not

above : Clyde Butcher’s ‘Ghost Orchid’

know this until later, orchids had sustained him for years.

Daniel’s patio is lined with plant stands containing dozens of orchids. They are vestiges of his travels with Mary Alice. The orchids are a living history, a piece of the past that blooms year after year.

Mary Alice is gone now — lung cancer — but Daniel’s love for orchids remains.

He donated a large portion of his collection to Florida Gulf Coast University Library Archives, where they are now part of an exhibit titled ‘Orchids: An Eternal Love Affair.’ Threading through the exhibit is passion, and the way it borders on obsession not just for Daniel, but for generations of natural historians and artists.

I walk through the opening doors of the exhibit, and find myself in a botanist’s study. On the far left wall of the exhibit, there is a crepuscular purple and jungle green wallpaper with ferns dripping down and elephant ear plants tucked behind anthuriums. Immediately to my right is a large wooden brown desk with a typewritten letter that reads: “Caught in a rainstorm today while looking for orchids.” Dark green wallpaper vines around the exhibit, and I feel like I am in the middle of a rainforest, the Florida humidity still lingering on my skin.

“We played with coupling rare and exquisite books and artwork with antique cameras,” Melissa VandeBurgt, Associate Director of University Archives, said. “Typewriters hang on the wall, and we installed dozens of framed insects and gold mirrors.”

Daniel donated his collection to University Archives in order to preserve a lifetime of orchid material, which spans decades of his life and is rooted in his love for Mary Alice. The exhibit lengthens this love story to encompass not only Daniel’s life, but four hundred years worth of orchidelirium.

“Curating exhibitions is storytelling,” VandeBurgt says. “People want a narrative, even if it is subtle. We often create a ‘character’ to help us develop the story throughout the research portion of the curation process. One of our student employees, Viviana, told us about a British female botanist, Marianne North, from the Victorian era and she seemed the perfect inspiration. ‘She’ helped us develop a tone and aesthetic that we could use to tie together four hundred years of orchid themed material.”

The exhibit features two Clyde Butcher photographs. One features a ghost orchid, which hovers in the black and white picture like its phantasmic namesake, and the other features a clamshell orchid, so named for its crustacean-like resemblance. Victorian prints of paphiopedilum, cypripedium, and dendrobiums hang on the walls from a wire vine.

Along the wall in the reading room is an eighteenth century herbarium filled with orchid plates from Daniel’s collection. Neil Gaiman’s Black Orchid comic collection is situated next to a display case of eighteenth century botanical guidebooks.

Couched in velvet, these guidebooks instruct readers on the proper methods of orchid maintenance as well as eighteenth century orchid collecting expeditions which mirror Daniel’s stories.

“In the mountainous country south of Lake Muncho in northern British Columbia, I observed large colonies of this little orchid growing in a most picturesque setting,” writes one author. “Sheltered beneath its low branches were numerous ‘shy’ Heart-leaved Twayblades.” These words are visible through the Twayblade-shaped stain of a two-hundred year old pressed Twayblade, the shadow of which has seeped into the text, infusing it with life.

Another eighteenth century book, First Lessons in Botany, details the anatomy of plants. The text anticipates the reader’s questions: “Of what are Plants composed?” the author asks, but then responds in turn with a kind of omniscience. “The matter or substance of plants consists of certain structures, of wonderful form, called vegetable tissues. They are of several kinds, but we must not stop to describe them now.” There is no time for stopping in these texts. This is the sense of urgency orchids inspire. A frenzy for beauty. One of the exhibit centerpieces is a living orchid wall assembled by the Naples Botanical Garden. Foxtail orchids, butterfly orchids, dendrobiums, and other species are rooted in damp moss. The exhibit converges on this living wall centerpiece, which forms the root of the obsession that haunts the natural historians and artists featured within the walls of the University Archives.

The exhibition has a dream-like quality. Like orchids themselves, the paintings and display cases seem like they are floating. Orchids themselves are epiphytic plants, known as “air plants.” It is this airiness and mysticism which permeates the two room display.

The exhibit inspires a sense of wonder. “The show puts a smile on your face,” Melissa VandeBurgt says. “After a year and half of Covid, I think we can all use something to smile about.”

Orchids have inspired this wonder and joy for centuries, but it feels most palpable to me standing next to Daniel Porecki in the orchid garden on his patio, his living history.

Daniel shows me an orchid laden with flowers, and another full of buds. It is not only a garden of plants, but a garden of memories.

He describes the experience of collecting each orchid, and the people he was with when he and Mary Alice gathered them from fallen trees or the side of gorges. Even after the people involved in the orchid-collecting have left his life or passed away, the orchid lives on.

When properly maintained, an orchid can live over one-hundred years, longer than most human lifetimes. One plant looks almost dead, but then Daniel pulls back a leaf, and reveals its startling bloom. •

“My wife knew I had it bad when I looked at the painting and saw the orchid, but didn’t notice the naked woman in the background.”

The Shape of Orchids An Eternal Love Affair THRU DECEMBER 3 Florida Gulf Coast University Bradshaw Library 10501 FGCU Blvd. S. Fort Myers