Photos by Frank McMains
orchid march 2020
James Jeansonne
James Jeansonne hands me a picture. In it, he is a younger man—his hair a bit darker but his features still recognizable. The photograph was taken in a jungle clearing. He is sitting in a folding chair, looking pleased, but tired, and holding an orchid the size of a watermelon.
Here in South Louisiana, we live in a world dominated by grasses and trees. Pines, oaks, and poplars make up the canopy. Sedges, bamboo, and cereals are our floor. Broadly speaking, the dominance of these species in our world reflects the environments in which they thrive. There are so many grasses and trees here because there are so many places where they like to grow. Orchids live in the other places.
The picture of Jeansonne was taken in Belize, long before legal restrictions on the harvesting and transportation of rare plants were put into place. In it, he is centered in a space dominated by green, a bit like a Gauguin painting. The human colors and lines are engulfed in an organic mass. The orchid he holds was pulled from the bark of a tree.
On that tree, the orchid had found everything it needed to survive and reproduce. The great mahogany or twisted tropical laurel that was its host sank its own roots deep into the jungle soil. But the orchid sprawls its roots across the bare face of the tree. The orchid does not compete with the tree, but rather lives where a tree or grass cannot, in the habitat that the dominant plants create.
orchid march 2020
Kim Kensill
Jeansonne told me that eighteen months after his orchid collecting trip to Belize, he returned to the same location. Instead of the established colonies of epiphytic orchids and bromeliads and ferns that once populated the floor of that rainforest, a commercial orange farm confronted him. Profound diversity had been converted, by the logic of the market, into a monoculture. An unknowably valuable thing turned into a thing that’s very value depended on its uniformity.
Jeansonne’s greenhouse behind his suburban South Louisiana home presents a fair re-creation of the photo. A few of the largest plants inside of it are specimens he gathered in Belize. Every inch of space is covered in potted plants, most of them orchids, many in bloom. Orchids in clay pots and wooden baskets and mounted on lumps of bark crowd the space above the potting shelves, swaying from rafters and sprinkler pipe: a collection of tropical diversity, captured and presented under glass.
The casual observer will be familiar with the phalaenopsis. It is the wide-leaved orchid with a long bloom spike, commonly seen in grocery stores. In spite of its apparent ability to endure the demanding environment of modern retail, thriving between the mylar balloon display and nasal decongestant, orchids intimidate. Beginners are often wary of the specialized potting material and the strange pots that orchids prefer. Orchids also have an undeserved reputation for being delicate.
orchid march 2020
Kathy Conerly
In the 1946 Humphrey Bogart/Lauren Bacall-helmed noir classic, The Big Sleep, a wheelchair-bound patriarch central to the plot asks Bogart, “Do you like orchids?” Bogart, playing detective Philip Marlowe, replies that he does not, and the patriarch agrees, “Nasty things! Their flesh is too much like the flesh of men, and their perfume has the rotten sweetness of corruption.” The word “orchid” comes from the ancient Greek word for testicle, so the perception issues go way back.
A few weeks before visiting Jeansonne at his greenhouse, I joined three board members of the Baton Rouge Orchid Society (BROS to their friends) at the society’s conservatory at the Louisiana State University Rural Life Museum. I had joined the BROS a year before under the assumption that anything humans devote themselves to with enough seriousness so as to require a conservatory must be interesting.
The three board members, Frank Zachariah, Kathy Conerly, and Kim Kensill, picked their way through the specimen orchids, many so large they had to be potted in milk crates. From among the not-at-all-human-flesh-like leaves, flowers bloomed in vivid lavenders, yellows, greens, and reds. Long, narrow bloom spikes, heavy with buds, bent and dripping. Orange blooms resembling seashells and pink butterfly-shaped flowers shook as the BROS moved through the plants.
I had met Zechariah several times before. He and Jeansonne are big personalities within the BROS, both able to deploy extensive knowledge, experience, and charm while offering wisdom on the practice of orchid cultivation.
orchid march 2020
As with most organizations like the BROS, all the members are intense in their enthusiasm for their chosen subject. A typical monthly meeting of the society involves a meal and a lecture about a particular species of orchid, orchid hybridization, or how to mount a plant on wood. Members conduct demonstrations and also supply orchids for door prizes. Conversations around the tables address the finer points of fertilizing for better blooms, or wander amongst the scientific names of the greater orchid families—oncidium, epidendrum, brassavola, dendrobium, cattleya.
Orchids are not hard to grow. They grow just fine on the tops of tree limbs and in nutrient poor organic debris, in millions of places, all around the world. With just a bit of less-than-exotic material such as sphagnum moss, rocks, or tree bark, anyone can nurture this mysterious foreign flower. When we take them from their tropical home, dragging them to the sub-tropical flatlands of South Louisiana, all orchids require of us, really, is care. It is hard to get a plant to grow in the wrong conditions, but if you provide an organism with a suitable home, the organism will do most of the work.
People who are interested in a thing are made more interesting through passion. Detecting their unseen hours of study and attention, we are impressed. But it is participation in the process that ultimately yields the reward. If you can find satisfaction in watching an orchid grow, the eventual bloom will be that much more spectacular.
