Saving the Wild Orchids

By Janice Kimball

The array of flowering color plants — from dahlias to caladium and roses to impatiens — at this roadside nursery in San Juan Cosalá reminds me of the "flower lady's" Detroit gardens.

I was once known as the "flower lady" basking in the weekend summer sunlight on the stairs leading to my wrap-around porch. I reaped sweet satisfaction relishing the flowers I had planted and nurtured.

The plans for other, and perhaps even more glorious, flower gardens gave me the bright spot necessary to ward off the stark winters in the historical district of Woodbridge where I lived, in Detroit's inner city.

I waited for the first snowy weekend and then headed out to purchase the finest in leftover spring bulbs — $800 dollars worth of tulip bulbs purchased for a fraction of that price. I planted them on a freezing day — digging late into the night under the headlights of my old Cherokee, vibrating with elation and exhaustion.

The huge bloom the following spring, with purity of backlit color embanked along the sides of the serpent-like grass path that wound through the front yard was stunning. That spring, for sure I lived up to my name.

That winter I was teaching art in a student at-risk program near Belle Isle, once the Grande Dame of inner city parks, but, by then in despair. Saddened by children's eyes that took on the desolate gray of the sky I started escaping at lunchtime by crossing the ornate, decaying Belle Isle Bridge to drive past abandoned buildings and haunting fountains.

The park patrols guarded me as I munched big Macs among the snowdrifts, my defroster blasting. Then, I noticed a truck parked behind what I had presumed was the abandoned observatory. When the director stepped out of the building, I begged for a peek inside.

The domed atrium, once imposingly fit for a palace, was home to a very fine collection of orchids. I was introduced to each orchid by name and then given their history and lineage, as if they were royalty. The director explained that the conservatory collection only included cultivated orchids.

(Left:) In the depths of miserable winter I discovered the beauty of this building in the once lovely inner city Detroit park, Belle Isle. (Right:) My next discovery was the rainbow of blooming orchids inside and the collection's director who introduced me to the world of these exotic blooms.

During one of many return visits, he was adamant, saying, "I will never own a live thing that was once growing wild. Orchids that are free are not like the cultivated gorgeous creatures in here stripped of their tongues and in bondage. They may appear to be like a country cousin — until you experience them, fluttering about in the treetops, their life substance being drawn from pure air."

Those orchids helped me through my last winter in Detroit. Giving up my cornerstone house in the historical district, where I was a slave to the Victorian, restored my passion. I explained to the street people for whom I'd been an advocate that I had to move where, like the wild orchids, I could bloom. They were the only ones that understood. I knew they would miss me and that the ancient Catalpa tree with its orchid pink blossoms would know I wasn't sitting under it when summertime came.

These small lavender blooms once grew wild on the mountains above Lake Chapala.

With my precarious health and my caged pet, Construction Cat, I boarded the airplane for Guadalajara leaving all else behind in search of a new beginning.

We happily settled in at Lake Chapala with a new garden — one with almost no season if you had enough water; this garden could simulate spring most of the year. I was standing in my courtyard on the fringes of Chapala counting bananas when I had my first encounter with Jalisco's silky lavender wild orchids. An unkempt man came walking in my gate with a clump of them in each fist, shaking them in the air as if they were rattles.

"Muy bonitos orchidias para ti," (very pretty orchids for you,) he chanted. "Muy baratos, dos para una, especialamente para la señoras jardin." (Very cheap, two for one, especially for the lady's garden.)

I shielded my eyes from the sight, remember the words of the director and murmuring, "No, please no." He headed to the neighboring houses, following in the heels of the topsoil salesman, a man in distemper leading his old mule, from which I bought plenty — while still in ignorance that it had been stripped from under the trees in the wild.

Visiting a neighbor, I noticed clumps of orchids tied to a tree; I was transfixed by the sight of them. The owner said that the orchids were there when she moved in. I heard that explanation many more times, as the raising of consciousness regarding the protection of wildlife began to take a foothold in Mexico.

I went back recently to that neighbor to photograph that cluster of orchids for this article but they hadn't survived. I discovered that these poached orchids rarely do.

In 2001, the federal government passed a law making the cutting, or the removal of orchids in the wild illegal. Soon after they began to enforce stiff penalties. After that, the Orchid salesman did not come down the street again, and later I heard the old man who hawked poached topsoil from his decrepit mule died, it was his time.

(Left:) I visited several local nurseries to snap pictures of blooming hybrid orchids. This is the graceful entry to Flora Exotica on the corner across from Walmart. (Right:) These pink orchids were flourishing, along with beauties in shades and combinations of yellow, white, and purple in Granja la Paz, the large nursery on the highway west of Ajijic.

Over the ten years I've lived at Lakeside, I have seen incredible growth in all areas. I find today's viveros (nurseries) particularly exciting. When I feel restless, I head out to visit my favorites, basking in their flowers.

The nurseries are the place to buy orchids for your garden; they sell hybrids that will survive, and thrive if kept moist while making sure their roots do not drown from over watering.

For less than you would pay for cut orchids up north, you can buy real plants here, exquisite in every detail, in a myriad of mood and form and so many combinations of waxed and silken colors. Let them sell you a little bag of fertilizer to take home and you will be a happy Gringo.

(Left:) Be sure to stop in and talk to Karina at Viveros del Lago, the nursery on the highway in Ajijic, next to the Telmex office. They have a lovely display of orchids. (Right:) The orchids at "the Japanese nursery" (Granja la Paz) are scattered through the displays of other potted plants.

The end of the orchid poaching era is almost here, but not quite. The tail end of this saga can often be seen in front of Ajijic's Farmacia Guadalajara. The man that once stood in my garden shaking his handfuls of wild orchids with glee now spends his days there, wandering the parking lot with shame written in his footprints. I looked away as I head into the store to use the ATM, not wanting to encounter his wares of snatched orchid clumps, clamped between slabs of bark, suitable for placement on the kitchen table.

He dodges the cars going in and out and is no longer allowed to sell on the public streets or in the plaza. Attention has been drawn to his activities by The Guadalajara Reporter periodicals and he is no longer popular.

These days he is unpalatable and unbathed, legs wobbling beneath him like rubber. His eyes stare off into nowhere, as if covered by faded film. He arrives each day propped up on one arm by his fresh scrubbed portly wife. She looks strangely displaced, especially from the rear, reminiscent of a Midwestern farmwoman in her scalloped straw hat, imported from China, bedecked with artificial posies.

I asked permission to photograph the couple as they sat on the curb. She became hostile as he explained that he had let a newspaper woman photograph him, and now he was in trouble and had to go to Guadalajara, and could not understand why. She told me I either had to buy an orchid plant or leave. I left with apologies for my intrusion.

(Left:) It's really easy to forgo the wonders of the wild poached orchids being sold in local parking lots when you can purchase legal plants from helpful local nursery owners. (Right:) Look at these beautiful orchids tucked into an assortment of other blooming plants.

They pass my studios on their way to Ajijic. I took out my camera to shoot them on the sly, but that feels as wrong to me as snatching orchids from the wild.

I was fortunate to have my botanical consciousness raised before I retired to the land of wild orchids. Never did I dream I would be living on the shores of a lake, surrounded by an extinct volcano, below the forest whose heights harbored communities of wild orchids swaying in the breeze — some of the orchids that Belle Isles man had described to me a lifetime ago.

After several failed trips into the wilds of the high Sierras, my health always betraying me, I have altered my dream to see orchids blooming in the wild. I will be with them in their wild habitat, but it will be from within the confines of a hot air balloon or a glider. I will toss sheets of music, or maybe someone else will toss my ashes, to flutter down among them in the breeze. In the meantime the local nurseries with their magnificent cultured orchids will sustain me.