Root of the Matter : This San Clemente hobbyist finds the greatest challenge in growing her 400-plus orchids is parting with them.
While many of you fixated folks are kind enough to turn yourselves in to us, sometimes it takes a friend or acquaintance to let us know about someone’s peculiar talent or interest.
That’s the case with Pam Hatcher and her 400-or-so orchids, which we wouldn’t know about except for a letter writer, one who asked we not tell Hatcher his or her identity. Not that we aren’t trustworthy, but the author was wise to leave the letter unsigned.
Hatcher has her suspicions about who might have thought her to be fixated, though: “I think this must have been this one lady from my tennis club who I actually brought myself to sell an orchid to. As she was leaving I was chasing her car down the driveway going, ‘Wait!’ and yelling out care instructions to her,” she said with a long laugh.
Though Hatcher obtained a business license to sell her orchids five years ago, she rarely does.
“Sometimes I sell a few, to console myself that I’m not as self-indulgent about them as some women are about clothes or shoes. But then I worry about them. One woman bought a white orchid from me who only wanted it as a centerpiece for a party. She probably just threw it in the trash afterward. And I grew it from a baby! I was practically in tears. It was like getting rid of a kitten,” she said.
An actual kitten played on the floor with an immense happy dog as we spoke at Hatcher and husband Tony’s hillside home. Along with orchids in every room, a packed greenhouse abuts the house on one side, with long windows looking into it. The beautiful wood and glass home has no drapes and doesn’t need them due to the placement of the lush greenery in the yard. The designer and original owner of the house, she explained, was a nudist.
We were joined as we talked by Hatcher’s similarly orchid-minded friend Melanie Schweitzer. The two were leaving shortly to attend some orchid event. Hatcher was pleased when she learned a few years back that there are orchid societies. “It was very reassuring to find other people like me,” she said, “I was getting kind of nervous there for a while.”
Raising orchids has a long tradition and once carried a real mystique. Though various of the 35,000 known species of orchid grow everywhere except Antarctica, it was the ones brought back to England by explorers of American rain forests that were a horticultural hit with barons, dukes and the like. (They were about the only ones who could afford orchids before modern cloning methods came along.)
The closest Hatcher comes to being titled is her claim of having been “one of the worst Gidget surfers” on the San Diego beaches. Now in her 40s, she was a long ways then from her present green thumb. “The only plant I knew was kelp. I despised kelp.
“But when I had my first child 24 years ago. I decided I needed a stay-at-home hobby. I tried the arts and crafts and macrame and all that, and would never finish them. That was sort of the hippie era when everybody was growing their low fruits and vegetables and all that, so I got interested in growing houseplants. Then the downfall was the first cymbidium orchid six years ago.”
After getting it to bloom, she wanted more, then ones that would bloom at different times of the year. Then she just wanted all of them, and only has about 34,600 to go. Even in such off times as the summer, she rarely has fewer than two dozen in bloom. She has a couple of varieties that no longer exist in nature. One plant has already outlived over three generations of human owners.
Some are your standard corsage orchids. Some, though, look about as inviting as the mug of that Rasta-insect creature in Arnold Schwarzenegger’s “Predator.”
“When I first started I’d tell orchid people, ‘I don’t want to grow those kinds, they’re ugly,’ and they’d say, ‘Yes, you will, just you wait.’ And it’s true. They intrigue me now. When you see strange flowers on Star Trek, they’re almost always orchids. “
The next step in orchid-dom is to come up with one’s own hybrid, which Hatcher and Schweitzer are considering. It can be a complex process, involving expensive lab work and years of waiting. Most orchids don’t bloom until they are four to six years old. The two are anxious to try though.
Hatcher’s husband, she said, is supportive of her obsession. They take their vacations to orchid centers such as Hawaii, which also happen to coincide with his interest in surfing.
“He’s very understanding; I’m very fortunate. And in a way I’m glad he’s not as interested as I am in growing them because he’s much more of a perfectionist. He’d probably make me catalogue them all on the computer. I’d know then how much I really spent on all this, and I don’t think I want to,” she said.
Some original species plants or hybrids can go for thousands of dollars, though she has rarely paid more than $60 for one. Immature plants can sell for a small fraction of what a blooming plant would, though they’re often only the size of a pen when you buy them.
“The best thing this hobby has done for me is teach me patience. I was never one to be able to wait. I wanted instant gratification. Maybe many Southern Californians are that way. But I finally learned, and found it of necessity economically to buy the younger plants and watch them grow.
“You have to wait so darn long for them to bloom, and you’re so thrilled once they do you feel like it’s a personal accomplishment. There’s a joke among orchid growers, who tend to be older than I am, of, ‘I hope I live long enough to see it bloom,’ because they take so long,” she said.
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Hatcher is in her orchid greenhouse every morning, often before it’s light, “to talk to them for a bit.” Working with them, she said, “is a form of meditation. I get excited when I see a new root emerge! It doesn’t have to be a flower. A plant that looked kind of sickly or dehydrated, if it gets a new leaf I can’t tell you how excited I get. There’s something about these plants that’s so incredible and fascinating that I’ll find myself with my mouth hanging open just staring off into them. Then my husband will be pounding on the window pointing to his watch or holding up the telephone.”
She has a few too many plants now, but in her earlier days of raising orchids, she said, “Tony and I used to play a game. He’d hold a plant up, not in bloom or anything, and I could tell you its name. I’d know how old each was, if one had a wrinkled leaf here or a spot there.”
Along with the good raising orchids does her, she also hopes she’s doing the world some good, by helping to preserve species that are often vanishing from their natural settings. Several species were wiped out by irresponsible harvesting, which led to orchids being included in the Convention on International Trade and Endangered Species treaty.
While Hatcher thinks that treaty was necessary, it, in turn, is speeding the destruction of species, she says. Instead of harvesters decimating them, now it’s the slash-and-burning of the world’s rain forests, and the plants’ protected status under the CITES treaty often makes it illegal to go in and save them from destruction. All of the six orchid associations she belongs to contribute to rain forest causes, and one supports the UC Irvine Seed Bank.
She likes the people at the orchid meetings, finding they go a little deeper than just caring about acrylic nails and designer fashions. Hatcher fancies herself to be a simple-living person, saying, “I only have my hair done three times a year. I figure it’s more money for orchids.”
