Visitors will have to drive to Fairchild Tropical Botanical
Garden to see orchids like this paphiopedilum. Photo by Jerry Lower
By Mary Jane Fine
For Pamela Salomone, the visit was probably a last opportunity, and soon to be a lost opportunity: seeking yet another orchid in the gift shop of the American Orchid Society. It was a mid-November morning, two weeks prior to shutdown, after which the AOS — based in Florida since 1984, in Delray Beach since 2001 — moves lock, stock and orchids to Fairchild Tropical Botanical Garden in Coral Gables.
“I’m gonna miss this location,” said Salomone, of Boynton Beach, bending to read the price tag on a deep purple Phalaenopsis with broad, shiny leaves: $67.50, a bit steeper than she had in mind. “It’s been a treasure. I come here every couple of months and pick out an orchid. I usually spend about $20. I have about 100 or so.”
Spending has been a concern for the AOS, too — a major one — and it prompted the uprooting. Declining membership (16,000 in July 2009; 14,000 less than a year later) and dwindling donations foretold a gloomy future.
“The challenges that we have seen so far this fiscal year have been unprecedented as the society finds itself having to operate without reserves or moneys to borrow against,” read the minutes of a trustee meeting from April 2010.
Reactions to the move have been both bitter and sweet.
“I usually smile,” said a rueful Arlen Lavitt, a gift shop volunteer, making her mouth turn down. “It’s a tough time.”
“What’s great about this [AOS and Fairchild] partnership is that 350,000 people will be able to enjoy these beautiful new plants,” said an exuberant Nannette Zapata, Fairchild’s chief operating officer, referring to the number of annual visitors to the garden, “and we’re expecting attendance to double in the next 10 years.”
Plans for transferring the society’s 3,500 plants from its 3.5-acre site to its new 83-acre home remained somewhat in flux, Zapata said: maybe multiple back-and-forths by van, maybe one big truck outfitted with hooks for the hanging plants, floor space for those in vessels.
Plans for the society’s employees were less certain; no one could, or would, speculate on who might be invited south.
Enid Torgersen, volunteer coordinator for the society in Delray, said she will miss the orchids terribly and will certainly go to Fairchild — “To visit? Sure. And a lot of people have said they’ll go down there.” But Torgersen isn’t planning on working there, which would require a daily three-hour roundtrip drive. She has 500 orchids of her own and runs an orchid business, Home Health Care for Your Orchids.
Like Torgersen, orchid-o-philes who want to visit their favorite blooms can motor down to the Gables. Fans of the society’s spectacular botanical garden, though, will have to find another venue. The Visitors Center building and botanical garden and greenhouse were sold to the Sandra C. Slomin Foundation and Family Center for Autism and Related Disabilities, which will use the grounds for its clients “as healing gardens, for stimulating the senses,” Zapata said.
The society’s staff and volunteers will miss those surroundings, too.
Development manager Susan Wayman called the garden “everybody’s favorite lunch spot.” But she and Zapata prefer looking ahead. By December of next year, Fairchild Garden’s new 12,500-square-foot conservatory will open, to welcome a kaleidoscope of hummingbirds and butterflies and orchids, the ones not already clinging to Garden trees.
“They’re such incredible plants,” said Zapata, who learned to love orchids because, “I could get them to bloom. People think that when they stop blooming, they’ve died. But they come back the next year. ”
Peggy Rosenthal, an Orchid Society volunteer for the past three years, harbors mixed feelings about it all. She understands the need for the transfer, but can’t help feeling a bit melancholy.
On that recent November morning, seated behind the Visitors Center front desk, she smiled warmly, then told a departing visitor, “I’d say come back and see us, but …” Ú
Comments