Every Orchid in the World
How a jewelry store owner in Key West created the Wikipedia of orchids
One Saturday in September, Jay Pfahl invited people over to his house to look at an orchid. He and Carmenza have more than four thousand orchids down there on Patricia Street, but this one only blooms every seven years or so, and we went to witness its moment. His grammatophyllum speciosum is much bigger than the orchids at the supermarket. It’s the giant of Orchidaceae and can weigh two tons. Jay’s was ten feet tall with leopard-print blossoms the size of your palm, unseen since before the Covid pandemic. A few months earlier, we’d had a similar invitation from a neighbor on Duncan Street: “Would you like to see my corpse flower? It’s blooming right now!” A corpse flower not only takes many years to bloom, it dies within the day and smells like half a dozen people died there two weeks ago, and – just like them – seethes with flies. What fun!
Like Marylene Proner, the corpse plant lady, who is an artist in real life, Jay Pfahl does more than garden. He and Carmenza own a jewelry store on Duval Street; and, if you type the words Jay + Orchids into a search engine, it will pull up the most comprehensive orchid encyclopedia on Earth.
Orchids are astonishingly diverse, with about 30,000 distinct species. Among flowering plants, only the asters (think daisies) have more, but not by much. Orchids have genes that help them whip up novel structures – sepals, petals, roots, lips – that equip them to thrive in the narrowest of ecological niches. Some change their scent so as not to compete with orchids nearby. Others store water, so they can live on trees. There are orchids that mimic insects, right down to the pheromones, to trick male spiders into mating with their flowers.
Pfahl enjoys telling people that he runs the largest porn site in the world. “That’s what flowers are,” he explains. “They’re the plant’s sexual organs, and orchids have incredibly bizarre reproductive strategies.” Charles Darwin was so fascinated by the “various contrivances” orchids employ to procreate that he wrote Fertilisation of Orchids as the first “detailed demonstration” of his theory of natural selection described in On the Origin of Species.
Orchids were the proof. When a colleague sent Darwin an unusual orchid from Madagascar in 1862, he marveled at its 14-inch-deep nectar tube, and reasoned that there had to be an insect with a 14-inch-long proboscis. Had to be! Forty years later the Madagascar pollinator, a moth, was discovered.
Right now, Pfahl is sitting between a wall of orchid reference books in six languages and two big monitors crowding a small desk. He works on his orchid encyclopedia for about five hours a day and has discovered three new species in the mountains of Colombia – along with Ecuador, home to more orchid species than anywhere else. How he got from Columbus, Ohio, to those mountains is a story.
One morning when he was 19, a young woman gave him a business card that changed his life. Her name was Alex and she was a complete stranger, although he’d found her in his bed the night before. These things happen in college. There were four words on the card:
ALEX
LIBRE
FARISITA, COLORADO
“Come and visit,” she said. When he couldn’t find Farisita on the map Jay decided to hitchhike west and find it in person. Libre itself is 11 miles north of there, which he had to walk, there being zero traffic. It was – and is – an off-the-grid artist’s community at 8,300 feet, founded by sculptor Linda Fleming. There were a dozen hand-built houses and maybe 35 people, including Alex, who was living with a novelist known at Libre as Peter Rabbit.
By the time Pfahl arrived, spring break was over, and so was Ohio State. “I built a house for fifty bucks and a lot of work, with nice windows all around looking at the mountains.” He was the youngest person at Libre and spent two winters in that house. Meanwhile, Jay’s father, a professor at Ohio State, was certain his son had been brainwashed.
To get him away from the artists, Dad essentially bribed him to become a cowboy in Paraguay. The deal was $200 up front, $20 a month for cowboying, and an air travel card. Jay had his doubts, but the artists were excited for him. You should see South America, they told him, so he went.
Jay turned 20 on the ranch in Paraguay, where his first job was burying a dead calf that had already been disemboweled by vultures. The Campo all around looked like the Everglades, a sea of grass with little islands of trees. “There was no one who spoke English, and the people didn’t speak Spanish. They spoke Guarani.”
He learned fast, but not fast enough. A few months later, a local patron showed up at the ranch insisting that Jay had promised marriage to his daughter. He wasn’t mad, he just wanted to show Jay the livestock and land that came with her. “I went to my boss and said, ‘You’ve got to save me!’” Pfahl’s patron explained to the other patron “that I was an idiot who didn’t know what he was saying,” Jay remembers. “I had to get out of there.”
He kept a diary of his time in South America, in dense, edge-to-edge print. It’s full of picaresque adventures and chance encounters with other wanderers who turn up farther on. Like Alex, in the first place, who pulled him like the moon pulls the tide to Libre. And later, Annette, a Brasiliera in Cuzco. She and her partner Rocky got him started on making jewelry and told him, You must come to Ollantaytambo.
Future Jay is present in these 50-year-old writings as a man who notices things: the color of a beetle; the stillness of a condor’s wings in flight; how a barbed-wire fence gate is made. And a man who catalogs things: including the roster of snakes, bugs, dangerous plants and parasites that beset him on the Campo. And, most of all, an autodidact who learns all that is necessary to learn, all by himself. Botany. Languages. HTML.
Ollantaytambo is in the Sacred Valley of the Incas, about 30 kilometers from Machu Picchu. He arrived in a gray drizzle a few days after Christmas, looking for Rocky and Annette. In the same house, he found “a hot little Colombian number who knows how to enjoy herself.” Her name was Carmenza and she’d drifted down from Bogotá. That first meeting was a flechazo, an arrow-shot, and it stuck. “When I fist met her, I thought ‘Holy Moley!’ I can’t not have her.” He still says it with wonder.
They had four months of heaven in Ollantaytambo. They sold jewelry in the daytime and made mad love at night. Then, with Shining Path Maoists seeping into the province and cops hassling them in the square, it was time to go. They married in Bogotá and Jay brought her home to Columbus, Ohio, where it snowed like hell. This was a deal-breaker for Carmenza, so they tried the Ozarks where Annette and Rocky were now living, and it was snowing there, too. America wasn’t working out for Carmenza.
“Okay, I know a place,” Jay told her. He’d been to Key West for Spring Break once and heard that it never freezes. They opened Neptune Designs in 1976 and now it’s the oldest continuously-owned business on Duval Street, which tells you something about the Pfahls and something about Duval.
A few years after repotting in Key West, Jay bought a $75 orchid. When it died, he bought another one. This kept happening, until he figured out it was the house that was killing them. They got too little light in the morning, and fried at noon. After he moved to Patricia Street, the orchids did fine. And soon, better than fine.
“I built the website just to keep track of my plants, he says. “I had 400 at that point and then other people started sending me photos.” When his website ticked up towards 4,000 orchid species, Harvard botanist Leslie Garay got in touch. “You need to run with this,” Garay told him. There was nothing like Jay’s Internet Orchid Species Photo Encyclopedia. He was the first mover online and had just achieved critical mass.
These days, Pfahl is in continuous contact with the great sachems of the orchid universe, along with countless orchidologists in the field who both use and inform the site. It has become a nexus for scientific compilers, reviewers, and taxonomists all over the world and the ultimate field guide.
He gets out there himself, having serendipitously married that hot little Colombian number. When Covid bottled up the Pfahls in Colombia for seven months, he found plenty of social distance in a dwarf moss forest at 10,000 feet looking for orchids.
For orchidologists in the field, drawings make the distinguishing bits of a species more obvious than a photograph. “I’ve just finished adding 200 microstylis species,” he says as he works. “The flowers are less than a tenth of an inch, so most of us can’t differentiate and there aren’t many photos. Now we have drawings out there of the ‘type’ species – this is what it is – so people in the field know exactly what they’re looking at.”
Today there are 26,086 authenticated orchid species in Jay’s encyclopedia, but there are days when the count goes backwards as he winkles out errors and duplicates in old orchid manuals. He calls up some photos on the screen: “These five plants are all exactly the same,” he explains, “but they came from five different countries, and people wrote five different names for it.” Matters like this get sorted out by Raphaël Govaerts, the taxonomist in charge of plant names at Kew Gardens in London. Kew is the World Court of botany and Pfahl and Govaerts take a perverse glee in correcting each other’s mistakes.
The Internet Orchid Species Photo Encyclopedia will never quite be complete because there will be no final tally of the world’s orchids. Unknown species are always turning up, but he’s getting close. “At this point, I’m mostly documenting extinct stuff, or orchids that are so obscure that nobody has realized what they are.”
“When I started, I knew it was a bigger bite than I could chew, and I haven’t gotten tired of it. And it’s interesting. I’ve always been able to look at big puzzles and make sense of them.”
Fascinating story. Thanks!