RIGHT SAID FERD:

'You can get off alcohol and drugs, but you never get off orchids. Never': Fanatical collectors of 'trophy' specimens are driving a £6 billion black market with smuggling routes that criss-cross the world. As William Langley reveals, 'orchidelirium' is beyond addiction - and beyond hope (William Langley, 22/01/2006, Daily Telegraph)

On the moist, spicy slopes of Borneo's 13,500ft Mount Kinabalu grows the Rothschild orchid, a plant too sexy for its stalk.

Named after Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild, a 19th-century connoisseur of the erotic potential of flora, this rarest of orchids has hardly ever been seen outside its natural habitat.

Which made it all the more surprising when six of them were found at Heathrow airport in the luggage of 32-year-old Sian Tiong Lim, a fresh-faced pharmaceutical researcher from Putney, south London.

The plants had been smuggled into Britain to feed the fevered demand of collectors for exotic orchids. Last week Lim was jailed for four months - believed to be the stiffest sentence ever handed out by a British court to a plant trafficker - but the world's endangered orchids can feel no safer.

The trade is worth an estimated £6 billion a year. On the black market a single, rare orchid can sell for thousands of pounds.

Those infected by what is known as "orchidelirium" describe a condition not just beyond addiction but beyond hope.

Eric Hansen, author of Orchid Fever, recalls a conversation with an otherwise down-to-earth neighbourhood flower grower who told him: "You can get off alcohol, drugs, women, food and cars, but once you're hooked on orchids you're finished. You never get off orchids. Never."

MORE:
-REVIEW: of The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean (BrothersJudd.com)
-REVIEW: of Fer-de-Lance by Rex Stout (BrothersJudd.com)