Human Flower Project

Friday, January 20, 2006

Smuggling Slipper Orchids

A scientist who traded in endangered flowers of Malaysia is sentenced to a London jail.

Slipper Orchid (Paphiopedilum Holdenii)

Photo: Jo’s Orchids

Orchids have a peculiar effect on people. In the eyes of some folks (who will go unnamed), they’re ghastly flowers, resembling either insects or genitalia. (Perhaps this attitude stems from wearing the floral equivalant of a dog tongue too near one’s face at a long Easter service 40 years ago.) Other people are so captivated by these odd plants, they’ll risk prison time for them.

Dr. Sian Lim clearly falls on the latter side of the line. He was caught at Heathrow Airport in June 2004 with more then 100 endangered orchids. Lim, employed by an English drug company, appears to have collected the plants in Borneo, Indonesia and his native Malaysia. The Independent reported, “126 plants of the 130 …seized from his luggage were all Asian slipper orchids – one of the rarest of all the 750 orchid genera, or groups of species. They are distinguished by a voluptuous lower petal, or lip, and are closely related to Britain’s rarest wild flower, the lady’s slipper.” Call them Paphiopedilum.

Paphiopedilum rothschildianum

Photo: Guido Braem

Because the habitat for these flowers is disappearing and hungry fanciers have over-collected the plants, trafficking in many varieties of slipper orchids is forbidden by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES). Check out this unbelievable gallery of endangered orchids; then, if you feel tempted, check out the story of Lim’s arrest once again.

Lim pleaded guity to 13 chages of smuggling and was sentenced to four months behind bars.

Susan Orlean explored this not-so-rare form of floral obsession in an article for the New Yorker, which morphed into her book The Orchid Thief, which morphed into a weird and excellent movie called Adaptation a few years back.

We don’t know whether Lim brought the orchids to England to keep or to sell—according to the Independent, “Some specimens can change hands for thousands of pounds.” The judge in the case ruled that Lim had demonstrated “a view to commercial gain”—as well as bad judgment and (some might say) hideous taste in flowers.