Florist found a niche in nursing ailing orchids back from the brink
RICHMOND, Virginia: Even within Richmond, Virginia’s redbrick historic neighbourhood known as the Museum District, Art Chadwick’s florist’s shop seems like a quaint throwback to an earlier time. A bell chimes as you open the door, and fans swirl below a pressed-tin ceiling. Cymbidiums, cattleyas and other flowering orchids are presented in decorative pots on round tables. Along one wall, a green pleated sofa invites patrons to linger and chat.
I am here on a mild Friday afternoon in winter, and a small but steady stream of customers arrive, chatting in relaxed fashion with the proprietor. Chadwick, 56, is dressed casually in a brown cable-knit sweater, and he seems to be a guy comfortable in his own skin, smooth and urbane - in sum, exactly what you might expect in the genteel and luxuriant world of orchids.
For all the delight of this little flower shop, I can’t help thinking that it should belong to a time before mass merchandisers (never mind the Internet) came along and did away with momand-pop haberdashers, milliners, green grocers and the like. But Chadwick & Son Orchids is thriving and preparing to expand. To understand why, you have to perch yourself on that green sofa and observe carefully. You will come to see that the customers aren’t just leaving with orchids, they are arriving with orchids.
Art Chadwick is meeting a need that is both absurdly obvious and, in the world of horticulture, spectacularly unmet. He babysits the orchids that you bought and bloomed and are now watching decline in a stupor of regret, shame and despair. Give Chadwick that flowered- out, wrinkled old moth orchid you got a couple of months ago and he will nurse it back to blooming health. Nine or 10 months after you drop it off, Chadwick’s colleague, Janis Ranck, will ask you to come back, and when you pick it up, it will be like a poodle fresh from the groomer: clean, fluffy and raring to go. He charges US$ 2 a month to mind the plant - at pickup time the accumulated bill is about the price of a new one - but you will be getting back a larger, more robust and more floriferous orchid. More to the point, you will have your orchid back. “It has sentimental value,” he says. “The plant gets bigger with age. They want to see it again.”
I am wary of services that take any gardening work out of your hands; we live in a nation of homogenized, leaf-blown lawns and hyper-mulched shrubberies precisely because we have ceded control of our yards to landscape crews. I recently came across an enterprise that keeps honeybees for you, which is sort of like paying someone to ride your bicycle. But Chadwick’s orchid boarding is one undertaking whose value seems so needed, even to a horticultural purist like me.
It still seems improbable for reasons I’ll get to, but first a little orchid history. Orchid mania gripped wealthy Europeans and, later, Americans during the period of Western colonial and mercantile expansion in the 19th century. Orchids are found around the world, but the most amazing types of these flowering perennials grow in the tropical Americas and Asia. The ornate, gigantic cattleyas grow on trees in the jungles of the New World. Moth orchids, or phalaenopsis, are indigenous to countries such as the Philippines and Malaysia. Some of the most gothic-looking slipper orchids are found in steamy Sumatra. In the 19th century, when these exotic beauties became known, nurseries and other patrons funded expeditions to bring them into the trade, where breeders got to work creating new varieties.
Orchid fanciers had to be wealthy - to buy the orchids, to house them in hothouses and to have the leisure time to cultivate them. In the past century, the rise of the corsage generated a cut-flower industry for cattleyas, though Chadwick wonders how such delicate beauties could have endured a cotillion. “One slow dance and they would have been crushed,” he says from his shop, looking at a potted cattleya whose blooms have been given protective pillows of cotton balls.
The world changes, consumerism marches on, and
Art Chadwick, florist shop proprietor
things once considered luxuries for the well-heeled are now taken for granted by us all - homes with 2 1/2 bathrooms, air travel, cars with power windows.
How the orchid and specifically the phalaenopsis crossed over from hothouse diva to America’s favourite houseplant - more than 36 million were sold in 2015 - has its origins in new propagation techniques after World War II. One of the pioneers was a French plant scientist named Georges Morel, who figured out how to produce asexually thousands of identical orchids from one plant through cloning instead of breeding from seed.
Today, sophisticated and highly automated production greenhouses around the world feed a rapacious consumer market.
Chadwick opened his business in 1989 with the help of his father, who is now in his late 80s and still raises 800 cattleyas in his Wilmington, Delaware, home. Art Sr. helped his son build his first greenhouse and provided thousands of his own plants to create an early inventory but has not been involved in the daytoday running of the business.
His son opened the Museum District shop 15 years ago, about the same time affordable orchids were flooding the market and on their way to edging out the poinsettia as America’s most popular houseplant.
Chadwick’s orchid boarding service began as a sideline but has grown into three- quarters of his business. He has about 2,000 customers boarding 13,000 orchids - an average of 6 1/2 per person. “Some people have one, some have 500,” he says.
But if this is such an obvious service, why doesn’t every city have an orchid boarder? One reason is that greenhouse growers don’t want Joe Public’s orchid anywhere near their choice stock; the chance of introducing disease or pests is too high. (Chadwick quarantines, monitors and sprays new arrivals before placing them on the growing benches.)
The bigger reason, however, is an economic one, Chadwick says. The greenhouses take capital to build, and the operating costs are high. He has a dozen employees and burns 20,000 gallons of propane per heating season. “It’s too high a hurdle for this to go widespread,” he says.
Back in the Museum District, I chat with some of his customers. Jennifer Friend, who used to live in the nearby Fan District but is now in Henrico County, says “everybody knows” Chadwick and his orchid service. She has been boarding her 10 orchids here for a decade. “If I kept them,” she says, “they’d die.”
“I think there are a lot of people like me who would not have become a collector were it not for Chadwick’s,” says Sarah Ann Scott, who lives in Chesterfield County.
Susan Jamieson, an interior designer in the city’s Ginter Park neighbourhood, has 50 orchids with Chadwick’s. “Every time they call and say you have got an orchid to pick up, I wonder which one will it be,” she says. As many as 10 find their way to her home at one time, and she puts them around the house: over the mantel, on a coffee table, in a bathroom, on a bedside table. “They’re all over,” she says.
Most of his customers are within an hour’s drive of the Richmond shop. Chadwick does accept shipped orchids and can ship them back when they’re ready. “It’s not particularly cost- effective for clients, but if they are trying to build their collection from afar, they’re pleased with it,” he says.
Chadwick started his career as an electrical engineer but found the corporate environment too stultifying, and he got out early with his dad’s help. Growing other people’s orchids “is a crazy niche,” he says. “I never thought I would be doing this.” — The Washington Post