It was September 1975. Roger Hammer packed his camera, six canteens of water, two compasses, an Army jungle hammock, dried fruit, beef jerky, and other light rations before he headed to the Everglades in his Volkswagen van.
He drove 90 miles from his home in Homestead to Fakahatchee Strand Preserve State Park, home to 50 native orchid species. That’s about half of Florida’s orchid diversity and a fourth of the species in the U.S. and Canada.
But Roger, then 32, was looking for just one: Lepanthopsis melanantha, the tiny orchid.
He had read about it, but few if any botanists had seen firsthand the flower’s delicate purple-red blooms. They are extremely rare, found primarily in hard-to-access recesses of the swamp, he recalls reading.
He parked his van, stepped outside, and proceeded to hike for five days. Along the way, he stumbled across 30 orchid species. Trudging through a swamp is tiring, it turns out, so Roger took a seat on a pop ash tree stump to rest and enjoy a granola bar. As he munched, he looked over his shoulder, and like a ghost, there it was: a tiny orchid with tiny burgundy petals.
“I went, ‘Oh my god. There it is,’” he remembers.
Roger, now 79, has continued to spend much of his time chasing down and photographing the state’s most elusive flora. Florida alone boasts the greatest diversity of orchids in the continental U.S., but today, three-fourths of its orchids are listed as endangered or threatened.
Humans and their insatiable poaching appetite for the rare flowers are putting Florida’s last remaining species at unprecedented risk, and climate change is only making matters worse, as are sea-level rise, saltwater intrusion, heat waves, and urban sprawl.
But Roger has done much more for the orchids than take their beauty shots and publish them across more than eight guidebooks. His highest degree is from Cocoa High School, yet he regularly educates authors, botanists, and students about Florida’s native orchids and other wildflowers.
For his contributions, Florida International University awarded him an honorary doctorate of science in 2012. Key among them was discovering two species new to Florida: Maxillaria parviflora, the purple tiger orchid, and Pelexia adnata, known as Hachuela. Both are listed as endangered. There’s even a plant named after him: the recently discovered Euphorbia hammeri.
He laughs about all this starting with $25. That was how much it cost to buy Dr. Carlyle A. Luer’s “The Native Orchids of Florida” at the Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden in Miami in 1972. The book inspired him to go on his orchid safaris throughout the state, eventually finding and photographing all 98 remaining native orchid species out of the roughly 110 native to Florida. The other dozen have been wiped out.
A Flor(id)a Man
Roger regularly often embarks on 200-mile solo canoe trips up, down, and across the state of Florida. He has paddled up the Caloosahatchee River to Lake Okeechobee, reeled in sailfish off the coast of Miami, and camped on many a riverbank for the multi-day, backwoods excursions.
Sometimes, he gets lost. He’ll realize he turned into a wrong tributary and has to paddle his way back to the main river. Then, he’ll try another tributary. “My life,” he says, “has always been like that.”
Roger is an apt candidate for Key West’s annual Hemingway look-alike contests — although it’s his neighbor down the street who actually competes in them. He dons an Everglades ball cap and a coral-colored fishing shirt the day we meet. The Cocoa Beach native tells me he grew up surfing and sunbathing until he was drafted for the Vietnam War and sent to a base on Okinawa. He still remembers some rusty Japanese. When he returned to Florida in 1968, the 24-year-old had “no purpose in life,” he says. So he took a job at a University of Miami shrimp farm near Turkey Point, the nuclear power facility about six miles east of Homestead.
Not long afterward, he purchased Luer’s orchid book and became obsessed with its 102 native orchids. (Eight weren’t yet identified). It became his mission to photograph them all. Soon enough, Roger landed a job at Castellow Hammock Preserve, a nature center in Miami, and went on to lead nature tours he called “wildflower walks” at Everglades National Park.
It’s humid and sunny in mid-August when I park my car beside the decorative flamingo on the wooden fence surrounding Roger’s home. Inside the gate, I’m greeted by Layla and Satine, Roger’s two dogs; one of about a dozen cats; and a large cage full of parakeets. But those are just the domestic animals.
Roger’s yard is a one-acre haven of botanic bliss. Tropical plants form a walkway from the gate to the porch, and critters adorn their branches. We stop to admire the caterpillar of a Florida atala butterfly, a rare species presumed extinct until Roger rediscovered it on Virginia Key off mainland Miami in 1979. He and other conservationists then led a successful campaign to re-establish the species, which earned him a small mention in a 1996 issue of National Geographic.
A few steps farther, I see the blurred wings of blue jays as they flit among the canopies. “Blue jays are screaming,” Roger observes as we tour the foliage. “There’s a new hawk in the yard, a Cooper’s hawk.” On his property alone, Roger and his neighbors—including world-renowned ornithologist John Ogden—and other Tropical Audubon Society birders have tallied 147 bird species and 66 butterflies.
Sometimes, green, blue, or black-crowned night herons pay a visit to his fish pond. At the pond’s edge, tiny wooden crates hold the roots of several endangered orchids. “This thing right here, this is Vanilla dilloniana,” he tells me. It’s a relative of the vanilla we get our extract from, and it’s now extinct in the wild. He runs inside and comes back out with a jar of vanilla pods from the orchid that have soaked in vodka for a year — his own vanilla extract.
We walk from a shampoo ginger plant to a large seagrape tree from Costa Rica to a rare Lignum vitae, a broad-leaf tree native to the Florida Keys. People have offered him thousands of dollars for that Lignum vitae, but no price could convince Roger to relinquish his protection over it. These plants are safe in Roger’s fenced-in yard, but for the dozens of native orchids scattered across Florida in odd places, from swamp to suburb, reality is much more grim.
They’re being loved to death
Roger doesn’t know what it is about orchids, but people “go crazy” over them — similar to how birders travel far and wide to see a single species with their own eyes. When I told Roger he strikes me as the birder of orchids, he agreed.
After Hurricane Andrew tore through Miami in 1992, orchid thieves swarmed to the fallen trees near Deering Estate to grab what they could. When people find fallen orchids, Roger grumbles, they often say, “Oh, it was laying on the ground.” His response is usually, “Well, stick it back in the frickin’ tree!”
That’s what Roger did after the storm, using Liquid Nails to glue the orchids back to the trunks of living trees. They’re still there today.
Orchids are Earth’s most diverse plant family in the world. Varieties date back to the early 20th century, when collectors looking to make a buck in European markets scavenged the Everglades for their colorful charms.
“There was kind of an orchid fever,” says Jennifer Possley, a botanist at the Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden. “People would just go in with wagons and load the wagons up with orchids harvested from the Everglades or other regions around here and sell them.” Today, it’s less of an issue, but some poaching still happens. “They’re being loved to death,” Possley adds.
Earlier this year, law enforcement intercepted an attempt to steal the super-rare ghost orchid, which is a common occurrence. Yet the species remains unprotected after U.S. Fish and Wildlife officials missed their deadline to list it as endangered in January. During a visit to Fairchild, Possley took me to a hidden corner of the botanic garden to see the famed orchid. Its delicate white pedals hung like fangs on a pillar about 10 feet away from the walkway, intentionally located in a hard-to-reach spot.
Orchid poaching has long been an issue, but the bigger anthropogenic threat is climate change. Sea-level rise, climbing temperatures, and intensified storms are placing fierce pressures on some plant species more than others, explains Jason Downing, an orchid biologist at Fairchild.
Coastal populations, like the mule-ear orchid, are especially imperiled by hurricanes and storm surges, he says. As a Caribbean species, they’re adapted to periodic storms, but “the frequency and intensity may be happening at a rate that they can’t co-evolve with,” he says.
Another issue is the warm, dry atmosphere of urban heat islands. Buildings, pavement, and other human-made infrastructure “trap” heat in condensed areas, which can cause changes in local weather patterns, such as decreased precipitation. Orchids that are adapted to these drier conditions have a better shot at survival, Downing says. But orchids that require certain levels of humidity and freshwater, like the ghost orchid, may be less suited for these changes. Their host plants are at risk, too: Orchids dependent on coastal trees that aren’t salt-tolerant may dwindle.
Pollinators are also important. A native oil bee, Centris errans, lives only in Miami’s pine rockland forests, an ecosystem that has shrunk to less than 2% of its original scope. The oil bee pollinates the locust berry, Byrsonima lucida, but cowhorn orchids — the largest of which was toppled by Hurricane Irma in Everglades National Park — trick the bees into pollinating them, as well. Without these bees, Downing says, both plant species would likely suffer.
The good news? The entire family, Orchidaceae, is listed in Appendix II of CITES, a treaty designed to protect threatened wildlife from international trade. But there’s another looming threat that has swallowed up thousands of other wildlife species around the world: habitat loss from urban development. It’s an issue plaguing the natural areas surrounding Roger’s home, turning more rare and endangered orchids into mere memories.
The impossible scavenger hunt
I don’t expect to hear the voices of Doris Day and Frank Sinatra when I climb into Roger’s tan Chevy Silverado, especially after he riffed about his long-haired “ZZ Top days” in the ’70s. His hair, now white, is still long and tied back in a small ponytail at the nape of his neck.
On our way to the Everglades, just a 20-minute drive from his house, we chat about how congested Homestead has become. Droves of people have moved to this rural stretch of cultivated land between Miami and the Keys known as the Redlands. We drive past the occasional dragon fruit or sugar cane plantation, but Roger points out the plots where large developments have replaced farmland. They’ve replaced orchids, too.
Another reason why orchid conservation is so difficult is because it’s not possible to survey every inch of land across the state — and even if it were, it wouldn’t provide a true count. Orchids don’t bloom year-round, making them easy to miss, and sometimes, seeds can stay buried in the soil for years before they take root.
Our first stop is a small patch next to an electrical box where Roger wants to “check on something.” When we pull off the side of the road, he leans over his window and groans. “Yeah, they got rid of it.” There used to be an orchid there, he tells me, Eulophia alta. When it’s not flowering, it can look like nondescript blades of grass. The park’s mowing crew likely cleared the patch with a weedeater. I can hear the disappointment in his voice, but he has seen this sort of thing many times before.
We drive past hiking trails and administrative buildings until we reach the spot where Roger parks the truck, and we hop out. I follow him as he walks offroad into the grass. Then, as I’m looking at another plant, I turn to see him pointing at an unassuming bush.
“Is that it?” I ask.
“Yep,” Roger says. “Hadn’t been seen in a bazillion frickin’ years.”
It’s Bletia patula, the Haitian pine pink orchid. To be precise, a “bazillion” was actually 58 years before a park researcher spotted its pink-purple petals in 2005. In its current non-flowering state, I would have easily mistaken it for any one of the similar-looking bushes around it, and suddenly, I feel guilty of the weed control we witnessed on the side of the road a few minutes earlier. Other orchids have gone unseen for even longer, like the Cranichis muscosa, which was rediscovered 101 years after its previous sighting in the Fakahatchee.
We cross the street and find another small stand of Haitian pine pink. Suddenly, Roger reaches down and starts yanking an adjacent plant. It doesn’t budge, so he tries again. It’s shoebutton ardisia, Ardisia elliptica, which is native to Southeast Asia. “Category one invasive,” he says, pulling it so hard that clumps of dirt come up with the roots. That’s one way — Roger’s way — of protecting orchids. But there are other ways, too.
Seeding the state
In 1938, Marjory Stoneman Douglas joined David Fairchild and a handful of other conservationists in establishing Fairchild’s namesake botanic garden as a haven for tropical plants from around the world. But these days, the estate’s biologists have put native plants at the forefront of their work. The garden is brimming with thick islands of foliage, each tree and flower tagged with a metal identification plate. Way in the back of the garden, just beyond a bronze statue of Marjory herself, a brightly lit research lab houses the future of Florida’s orchids.
Inside, hundreds of plastic containers line the shelves. Each contains a thin layer of black carbon gel that helps budding orchid seeds germinate by slowing the growth of harmful fungus and mold. When they’re big enough, they are transferred onto sphagnum moss or burlap and taken to a plant nursery, Fairchild’s Possley explains.
It’s part of an orchid restoration effort called the Million Orchid Project, and as the name suggests, its goal is to reseed a million native orchids in public spaces across South Florida — spaces where people feel a sense of ownership over local conservation, says Downing, the director of the program.
Most are planted by students from about 150 participating schools, but other community groups have joined the volunteer effort. Now in its 10th year, the project has surpassed its halfway goal, with 570,000 orchids planted across Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach counties.
“These [orchids] really are tropical jewels,” Downing says. “They’re an iconic part of our sub-tropical climate, and that’s really important that we want to preserve that biodiversity for future generations.”
Wrong turns and tributaries
By the time Roger and I return to his backyard paradise, the midday sun has given way to August’s characteristic afternoon thunderstorm. As we sit in the truck waiting for the rain to let up, Roger begins flipping through the pages of one of his guidebooks, rattling off facts about each species. “I took that in my yard,” he says about several of the photos.
Each year, the rarest orchids become increasingly difficult to find, Roger says. But if a species can be rediscovered after 101 years — and if two previously undiscovered species can be identified by a single man — that could mean there’s more out there.
That’s what keeps Roger going on miles-long hikes and canoe trips through Florida’s inaccessible recesses, even at an age when many of his friends and colleagues have passed away. He pours one out — literally — on their death anniversaries, each marked on his calendar like a lunch date.
A few weeks after my visit, Roger sends me an email about his eight-mile humid hike through the Everglades looking for two rare orchids. He didn’t spot them, so he’s going out the next day on his bicycle to cover more ground. Even at 79, despite dermatologists telling him to stay out of the sun, as wives have come and gone, as friends have passed on, Roger remains the determined, self-taught naturalist inspired by a $25 book at a botanic garden.
“It was all those lucky tributaries,” he says, “that led me where I wanted to go, or didn’t know I wanted to go.”
Back during my visit, a light spray hits the left side of my body from the downpour as I sit with Roger underneath his patio overhang. To reward us for our orchid search, he reaches into his patio fridge for two ice-cold bottles of Chimay, his favorite Belgian beer. He pours us each a glass, and we toast to orchids, to biodiversity, to Marjory, and to the swampy state we both call home.
This story was produced in partnership with the Florida Climate Reporting Network, a multi-newsroom initiative founded by the Miami Herald, the South Florida Sun Sentinel, The Palm Beach Post, the Orlando Sentinel, WLRN Public Media and the Tampa Bay Times.
