Early one recent morning at the midtown New York flower wholesaler Dutch Flower Line, the author Susan Orlean paused to smell a fragrant bouquet of baby-blue hyacinth. With a light flurry of snow falling outside, the incongruity of her surroundings was not lost on her. “New York,” she noted, “has a great talent for creating worlds inside worlds.” Orlean is, of course, no stranger to uncovering the unusual. She traveled deep into Florida’s swampy Fakahatchee Strand State Preserve with the orchid poacher John Laroche for her widely read 1998 book “The Orchid Thief,” which laid bare the little-known floral black market while also chronicling her own personal revelations along the way.
“I’ve always had a strong tie to the flower district,” she notes, pausing to pick up a bunch of freshly cut pink ranunculi. “In fact, I had the launch party for ‘The Orchid Thief’ at another flower shop just down the road.” However, long before the success of Orlean’s book and the subsequent film it inspired — Charlie Kaufman’s wildly inventive “Adaptation,” in which Meryl Streep played Orlean — she recalls forays to the flower district as special indulgences during her early years living in the city. “Until I moved to New York, I could probably count on my hand the number of times I’d bought flowers for myself,” she says. “One day, I thought, ‘I need something alive in my new apartment.’” Pausing to head over to a bundle of yet-to-bloom crimson peonies, she continues: “Coming up from the subway, I’d get a bouquet — even if it was about to be thrown out — and bring it back to my little apartment.”
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