An exotic, delicate passion

Down a quiet country lane in East Hampton is a large, wood-shingled house with a 15- by 20-foot greenhouse attached to one side.

It isn’t a greenhouse for living in, with rattan furniture and a few ferns for decoration. No, this greenhouse is packed from floor to ceiling with orchids.

It belongs to a passionate orchid lover, Dr. Robert Moraru.

Dr. Moraru, a dermatologist with Lower Manhattan Medical Associates, has been immersed in the world of orchids for 20 years. He received his first orchid plant as a gift from the curator of the conservatory at Cornell University, where he was a student.

“A year later it bloomed,” he said, “and I was hooked.”

Today, he serves on the board of the Manhattan Orchid Society and also belongs to the Greater New York Orchid Society.

With that first plant, a moth orchid (or

Phalaenopsis

lueddemanniana, to serious orchid fans), he began cultivating orchids on his apartment windowsills. Then he got a light cart—a wheeled shelving unit with fluorescent lights attached. But his collection continued to grow and virtually exploded in the last 3 years since he bought his East Hampton getaway and built the greenhouse.

In fact, one of the reasons he chose the house was because it had space for a greenhouse.

“It was one of the criteria,” he declared.

“When the greenhouse was built,” Dr. Moraru explained, “I had 15 or 16 plants.”

Now he has more than 1,500. Among them are the descendants of that original orchid—it produced “keikeis” or babies that he removed from the parent plant and grew in pots. The offspring are exact clones of the parent.

On a recent afternoon, Dr. Moraru slipped on a pair of Crocs from a multicolored assortment lined up neatly by the door and led the way into his greenhouse. Metal shelves and racks covered the floor space and lined the walls, all filled with orchids. More plants dangled from hooks overhead in square baskets made of wood slats. Every available inch of space was filled.

Exotic World

The air inside is warm. Temperatures range from the 80s during the day to the upper 60s at night—ideal for the kinds of orchids Dr. Moraru grows. In summer, temperatures are kept in check with an exhaust fan and a combination of rolling shade slats and automatic vents.

Though warm, the greenhouse is not stuffy. Nine fans run 24 hours a day, seven days a week to keep the air circulating. Continuous air flow is critical for orchids, according to Dr. Moraru. So is humidity. Many orchids are epiphytic, meaning that they grow above the ground, perching on trees or shrubs, or sometimes even rocks. They don’t draw nutrients from their host plants. Instead, their exposed aerial roots absorb water—and the minerals carried in it—from dew or rain or fog. Dr. Moraru’s greenhouse has an automatic misting system that sprays the plants with a fine mist every few minutes. He also sprays the roots with water every few days.

Like most orchid lovers, Dr. Moraru has his favorites. As a collector “I have two passions,” he says. One is the vandas, a large genus of epiphytes that grow in the wood baskets or wired to slabs of tree fern bark. In late November some of them were sporting big, flat-petalled flowers in luscious shades of purple and purple-pink, dotted with red and pink. One beauty, called Black Butterfly, had rich purple blossoms mottled with deeper purple.

Dr. Moraru’s other great loves are the slipper orchids, whose flowers have a pouch vaguely reminiscent of a lady’s shoe. The various genera of slipper orchids are terrestrial and grow in pots.

Tempting Obsession

What is it about orchids that turns otherwise normal people into obsessive growers? Their amazing diversity, for one thing. Orchids are the largest and most varied class of plants on the planet, comprising 10 percent of all the world’s flowering plants.

There are tens of thousands of orchid species, and uncountable hybrids and varieties. They range in size from a couple of inches to 20 feet, and are found in all sorts of climates, from near to the sea to high in the mountains.

“Orchids grow on every continent except Antarctica,” said Dr. Moraru. He once grew the orchid known as the world’s largest—the giant orchid (

Grammatophyllum

speciosum). He had to get rid of it when it hit 4 feet tall and
 still needed to grow another 2 or 3 feet before it was big enough to bloom. He gave it to the New York Botanical Garden.

Orchid flowers come in so many colors and forms that it’s impossible to grow them all, or get bored with them. Best of all, the plants produce lots of flowers that last a long time. Each flowering stem (called a “spike”) bears a succession of blossoms along its length, and the flowers often last for months. Dr. Moraru has one plant that’s been blooming nonstop for 2 years.

The highly evolved flowers of orchids have developed complex mechanisms for attracting the particular bees, flies, wasps, mosquitoes, ants or butterflies that pollinate them. Dr. Moraru cited an example of an orchid whose flowers resemble a specific kind of female bee and even exude bee scent. Male bees are attracted and pollinate the flower when they try to mate with the “bee.”

Dr. Moraru readily admits he’s addicted to orchids.

“I don’t think anyone who’s a real hobbyist isn’t,” he said.

Looking over over his collection, Dr. Moraru pointed out a plant he especially likes: the diminutive

Pleurothallis

schweinfurthii was getting ready to bloom. It had nine burgeoning flower spikes on a teeny little plant in a 2-inch pot. “It’s a great miniature,” he said, that offers “a lot of bang for the buck.”

Constant Expansion

Recently, Dr. Moraru’s orchids have begun taking up residence in his house. Orchids line the bright windowsills in the kitchen. And he’s set up a state-of-the-art light garden in the basement to accommodate several dozen of the cooler-growing varieties, such as cymbidiums and paphiopedilums. His friend, Patty Lee, a renowned New York orchidist (she’s been growing them for more than 50 years) helped him with the project. The plants sit on sturdy shelving units bathed in light 16 hours a day from a 1,000-watt halogen lamp that travels back and forth on an automated track. Large fans keep the air moving.

Dr. Moraru even grows orchids outdoors, too. Some slipper orchids can survive Long Island winters. He grows them in pots sunk into the ground, near pine trees that provide some shade and shower the plants with needles in the fall. “They love the acidity,” he says. Some wild native ladyslippers have even appeared in the outdoor garden of their own accord.

Dr. Moraru gets his orchids from a variety of commercial growers, and locally from Bridgehampton Florist. Sometimes he ships home plants he’s found while on vacation in places like Florida and Hawaii. But he’s discovered them in surprising places, too. One of his best finds, he says, is a Chinese cymbidium he found at a Food Emporium supermarket in Manhattan. The store had mistakenly received a shipment of choice orchids meant for a specialty shop and didn’t know what to do with them. Dr. Moraru got his cymbidium at an incredible bargain.

“You never know where you’re going to find greatness,” he says with a twinkle in his hazel eyes.

The One

Asking an orchid lover about his favorite plant is like asking a parent to choose a favorite child. They’re all special in their own way. Still, says Dr. Moraru, he is especially fond of

Bulbophyllum

medusae, which bears spidery-petalled white flowers that look like bursts of snowy fireworks. The last time it bloomed it bore 10 spikes of flowers “on a plant that fits in a 3-inch basket!” he said. “If I had to have just one orchid, this would be it.”

And a plant he’d love to acquire is

Dimorphorcis

lowii. That one has separate male and female flowers of different colors on the same plant—male flowers are red and females are yellow.

Dr. Moraru thinks someday he might like to become an orchid judge, when he has the time. “When I retire,” he says.

Becoming an accredited judge is a long and arduous process requiring a great deal of study.

For now, he’s content growing and showing his plants, and his collection will continue to expand.