1.

For the first time in thirteen years, my orchids did not bloom.

They used to flower like clockwork, shooting out a spike by November, while outside, the last leaves fell, little fires snuffed out by a cold, damp earth deepening into sleep. 

The first bud would burst open around New Year’s, or my birthday, or even Valentine’s Day, marking human milestones, ignoring winter’s slump. By Easter, I’d have cascades of blooms when cherry blossoms entered the fray.

My oldest orchid bloomed through the summer, an overachiever who dropped her last petals in August. For the better part of the year, I had orchid flowers or the promise of flowers. It was an arrangement I had come to rely on: as seasons changed, I had the tropics in pots. 

Friends asked me how I did it. I riffed about light, watering, fertilization, temperature, and location, as if I were an expert. 

Many years later, I’d know for sure that I was not.

2.

My oldest orchid has lived with me in four different homes around Pennsylvania. She survived all my moves, even my international trips, when I had to leave her behind.

When I first saw her across the room, I knew she was the one. She had a special glow, a brilliant smile, a flush in her cheeks, or so I imagined. I was grocery shopping at Wegmans in Allentown when destiny called.

I admired her up close. I noticed that one of her leaves had a slight split end. You see, I didn’t know a thing about orchids, except that they clung to trees in our garden back in the Philippines. But I knew I wanted one for my new Pennsylvania apartment, and it must be a healthy plant.

After a half-hour of inspecting orchids like I was prospecting for gold, I went back to the first. Her petals were velvet on my fingers, the rich royal robes of purple magenta suns. I didn’t want any other.

Split-leaf notwithstanding, I purchased my first orchid. Then I named her “Orchid.”

3.

It was the spring of 2009 when I brought Orchid to my new Pennsylvania home. The previous fall, as the banking system collapsed, just before the first Black U.S. president was elected, I had just moved back from the Philippines where I was impelled by U.S. immigration rules to live for two years, in a country that no longer felt like home. 

I remember being in a Starbucks in Manila in 2006, typing an email to a Pennsylvania friend a couple of weeks after my arrival. I have no one to hang out with. Most of my friends are married with kids. The same applies to the men. And I live at home. 

I was at home but not at home. 

Life has a way of helping you out during moments of change, giving you gifts you could never have imagined. I made new friends: younger friends who were unencumbered and unattached, older friends who were my past teachers and now my colleagues in the university where I was teaching, friends of the same age who also went to grad school abroad and were beset with similar challenges. And then there were my students whose talents and appreciation amazed and warmed me, whose growth I had the chance to be part of, even for two years.

I became a scuba-diver, took flamenco dance lessons, learned to play the kulintang, improved my Spanish—though I don’t know if these were attempts to familiarize a now-foreign place or if they were my efforts to exploit its offerings, knowing I would leave. I traveled around Asia, gave piano concerts, and I partied—yes, I partied. But I also spent time with family. I even fell in love a few times. The Philippines felt like home again, though the romantic relationships didn’t last, didn’t survive the move back to Pennsylvania. 

Now, it was Pennsylvania I’d been trying to reconfigure into some version of home, after just having lost everything and everyone yet again. I started from scratch: not only had I sold most of my belongings before I left; in the two years I was gone, my closest Pennsylvania friends had moved away.

I was rootless, untethered.

By the time I bought Orchid in the spring of 2009, I’d bought an old Camry, antique furniture, kitchenware, and a bed. I hadn’t hung pictures yet in my one-bedroom Allentown apartment, but in a few months, I’d do so for my housewarming party—for by then, I’d have furniture, as well as friends.

4.

Orchids can live a hundred years or more. 

They start like small specks of dust, possibly millions of them encased in a seed pod that takes half a year to form. Transported by the elements, the seed falls where it may, germinating only if conditions are right.

To germinate in the wild, the orchid seed must be colonized by a fungus. The chance of the seed and fungus meeting is very small, but it’s a necessary acquaintance. As the orchid seed doesn’t have an endosperm for nutrition, it relies on the fungus for food. 

First, the fungus must take over.

Then, as the seed opens and grows, the fungus becomes the food. The hungry seed forms a protocorm, then develops into a seedling. At this point, most orchids no longer need the fungus to survive, though the fungus sometimes hangs around in hopes of getting something in return. The orchid never gives. 

It grows into a mature plant, taking more than five years to flower, if it survives. Its blooms will be pollinated by bees enticed by expectations of food or a mate. But the orchid never made any promises; its beauty was all it had to offer. It produces a seed pod and the cycle continues, unlikely meetings evolving into relationships sustained by need and desire, hope and hunger, each life in a slow march toward self-enlargement or immortality or death.

5.

In the 1820s, at the Botanical Gardens of Buitenzorg on the Indonesian island of Java, a young German-Dutch botanist noticed moths hovering by a tree, or so the story goes. He was Carl Ludwig Blume, a namer of flowers, his own name a flower.

A world away from his native soil, Blume arrived on the island, then part of the Dutch East Indies, at the age of twenty-two, the same age I moved to the United States to study classical piano as a graduate student. When Blume climbed its volcanoes, sweat pooling in his boots and under his breeches, did he tremble at the thought of Mount Tambora’s eruption, the strongest one ever recorded, just years before? How did he feel trekking through its forests, sailing to its smaller islands, swimming in its hot pools while he tried to collect plants to use as medicine for his colonial government in a land that wasn’t his own?

He sent plants to Leiden, Utrecht, and Ghent. He collected plants from China and Japan. He placed his booty in the Botanical Gardens of Buitenzorg, two hundred lush acres on the site of a man-made forest built centuries before by the Sundanese kingdom to protect the seeds of its rare trees. 

I imagine the cascades of white wings fluttering in the wind and rain. They glow like ghosts under the tropical canopy, enticing this young man in boots and breeches, the gardens’ new director, on a respite from his other explorations.

He trudges on already wet earth as rain descends like a blinding mist. Approaching the moth-winged angels which haven’t fluttered away, he realizes they’re flowers growing on trees, the canopy’s weave shielding it from the storm yet letting through discrete rushes of water and light. He names their genus Phalaenopsis from the Greek phalaina or moth, and defines their existence to the world.

6.

Pictures from my travels hung amid the French- and English-style antiques I’d scrounged up from used furniture stores: a candle-boat for the festival in Luang Prabang (where my hair almost caught fire), the royal barge procession in Bangkok (where I nabbed the best seats for the king’s birthday), a monk on top of a temple in Bagan during the Saffron Revolution (the picture not showing the cigarette in his hand). 

And there were black-and-white pictures of the Philippines: Paoay Church completed in 1710, alive and well but like ruins in monochrome; my mother looking out to the sea, a beach of textures and shapes drained of color and heat. If there were other pictures of my father, mother, and brother, I do not recall. 

They graced my walls, carefully matted and framed, hiding as much as they revealed. 

And then there was Orchid by the window, a fellow Southeast Asian living in a temperate clime, a co-conspirator in a newly-constructed self. 

It all came together at the last moment, and I discovered my housewarming party’s theme: “French Oriental.” I wasn’t aware then of the loaded usage of the second word, didn’t understand what my choice of theme might say about who I’d become.

But my new friends—Black, White, Latin, Asian—partook in my celebration and seemed to enjoy this version of home and of me. I was so happy it felt like Christmas.

7.

In the wild, most Phalaenopsis grow on tree trunks and branches, their greenish-white, fleshy roots like sponges soaking in their spoils. Aerial roots stretch out like tentacles or dangle like loose curls, drawing food and water, as if by magic, out of air and rain.

They lap up stormwater like hungry animals, getting almost full within seconds. Like misers, they can hang onto it, saving it for dry times. Like chefs, they create food with it, procuring carbon dioxide from the air and cooking with light.

These roots, like extra leaves, gather sunlight while living in the shadow of lush, verdant trees. When all else fails, they drink up water and nutrients from the fungi living inside them. They are many things at once.

Most orchids are epiphytes. They grow on another plant but do not extract food from their host. Otherwise, they take what they can where they can, like seasoned opportunists or colonial explorers. Or artists grabbing inspiration while it’s there.

8.

One of my housewarming party guests was Dave, a slender, smiling Filipino man. He was born in Connecticut, grew up in New Jersey, moved to Pennsylvania for college, and stayed on for work. 

We were just friends at first—he was too shy to get in the way of my dating activities and I was too distracted to notice his interest. But eventually, Dave became my best friend. And though it seems strange to some, it was the surest way to my heart. 

One day in early spring, we drove to the New York Botanical Garden where bursts of orchids draped down, reached up, and arched across the grand Enid A. Haupt Conservatory, constructed from 1899-1902 while in the throes of the Philippine-American War. 

The theme was “On Broadway,” and the orchids were the orchestra, singers, costumes, and stage, while palms, ferns, and vines provided supporting acts. Orchid chandeliers hung from the ninety-foot-tall Victorian glass house, their petals aflame with reflected light. It was bloom upon bloom on seas of green, a tropical paradise on steroids.

From the central pavilion, Dave and I walked on to the outer wings where orchid rainbows arched above a path. Further down, the crowds started to dissipate. We then went behind a wall that turned out to be a large floor-to-ceiling terrarium teeming with orchids of various kinds.

I stared wide-eyed at orchid heaven, marveling at the colors and shapes, fantasizing about such a headboard for my bed when Dave got down on one knee, opened a tiny box, and asked me to marry him.

Crying, I said yes as he put the diamond ring on my finger, love in full bloom, with thousands of orchids as quiet witness.

9.

Orchids came to our wedding, even our honeymoon. Meant to be mere accents to our butter yellow and French blue color scheme, magenta orchids stole the show, cascading from my bouquet, Dave’s boutonnière, our wedding cake, all floral arrangements, and even my hair. While on honeymoon in Bali, orchids appeared on our balcony, the gardens, the restaurants, the temples.

I’d moved into Dave’s home in Bethlehem, a fifteen-minute drive from my old apartment. On a midsummer’s day, I was shocked to discover that a new shoot was growing out of Orchid. After some research, I learned that she was producing a keiki. 

“Keiki” is the Hawaiian word for “baby.” Certain orchids, like the Phalaenopsis, are able to spontaneously produce clones of themselves when grown in optimal conditions—or when stressed. I’d like to think that in this case, it was the former.

We tried to have a baby. The world fell apart when he told me he lost his job after I’d lost mine. But now, I’d just been offered a new job and was getting ready to move again.

The stress of the move, the stress of work, the stress of lack of work—all would keep us from taking the plunge, from making the lifetime commitment of raising another human being. 

One day, we’d realize that we have a choice; that bearing offspring is not a given.

I’d realize that I’ve lived a good life without them. That the only “clocks” I heard ticking were my mom’s and my mother-in-law’s. 

That I’d want to travel, to create, to be myself. To not just be what society expects me to be. Dave would have other reasons but he’d understand. Eventually, we’d decide to not procreate.

But for now, I had another choice to make: take Orchid’s keiki so that it may become a new baby plant; or leave it attached, creating two of her in one. 

I opted for the latter. Since then, she’d been growing two bloom stalks and was in flower for most of the year.

10.

In the summer of 2020, while a pandemic was ravaging the world, we were fortunate enough to set roots in ways we hadn’t before: we bought a home in Bloomsburg, a pre-war Colonial Revival of stone and wood built by a prominent family in our town.

I was taken by its decades-old trees and perhaps centuries-old woods behind the garden: a lush, almost tropical backdrop to a colonial-style house. Its white oak floors, its paneled wall, its bookshelf around the fireplace, everything gave the feel of warmth in ways my Philippine home did not. Its stone exterior, especially when decked with Christmas garlands and lights, with a sprinkling of snow, was a storybook invitation to our homey enclave. Perhaps it was a Hollywood-induced fantasy of home, but it felt like home nevertheless.

On their first spring in the Colonial Revival, Orchid and her new companion—a white orchid gifted by Dave while we lived in our previous Bloomsburg apartment—bloomed in spite of the new environment. 

But the November after that, I did some things I was bound to regret: I repotted them at the wrong time, just as they were about to spike. And I cut off most of their roots.

I pruned and I pruned, taking out the older and dryer roots, sure they were of no more use. It had been due for a while, this repotting, this pruning, and I decided it needed to be done, even at the wrong time.

I thought I was deepening my own roots. Why did I cut theirs?

11.

One orchid lifespan after Blume’s discoveries, pianist-composer Leopold Godowsky visited the same botanical gardens in Java in 1923. “The heavily perfumed air awakens an expressibly deep and painful yearning for unknown worlds, for inaccessible ideals, for past happenings irrevocably gone…” he wrote in his program notes to his piano piece “The Gardens of Buitenzorg,” from his Java Suite.

Almost a hundred years later, after performing Java Suite in various American cities, I recorded that very piece on my new piano in my new Colonial Revival in Pennsylvania, a garden of tones growing from my hands in counterpoint with wind, fragrance, and rain—with my flowerless orchids as quiet witness.

12.

I’m an epiphyte. I draw what I need from my environment, I do not need to be rooted in soil. 

But I need to root into something.

13.

I’ve been without Orchid’s blooms for a while now. The “empty nest” led us to buy another, and Dave gifted me one more for my birthday.

I shouldn’t be so bloom-obsessed. “A year or two without flowers is not the worst thing for a plant,” my friend Troy tells me; he used to have five-hundred orchids before the big flood killed them off. “And sometimes, roots do need to get pruned,” he adds, confounding my grief.

As I write this, I see fleshy roots forming and a new keiki developing, even if I know this one was caused by stress. This is how life works, I learn: the new usurps the old but it needs to take time to grow. Radix is Latin for root, the base from which radicle, the plant’s embryonic root, proceeds; from which radical change emanates.

The epiphyte’s roots anchor; they don’t just extract. The foamy structures mold themselves to the contours of their found home and grow root hairs that lock into its cavities and rifts. In the wild, an orchid dislodged by wind or heavy rain will meet almost certain death. I had worried that my orchids wouldn’t bloom by springtime—now I’m just happy they’re alive.

Perhaps there will be more roots, then leaves, and maybe flowers. Or perhaps not. Either way, these roots are catchers and changemakers; they are conduits of nourishment and light.

——————

Charisse Baldoria is a classical pianist, composer, and educator who loves the written word. Born in the Philippines, she came to the United States for graduate school in music as a Fulbright scholar. She is a music professor in Pennsylvania, has performed on five continents, and loves to travel. Her poetry has been published in The Asian Pacific American Journal (University of Michigan) and the Northern Stars magazine.