May 3, 2023 • 31 mins
In the Lonely Planet Guide, the editors provide one simple admonishment to travelers considering a journey to Panama’s Darien Gap: “Don’t even think about it!” But that didn’t deter English orchid enthusiast Tom Hart Dyke, who plunged into the forest in 2000 to see orchids – but ended up spending ten months in captivity.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
School of humans. Just be clear, I'm an absolute idiot,
and so's my friend that was with me. We should
never have gone, and obviously not recommending the experience because
you know you're going to die.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
That's Tom Heartdyke. And Tom Well, he's an orchid lover.
Back in two thousand, his zeal for these precious blooms
even got him into I'd say a little bit of trouble.
I'll let him tell the story.
Speaker 1 (00:33):
Where I met this chap called Paul Winder, also from
England and not a plant man so much, but more
of a mountaineer at heart, and we agreed across this
area called the Darien Gap on the Panamanian Colombian border,
an area that we knew wasn't that safe, but Paul
knew there were wonderful mountains to be discovered, and for me,
I knew it was a honeypot for orchids.
Speaker 2 (00:55):
So the two decided to buddy up and travel through
the gap together.
Speaker 1 (01:00):
Get up beginning of March of the year two thousand
to catch the six hour, bum bruising, potholed field bus
ride down the remainder of the Pan American Highway as
it fizzles out and the little hamlet, very very small
village of Javisa. You get off the bus, don you
rucksacks in your three foot long machettes. We bought a
few days earlier mosquito nets enough food for about two
(01:22):
and a half weeks. We reckoned, which was the time
to cross the Darien Gap according to our Lonely Planet guidebook,
and we followed the map in that guidebook, and we
made fabulous.
Speaker 2 (01:33):
Progress, following paths made by the wild pigs. The two
explorers weaved through the gap with unexpected ease.
Speaker 1 (01:40):
You are in the middle of absolutely nowhere, and the
wild boar and the very few people in the area
has rendered into this clearing full of air plants orchids.
I mean, it was a lovely place and no orchids
really worthy of Granny's name, and once to name it
new species. Walking after my dear granny. That was my
(02:02):
main drive, to see orchids and finding new species for her.
Speaker 2 (02:08):
It was a wonderland of plants. And then suddenly Tom
noticed something out of the corner of his.
Speaker 1 (02:14):
Eye, and we got our rucksacked on our backs and
started to walk through this clearing. When our guides just
stood in front of us and fell to the ground.
It was quite weird as these figures just ran at us.
Three girls really were fifteen sixteen year olds with big
M sixteen's and three chaps, so six in total, running
(02:35):
at us with all their all their machine guns, bandannas
on their heads and combat gear. Our guides just fell
to the floor and offered their hands behind their backs
and they were tied up in Paul just stared these people.
I mean we were in a film set or something,
We're in the TV screen. It was extraordinary and that
amazing feeling of those wonderful orkids. Oh you're screwed, You're
(02:59):
going to in split second, this happened on the hands
and knees. We went rock saxel, ripped off us, tied
up with what looked like garden string behind our backs.
These big M sixteen stuck to our heads. Our guides
dragged off into the woods. Probably one was executed. Even
to this day they completely and aftere vanished basically, and
(03:20):
Na and Paul marched to our feet and dragged off
into the woods for ten months in captivity.
Speaker 2 (03:32):
In this episode, the passion for plants gets dangerous. I'm
Summer rain Oaks from School of Humans and iHeart podcasts.
This is bad Seeds.
Speaker 1 (03:52):
My name is Tom Hartdyke and I'm curator of the
World Garden at Lallingston Castle in Kent in southeast England.
Speaker 2 (03:59):
Tom is a forty six year old horticulturalist, but to
be honest, after interviewing him, it's more apt to describe
him as a plant evangelist. His passion for plant life
pours from him.
Speaker 1 (04:11):
Hyper enthusiastic. I's called the other day.
Speaker 2 (04:14):
His property in Kent, which by the way has been
in the family for twenty generations.
Speaker 1 (04:19):
We moved here in thirteen sixty.
Speaker 2 (04:22):
One, has been converted into a world Garden with more
than seven thousand different types of plants.
Speaker 1 (04:28):
Laid out as a miniature map of the world. That
North and South America are represented, and we've got the
Canary Islands, we've got Africa, Europe, Asia, UK and Ireland
included in't that and Australia one of my favorite areas, Australasia.
And it's totally bonkers, but it's looking brilliant.
Speaker 2 (04:46):
To say the least. Tom is something of a plant addict,
and he's been one for a long time.
Speaker 1 (04:54):
And my passion to plants started at the age of three.
Sun in nineteen eighty when my granny gave me a
packaging carrots eats and a trowel. She was an amazing
character and she gave me my green blood cells and
everything else's horticultural history.
Speaker 2 (05:08):
Tom has traveled all over the world in the pursuit
to see the world's most spectacular plants. He's also, if
it isn't already obvious, an avid collector, but one plant
group has a special place in his heart.
Speaker 1 (05:25):
Orchids. Oh, it's just euphoric. It is spined even now
talking about its spine tinkling. It's Granny's fault all of this.
She had to sing about them. It was more unnative
orchids that really inspired me and granny and I think
they're absolutely majestic, and seeing them in the wild ear
then inspired me to grow some of their cousins in
a greenhouse here as a youngster. And then it was
(05:46):
the inevitable, the itchy feet. What was it like to
go abroad to see these plants in the wild. There's
something about them, and it's also their rarity, and it's
something about seeing them in the wild and some just
growing on the edge of extinction because there're only just
a handful of certain species of work. It's growing on
(06:06):
a rock in a certain specific sight in whether it
might be and that's fascinating, absolutely fascinating.
Speaker 2 (06:19):
In two thousand, when Tom was in his early twenties,
he made plans to visit one of the world's great
orchid hotspots, the Darien Gap, a dense rainforest between Colombia
and Panama. The Gap is widely considered one of the
most dangerous patches of wilderness on the planet. Now forget
(06:39):
the snakes, poisoned dart frogs, and jaguars. For decades, the
dense jungle has been a hideout for drug traffickers, paramilitary forces,
and guerrilla fighters. In the Lonely Planet guide to the region,
the editors provide one simple admonishment to travelers considering a journey.
Don't even think about it. But Tom, he didn't listen.
(07:05):
He had orchid fever. It's the nineteenth century and a
new plant craze is sweeping Britain. It's not tulips or ferns.
This time, the rich are paying explorers top dollar to
pluck orchids from the jungle. Tom Arenda, previously the orchid
(07:26):
collection specialist at the Smithsonian Gardens explains that at the
time there were a lot to choose from.
Speaker 3 (07:33):
There's probably more species of orchid than there are any
other type of plant in newarkids are discovered all the time.
I think that it's approaching about thirty thousand species. The
closest plant family to that number would be the composites,
which is the daisy family.
Speaker 2 (07:52):
Like Tom Hartdike Mirenda has been obsessed with orchids for
a long time. He understands the allure.
Speaker 3 (08:01):
They're so beautiful that we get seduced by them, and
so many of us that get fascinated with orchids end
up addicted to them and having these huge collections. They
are just mind bogglingly diverse, and they kind of have personalities.
For example, orchids are what we call bilaterally symmetrical, So
(08:22):
if you were to take my face and cut it
in half, you could fold it over onto itself and
it'd be a mirror image. Orkids are the same way.
When you're looking at an orkid, it's kind of like
looking at a face. You see something that kind of
looks back at you with a personality.
Speaker 2 (08:41):
Those seductive personalities led dozens of Victorian orchid hunters to
dive into the tropics, to Sierra Leone, to Brazil, to
Ecuador and Madagascar, to the Andes and beyond. It was
a scientific bonanza. They found thousands of species that previously
had been known only to locals.
Speaker 3 (09:02):
People were seeing plants that they never imagined did. It
was very exciting at the time, but it was also
before we really knew a whole lot about orchids in
particular and ecology in general.
Speaker 2 (09:19):
What followed was a botanical smash and grab. The wealthy
of Europe wanted orchids to show off, and competition was brutal.
With thousands of dollars on the line, orchid hunters swiped
every plant they could find and then would burn down
the surrounding forest to prevent competitors from finding new growth.
Speaker 3 (09:42):
They did a lot of dumb things. They would take everything.
If they found a new species, they would collect them
all and ship them all back to the Old World
to be grown. They would often lie about where a
plant was collected so that they could have it as
an exclusive plant for their nursery. A lot of misinformation
(10:06):
was promulgated from that where so people wouldn't know where
to find these plants in the future, and sometimes this
took like thirty forty years to figure out where the
plants were actually from.
Speaker 2 (10:18):
That's if any were left. Orchid hunting stripped the tropical
countryside within decades. Many species disappeared entirely from the wild,
only to be found in the gardens of the rich
and trendy.
Speaker 3 (10:34):
People think that it's a renewable resource, that there's just
thousands and thousands of these plants out in nature, and
it may seem that way, but it's very, very easy
to make a serious dent in a population by overcollecting.
Speaker 2 (10:50):
These plants would soon be called the lost orchids, but
rarity just enhanced the flower's mystique and boosted its asking price.
Orchid hunters kept combing the tropics, ransacking everything along the way.
Decency meant nothing. Susan Orlean in her book The Orchid Thief,
(11:12):
tells the story of one flower hunter in New Guinea
who discovered some orchids blooming from human remains, collected the
plants and sent them to England, still attached to ribs
and shin bones. That kind of behavior prompted one Swiss
botanist in eighteen seventy eight to write, these modern collectors
spare nothing. This is no longer collecting. It is wanton robbery.
(11:36):
Worse yet, few of those stolen plants survived.
Speaker 3 (11:41):
They brought them back to England and they put them
in what they call stove houses. These stove houses were
terrible for those plants. They perished. So entire populations of
plants from Colombia and Brazil and Venezuela and stuff all
died there with very very few survivors. So even though
(12:01):
all of this incredible diversity was being discovered, a lot
of damage was done to the tropical environments that these
things came from, and it can take, you know, hundreds
of years for those populations to recover.
Speaker 2 (12:23):
Eventually, the pillagings spread home to Britain too. Take the
lady slipper orchid siper Pedium calciolis. It bloomed across the
north of England until local hunters wiped it out in
twenty ten. The last remaining wild orchid in the country,
which was one hundred years old, had to be protected
(12:44):
by its own police detail. Even the country's botanical gardens
are extra vigilant with these prized plants, locking many of
the rarest orchids under cages. But during the height of
orchid fever, the flower weren't the only thing in danger.
The hunters were too. Guns, machetes, knives. These were the
(13:11):
orchid hunters go to tools. They trapes the forest, knowing
that at any moment they might have to fend off
wild animals, hostile locals, and other orchid hunters. One young
German hunter named William Arnold bragged that he once turned
down a high paying orchid hunting job because his client
(13:33):
failed to give him a trustworthy pistol. The gun wouldn't
have saved him. Arnold ended up drowning in Venezuela's Orinoco River.
His death was typical orchid hunters. Died of dysentery and malaria.
(13:57):
They fell off cliffs and had their heads shrunken. Many
stepped into the mists of the jungle and simply never returned.
Some were murdered by local rebel groups, others by competing
orchid hunters. Orchid hunting was a job for the few,
the proud, and the very very reckless, but the potential
(14:23):
for striking it rich was two appealing, and the orchid
beef Orlean describes the fate of one cursed orchid hunting
party in the Philippines, writing within a month, one of
them had been eaten by a tiger, another had been
drenched with oil and burned alive, five had vanished into
thin air, and one had managed to stay alive and
(14:45):
walk out of the woods, carrying forty seven thousand Fallinopsis plants.
To pursue the plant was to embrace a curse to
chase a blood diamond laced with petals. Few survived its seduction.
Those who did reaped life changing rewards. Decades later, Tom
(15:06):
hart Dyke heard the same siren call. Minutes before the ambush.
Tom hart Dyke and his hiking buddy Paul had been
making jokes about lollipops. Then their world is turned upside down.
(15:33):
People in full camouflage rush out from the jungle foliage,
and suddenly Tom is staring down the barrel of an
automatic rifle. The armed strangers command that Tom and Paul
come with them. As the young men are ushered through
the jungle, their hands tied and guns jammed into their backs,
they are convinced they are about to die. Then the
(15:57):
group stops its trek and the gorillas ask the hikers
to empty their pockets. The only thing that tumbles out
are a few seeds. Now this is a pretty good
indication that Tom and Paul are harmless. Still, the gun
toting kidnappers keep the two men captive in the forest
(16:20):
for ten long months.
Speaker 1 (16:22):
So we spent from March to Christmas of the year
two thousand with this Colombian gorilla.
Speaker 2 (16:27):
Group, and it was unclear exactly who the gorillas were.
They might have been rebels fighting the Colombian Civil War,
like members of Marxist Leninist group FARK, then a recognized
terrorist organization. All Tom could make out was they were
very young.
Speaker 1 (16:44):
To this day, we don't really know who they were
or what they wanted, at average age of fifteen sixteen
years of age. A third girls, two third boys, I
suppose made up the units, about seven hundred of them
in total, seven hundred different faces he saw during the
whole time.
Speaker 2 (17:03):
Over the months, the duo started to get used to
the feeling of having automatic weapons pointed at them, even
when they had to squat behind a bush or strip
in a creek in private moments. The guys give their
captors nicknames, Will Smith, Lucy M sixteen to name a
few they create a secret code to communicate, dream up
(17:26):
imaginary escapes, and even steal from their hostile hosts.
Speaker 1 (17:31):
We stole food from them. We stole a machete from them.
Paul was an amazing thief, so subtle and so cool
about it.
Speaker 2 (17:38):
One day, one of the gorillas, the one named M sixteen,
asks Tom why he was in the Darien Gap in
the first place. Tom tells them, I'm in love with plants.
Speaker 1 (17:48):
I thought to extend my life as much as possible.
My tactic was to show them who I was, a
gardener from Kent in southeast England and paul a mountaineers.
And that was a tactic we employed because inside, you're
absolutely peeing yourself. I mean, you are going to die,
so your survival strategy kicks in and you have this
faulty fact sort of thing. So on the inside you're like, oh,
(18:11):
we're screwed. On the outside, excuse my language, on the outside,
you're very much like, look at that wonderful butterfly flying,
but oh, thanks for the tarantula. The hair's got stuck
in my throat. But it was good to eat. The
armadillo and the hell the monkeys were absolutely gorgeous, they weren't.
They were awful and they're all protected. But it was
a way of sort of dealing with the situation. And
(18:33):
the captors didn't know what to do with this. I mean,
if you showed pleasantries, they couldn't deal with it. You
show a negativity and they feed off it. It's quite weird.
But if you did say that, they'd get, oh, i've
got a sore throw I missed my granny, and they
loved that. They fed off that and got very aggressive.
It's quite bizarre human nature, certain human nature. So we
(18:54):
had to just show that enthusiasm all the time and
that they didn't know what to do with us.
Speaker 2 (19:00):
At first, the militants, like M sixteen, thought Tom was
bluffing about all this plant stuff. They were convinced the
men were trafficking drugs to North America or maybe they
were Cia. But as time wore on, their minds began
to change. Because as the duo followed the gorillas deeper
into the jungle, Tom was getting distracted on sidiums pleurithallus,
(19:25):
lumbo glossoms.
Speaker 1 (19:26):
The orchids were fantastic. After we were kidnapped, it took
us right up to these isolated areas in Panama in particular,
and I mean there were orchids just dripping from the trees.
There were literally hundreds worthy of Granny's name. I mean,
you could name it after all the dogs and cats,
all the fish in the lake, all my friends I
haven't known over the years, people in the pub down
the road. Everyone could have had a new species of
(19:48):
orchids and named after them. Absolutely, it was astonishing. I'm
not an expert in orchids, but even I knew there
weren't just new species that I was coming across. There
were new genera. We saw quite literally hundreds of varieties,
and my guess was that some were highly endemic to
this area, the darry And Gap.
Speaker 2 (20:09):
Thinking that as time was up, Tom did something that
technically is illegal. He began to pluck the orchids.
Speaker 1 (20:16):
During captivity, going from camp to camp with the orchids.
I thought, there's no harm in that. It's aware of me,
keeping my sanity.
Speaker 2 (20:23):
Really, he later wrote in his book The Cloud Garden,
I was taking orchids from everywhere, from trees and from rocks.
I carried them behind my ears and in my hair
to get them to the camp. Eventually, Tom's orchid fever
takes over. He had to explore this irresistible array of flora,
(20:46):
so he asked the gorillas to come with him.
Speaker 1 (20:49):
I asked if we could go on these armed or
kid patrols to our captors that untied as by them
and were reasonably nice. They wanted to kill you, that
talked to you and kill you, but they were nice
to a decree, so they allowed us to gun these
old orchid controls, bring back orchist to the cap and
I started to make gardens. I started to make these
orchid gardens, Bromeliad gardens. Was quite bonkers, and it was
(21:12):
aware of me, completely distracting myself from from the thought
of execution. The scariest time was three months into our captivity,
during the sixteenth of the year two thousand, when they said,
you've got five hours mate, before before we blow your
heads off, and horribly talk to you beforehand. Then blow
your heads off. Oh okay, And as he turned his back,
(21:35):
he was just thirteen in this chat with a gun
that was with rocket launcher attachment, about four foot taller
than in.
Speaker 2 (21:43):
I mean, that's terrifying. How do you find solace when
you're in captivity? You got endless time to kill and
are a constant threat of being killed. But Tom was
finding ways to both kerbis fears and fill the hours
gardening and planning, and.
Speaker 1 (22:01):
Opened up my diary and started scribbling. I started to
draw a mini map of what would turn into the
world garden. Were just a way of distracting myself, ware
of me trying to think of Granny and to try
and show them who I was a gardener.
Speaker 2 (22:17):
Turns out the kid never returned to finish them off,
and as time went on, Tom started thinking more and
more about this world garden idea what.
Speaker 1 (22:27):
Turned out to be the next six months in captivity
until Christmas, drawing and fantasizing about this garden that I
could do in the Tuaca Old area back home. It
literally saved my life, just distracting myself from these murderous thoughts.
Speaker 2 (22:43):
Far from home and far from his dream garden, Tom
kept tending to his orchid plot and his captor's encampment
until one day it was all gone.
Speaker 1 (22:53):
When they really became very murderous. They burned all the orchids,
so I never had any orchids to bring back. Of course, Leek,
I can't bring them any orchids back anyway, but they
burned them, They stamped on them all in the end,
and never brought one back.
Speaker 2 (23:07):
Tom the gardener was now without a garden. But then
around Christmas time, after months in the jungle, one of
the gorillas turned to Tom and Paul and began speaking
in Spanish.
Speaker 1 (23:24):
And my Spanish was not brilliant, so it was very
much trying to get everything, trying to desperately understand some
us what they were saying, you know where we're gonna
die or not, And they just turned around to Just
and said, Happy Christmas. Get lost. If you come back,
will horribly kill you. And if you bring me friends back,
we'll kill them as well.
Speaker 3 (23:54):
Not everyone is conscious of how what they do affects
the natural world and how much we've displaced. The house
that I live in is in a very beautiful neighborhood.
We've got wild open spaces and pastures. But I look
out my window and I don't see any native plants
(24:15):
in my environment. The land that I live on was
once a sugar plantation, so all the native plants that
were here were removed to plants. We've completely altered the
landscape here in terms of the plants that are here.
The only native plants that you can find are often
in very remote areas, often on cliffs that are inaccessible.
(24:38):
And I think this is true all over the world.
True native plant communities are incredibly difficult to find, and
all of them are threatened by climate change, deforestation, exploitation
by humans.
Speaker 2 (24:56):
Tom Arenda pinpoints one of the great ironies of a
place like Dari Gap, it's not suffering from these problems.
It remains one of the most biodiverse, species rich places
in the world. And it's not because it's a protected area.
It's because people are too afraid to go there. In
(25:16):
a twenty twenty study in Scientific Reports, researchers wrote that
armed conflicts can create quote positive effects for biodiversity. Conflicts
have disrupted illegal timber poaching in Nicaragua and harmful farming
practices in Sierra Leone. Meanwhile, some peace agreements have been
shown to hurt the environment. When FARK, the armed guerrilla
(25:39):
group in Colombia, signed a peace agreement with the government
in twenty sixteen, a significant portion of Colombia's land finally
became open to exploration. Now after that truce, the rate
of deforestation increased forty four percent by some accounts. And
that's the cruel reality Tom hart Dyke faced when he
was a prisoner in the Darien Gap. All of those
(26:00):
new orchids, all of that great biodiversity he observed, much
of it new to science, was being unwittingly protected by
a bunch of teenagers with guns. After being released, Tom
and Paul plunged into the jungle, leaving their captors far
behind them. They had gotten everything back, their passports and
(26:23):
bank cards. The militants even gave them directions.
Speaker 1 (26:27):
Their directions were so rubbish. We got completely and utterly
lost in the swamps and spent four days starting to
really acquire trench foot that we ran out of food
and we were just a jungle was killing us and
we were sleeping on floating logs, barely floating. I mean,
we were just soaked for days, and our feet it
(26:47):
was trend trop Our feet were beginning to split and
just began to decompose. I've got on my toes now
and everything's fine, But any more of that and we
would have had serious medical problems.
Speaker 2 (26:59):
That's when Paul realized they would have to go against
every instinct and do what they felt impossible.
Speaker 1 (27:08):
So Paul turned around to me and said, we've got
to go back for directions. We had to go back
for a map. So back up the hill, this is
honestly true. Back up the hill we went. We followed
where we'd been. We'd had a machete still, and we'd
marked the trees with the machete so we could tell
where to go. We went to this radio mass, some
sort of tower that our captors were to be captors
(27:29):
for a few more minutes anyway, reguarding, and you could
see them put their hands on their heads shake that
dropped their guns and no, it's those two idiots from England.
We can't get rid of them. They'd come back for directions.
I mean, it was almost you can't make it up.
So back up the hill we went and explained that
it as our fault we got lost. It was their fault, really,
(27:51):
but we blamed ourselves to not aggravate them. And they said, okay,
you turn right instead of left, you idiots. All right,
so we knew the mistake we'd made, and they gave
us money. They paid us, our captors paid us to go.
In the end, I mean, it was quite extraordinary. They
re released us with better directions, and within forty eight
(28:13):
hours I was back here in England via a speedboat,
private jet, bulletproof cars and the ambassador's residence in the
Colombian capital, Bogatar.
Speaker 2 (28:25):
When they arrived in Bogata, they were greeted by the
British ambassador to Columbia and his wife, who presented them
each with a box of Pherrero Rochet chocolates.
Speaker 1 (28:37):
The ambassador's wife is spoiling as the chocolates were amazing
Me and Paul demolished the chocolates, thanked her very much,
and she turned to us and said, you two are
walking ghosts. Mate. When you're kidnapped, you either die, you're
either ransomed off, or you have some sort of prisoner
exchange of some description. You two have just walked straight
(28:58):
out after ten months in captivity. That will never happen again.
And I've been in this post for years and I've
seen everything, and I can tell you in fifty years
as a civil war, I've never seen that.
Speaker 2 (29:12):
Shortly after Tom decided to dedicate his life to building
the World Garden, the idea that helped keep him going
in the jungle in his own backyard.
Speaker 1 (29:21):
That experience was the embryonic start to it, but the
enthusiasm it's got even stronger because you survived that experience.
It's turned me even more towards the passion for life,
which is mere shown through the world of brilliant plants
and so on. And I think that Colombian experience, as
the word galvanized, it really into even more stronger sense.
(29:45):
I'm meant to do this. I'm meant to talk to
you to broadcast the enthusiasm for plants I have and
to generate interest in that field. It's almost like a mission.
It's turned into all thanks to kid kids that were
just in their teens beguns. I mean, the more you
think about it, the more it's a very unlikely story,
but it's absolutely true.
Speaker 2 (30:09):
It's a silver lining and if anything, a cautionary tale
because our favorite plants aren't just located in some of
the world's most dangerous places. They're also being picked and
sold by some of the world's most dangerous people too.
(30:30):
Coming up. If people are willing to pay high prices
for these things, criminal networks wouln't want to supply that.
Speaker 1 (30:38):
So in this vacuum, institutional vacuum, that's where we believe
that the Mafia ROAs.
Speaker 2 (30:46):
I'm Summer rain Oaks, join us again next time for
Bad Seeds. Bad Seeds is a production of School of
Humans and iHeart Podcasts. I'm Your Host Summer rain Oaks.
Lucas Riley is our writer, Gabby Watts is our producer,
and Amelia Brock is our senior producer. Fact Checking is
(31:07):
by Savannah Hugily and Zoe Farrow. Original music is by
Claire Campbell, sound design and scores by Jesse Niswanger. Development
was by Brian Lavin and Jacob Selzer. Our show art
is by Pam Peacock. Executive producers are Brian Lavin, Elsie Crowley,
Brandon Barr, Virginia Prescott and Jacob Selzer.
School of humans. Just be clear, I'm an absolute idiot,
and so's my friend that was with me. We should
never have gone, and obviously not recommending the experience because
you know you're going to die.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
That's Tom Heartdyke. And Tom Well, he's an orchid lover.
Back in two thousand, his zeal for these precious blooms
even got him into I'd say a little bit of trouble.
I'll let him tell the story.
Speaker 1 (00:33):
Where I met this chap called Paul Winder, also from
England and not a plant man so much, but more
of a mountaineer at heart, and we agreed across this
area called the Darien Gap on the Panamanian Colombian border,
an area that we knew wasn't that safe, but Paul
knew there were wonderful mountains to be discovered, and for me,
I knew it was a honeypot for orchids.
Speaker 2 (00:55):
So the two decided to buddy up and travel through
the gap together.
Speaker 1 (01:00):
Get up beginning of March of the year two thousand
to catch the six hour, bum bruising, potholed field bus
ride down the remainder of the Pan American Highway as
it fizzles out and the little hamlet, very very small
village of Javisa. You get off the bus, don you
rucksacks in your three foot long machettes. We bought a
few days earlier mosquito nets enough food for about two
(01:22):
and a half weeks. We reckoned, which was the time
to cross the Darien Gap according to our Lonely Planet guidebook,
and we followed the map in that guidebook, and we
made fabulous.
Speaker 2 (01:33):
Progress, following paths made by the wild pigs. The two
explorers weaved through the gap with unexpected ease.
Speaker 1 (01:40):
You are in the middle of absolutely nowhere, and the
wild boar and the very few people in the area
has rendered into this clearing full of air plants orchids.
I mean, it was a lovely place and no orchids
really worthy of Granny's name, and once to name it
new species. Walking after my dear granny. That was my
(02:02):
main drive, to see orchids and finding new species for her.
Speaker 2 (02:08):
It was a wonderland of plants. And then suddenly Tom
noticed something out of the corner of his.
Speaker 1 (02:14):
Eye, and we got our rucksacked on our backs and
started to walk through this clearing. When our guides just
stood in front of us and fell to the ground.
It was quite weird as these figures just ran at us.
Three girls really were fifteen sixteen year olds with big
M sixteen's and three chaps, so six in total, running
(02:35):
at us with all their all their machine guns, bandannas
on their heads and combat gear. Our guides just fell
to the floor and offered their hands behind their backs
and they were tied up in Paul just stared these people.
I mean we were in a film set or something,
We're in the TV screen. It was extraordinary and that
amazing feeling of those wonderful orkids. Oh you're screwed, You're
(02:59):
going to in split second, this happened on the hands
and knees. We went rock saxel, ripped off us, tied
up with what looked like garden string behind our backs.
These big M sixteen stuck to our heads. Our guides
dragged off into the woods. Probably one was executed. Even
to this day they completely and aftere vanished basically, and
(03:20):
Na and Paul marched to our feet and dragged off
into the woods for ten months in captivity.
Speaker 2 (03:32):
In this episode, the passion for plants gets dangerous. I'm
Summer rain Oaks from School of Humans and iHeart podcasts.
This is bad Seeds.
Speaker 1 (03:52):
My name is Tom Hartdyke and I'm curator of the
World Garden at Lallingston Castle in Kent in southeast England.
Speaker 2 (03:59):
Tom is a forty six year old horticulturalist, but to
be honest, after interviewing him, it's more apt to describe
him as a plant evangelist. His passion for plant life
pours from him.
Speaker 1 (04:11):
Hyper enthusiastic. I's called the other day.
Speaker 2 (04:14):
His property in Kent, which by the way has been
in the family for twenty generations.
Speaker 1 (04:19):
We moved here in thirteen sixty.
Speaker 2 (04:22):
One, has been converted into a world Garden with more
than seven thousand different types of plants.
Speaker 1 (04:28):
Laid out as a miniature map of the world. That
North and South America are represented, and we've got the
Canary Islands, we've got Africa, Europe, Asia, UK and Ireland
included in't that and Australia one of my favorite areas, Australasia.
And it's totally bonkers, but it's looking brilliant.
Speaker 2 (04:46):
To say the least. Tom is something of a plant addict,
and he's been one for a long time.
Speaker 1 (04:54):
And my passion to plants started at the age of three.
Sun in nineteen eighty when my granny gave me a
packaging carrots eats and a trowel. She was an amazing
character and she gave me my green blood cells and
everything else's horticultural history.
Speaker 2 (05:08):
Tom has traveled all over the world in the pursuit
to see the world's most spectacular plants. He's also, if
it isn't already obvious, an avid collector, but one plant
group has a special place in his heart.
Speaker 1 (05:25):
Orchids. Oh, it's just euphoric. It is spined even now
talking about its spine tinkling. It's Granny's fault all of this.
She had to sing about them. It was more unnative
orchids that really inspired me and granny and I think
they're absolutely majestic, and seeing them in the wild ear
then inspired me to grow some of their cousins in
a greenhouse here as a youngster. And then it was
(05:46):
the inevitable, the itchy feet. What was it like to
go abroad to see these plants in the wild. There's
something about them, and it's also their rarity, and it's
something about seeing them in the wild and some just
growing on the edge of extinction because there're only just
a handful of certain species of work. It's growing on
(06:06):
a rock in a certain specific sight in whether it
might be and that's fascinating, absolutely fascinating.
Speaker 2 (06:19):
In two thousand, when Tom was in his early twenties,
he made plans to visit one of the world's great
orchid hotspots, the Darien Gap, a dense rainforest between Colombia
and Panama. The Gap is widely considered one of the
most dangerous patches of wilderness on the planet. Now forget
(06:39):
the snakes, poisoned dart frogs, and jaguars. For decades, the
dense jungle has been a hideout for drug traffickers, paramilitary forces,
and guerrilla fighters. In the Lonely Planet guide to the region,
the editors provide one simple admonishment to travelers considering a journey.
Don't even think about it. But Tom, he didn't listen.
(07:05):
He had orchid fever. It's the nineteenth century and a
new plant craze is sweeping Britain. It's not tulips or ferns.
This time, the rich are paying explorers top dollar to
pluck orchids from the jungle. Tom Arenda, previously the orchid
(07:26):
collection specialist at the Smithsonian Gardens explains that at the
time there were a lot to choose from.
Speaker 3 (07:33):
There's probably more species of orchid than there are any
other type of plant in newarkids are discovered all the time.
I think that it's approaching about thirty thousand species. The
closest plant family to that number would be the composites,
which is the daisy family.
Speaker 2 (07:52):
Like Tom Hartdike Mirenda has been obsessed with orchids for
a long time. He understands the allure.
Speaker 3 (08:01):
They're so beautiful that we get seduced by them, and
so many of us that get fascinated with orchids end
up addicted to them and having these huge collections. They
are just mind bogglingly diverse, and they kind of have personalities.
For example, orchids are what we call bilaterally symmetrical, So
(08:22):
if you were to take my face and cut it
in half, you could fold it over onto itself and
it'd be a mirror image. Orkids are the same way.
When you're looking at an orkid, it's kind of like
looking at a face. You see something that kind of
looks back at you with a personality.
Speaker 2 (08:41):
Those seductive personalities led dozens of Victorian orchid hunters to
dive into the tropics, to Sierra Leone, to Brazil, to
Ecuador and Madagascar, to the Andes and beyond. It was
a scientific bonanza. They found thousands of species that previously
had been known only to locals.
Speaker 3 (09:02):
People were seeing plants that they never imagined did. It
was very exciting at the time, but it was also
before we really knew a whole lot about orchids in
particular and ecology in general.
Speaker 2 (09:19):
What followed was a botanical smash and grab. The wealthy
of Europe wanted orchids to show off, and competition was brutal.
With thousands of dollars on the line, orchid hunters swiped
every plant they could find and then would burn down
the surrounding forest to prevent competitors from finding new growth.
Speaker 3 (09:42):
They did a lot of dumb things. They would take everything.
If they found a new species, they would collect them
all and ship them all back to the Old World
to be grown. They would often lie about where a
plant was collected so that they could have it as
an exclusive plant for their nursery. A lot of misinformation
(10:06):
was promulgated from that where so people wouldn't know where
to find these plants in the future, and sometimes this
took like thirty forty years to figure out where the
plants were actually from.
Speaker 2 (10:18):
That's if any were left. Orchid hunting stripped the tropical
countryside within decades. Many species disappeared entirely from the wild,
only to be found in the gardens of the rich
and trendy.
Speaker 3 (10:34):
People think that it's a renewable resource, that there's just
thousands and thousands of these plants out in nature, and
it may seem that way, but it's very, very easy
to make a serious dent in a population by overcollecting.
Speaker 2 (10:50):
These plants would soon be called the lost orchids, but
rarity just enhanced the flower's mystique and boosted its asking price.
Orchid hunters kept combing the tropics, ransacking everything along the way.
Decency meant nothing. Susan Orlean in her book The Orchid Thief,
(11:12):
tells the story of one flower hunter in New Guinea
who discovered some orchids blooming from human remains, collected the
plants and sent them to England, still attached to ribs
and shin bones. That kind of behavior prompted one Swiss
botanist in eighteen seventy eight to write, these modern collectors
spare nothing. This is no longer collecting. It is wanton robbery.
(11:36):
Worse yet, few of those stolen plants survived.
Speaker 3 (11:41):
They brought them back to England and they put them
in what they call stove houses. These stove houses were
terrible for those plants. They perished. So entire populations of
plants from Colombia and Brazil and Venezuela and stuff all
died there with very very few survivors. So even though
(12:01):
all of this incredible diversity was being discovered, a lot
of damage was done to the tropical environments that these
things came from, and it can take, you know, hundreds
of years for those populations to recover.
Speaker 2 (12:23):
Eventually, the pillagings spread home to Britain too. Take the
lady slipper orchid siper Pedium calciolis. It bloomed across the
north of England until local hunters wiped it out in
twenty ten. The last remaining wild orchid in the country,
which was one hundred years old, had to be protected
(12:44):
by its own police detail. Even the country's botanical gardens
are extra vigilant with these prized plants, locking many of
the rarest orchids under cages. But during the height of
orchid fever, the flower weren't the only thing in danger.
The hunters were too. Guns, machetes, knives. These were the
(13:11):
orchid hunters go to tools. They trapes the forest, knowing
that at any moment they might have to fend off
wild animals, hostile locals, and other orchid hunters. One young
German hunter named William Arnold bragged that he once turned
down a high paying orchid hunting job because his client
(13:33):
failed to give him a trustworthy pistol. The gun wouldn't
have saved him. Arnold ended up drowning in Venezuela's Orinoco River.
His death was typical orchid hunters. Died of dysentery and malaria.
(13:57):
They fell off cliffs and had their heads shrunken. Many
stepped into the mists of the jungle and simply never returned.
Some were murdered by local rebel groups, others by competing
orchid hunters. Orchid hunting was a job for the few,
the proud, and the very very reckless, but the potential
(14:23):
for striking it rich was two appealing, and the orchid
beef Orlean describes the fate of one cursed orchid hunting
party in the Philippines, writing within a month, one of
them had been eaten by a tiger, another had been
drenched with oil and burned alive, five had vanished into
thin air, and one had managed to stay alive and
(14:45):
walk out of the woods, carrying forty seven thousand Fallinopsis plants.
To pursue the plant was to embrace a curse to
chase a blood diamond laced with petals. Few survived its seduction.
Those who did reaped life changing rewards. Decades later, Tom
(15:06):
hart Dyke heard the same siren call. Minutes before the ambush.
Tom hart Dyke and his hiking buddy Paul had been
making jokes about lollipops. Then their world is turned upside down.
(15:33):
People in full camouflage rush out from the jungle foliage,
and suddenly Tom is staring down the barrel of an
automatic rifle. The armed strangers command that Tom and Paul
come with them. As the young men are ushered through
the jungle, their hands tied and guns jammed into their backs,
they are convinced they are about to die. Then the
(15:57):
group stops its trek and the gorillas ask the hikers
to empty their pockets. The only thing that tumbles out
are a few seeds. Now this is a pretty good
indication that Tom and Paul are harmless. Still, the gun
toting kidnappers keep the two men captive in the forest
(16:20):
for ten long months.
Speaker 1 (16:22):
So we spent from March to Christmas of the year
two thousand with this Colombian gorilla.
Speaker 2 (16:27):
Group, and it was unclear exactly who the gorillas were.
They might have been rebels fighting the Colombian Civil War,
like members of Marxist Leninist group FARK, then a recognized
terrorist organization. All Tom could make out was they were
very young.
Speaker 1 (16:44):
To this day, we don't really know who they were
or what they wanted, at average age of fifteen sixteen
years of age. A third girls, two third boys, I
suppose made up the units, about seven hundred of them
in total, seven hundred different faces he saw during the
whole time.
Speaker 2 (17:03):
Over the months, the duo started to get used to
the feeling of having automatic weapons pointed at them, even
when they had to squat behind a bush or strip
in a creek in private moments. The guys give their
captors nicknames, Will Smith, Lucy M sixteen to name a
few they create a secret code to communicate, dream up
(17:26):
imaginary escapes, and even steal from their hostile hosts.
Speaker 1 (17:31):
We stole food from them. We stole a machete from them.
Paul was an amazing thief, so subtle and so cool
about it.
Speaker 2 (17:38):
One day, one of the gorillas, the one named M sixteen,
asks Tom why he was in the Darien Gap in
the first place. Tom tells them, I'm in love with plants.
Speaker 1 (17:48):
I thought to extend my life as much as possible.
My tactic was to show them who I was, a
gardener from Kent in southeast England and paul a mountaineers.
And that was a tactic we employed because inside, you're
absolutely peeing yourself. I mean, you are going to die,
so your survival strategy kicks in and you have this
faulty fact sort of thing. So on the inside you're like, oh,
(18:11):
we're screwed. On the outside, excuse my language, on the outside,
you're very much like, look at that wonderful butterfly flying,
but oh, thanks for the tarantula. The hair's got stuck
in my throat. But it was good to eat. The
armadillo and the hell the monkeys were absolutely gorgeous, they weren't.
They were awful and they're all protected. But it was
a way of sort of dealing with the situation. And
(18:33):
the captors didn't know what to do with this. I mean,
if you showed pleasantries, they couldn't deal with it. You
show a negativity and they feed off it. It's quite weird.
But if you did say that, they'd get, oh, i've
got a sore throw I missed my granny, and they
loved that. They fed off that and got very aggressive.
It's quite bizarre human nature, certain human nature. So we
(18:54):
had to just show that enthusiasm all the time and
that they didn't know what to do with us.
Speaker 2 (19:00):
At first, the militants, like M sixteen, thought Tom was
bluffing about all this plant stuff. They were convinced the
men were trafficking drugs to North America or maybe they
were Cia. But as time wore on, their minds began
to change. Because as the duo followed the gorillas deeper
into the jungle, Tom was getting distracted on sidiums pleurithallus,
(19:25):
lumbo glossoms.
Speaker 1 (19:26):
The orchids were fantastic. After we were kidnapped, it took
us right up to these isolated areas in Panama in particular,
and I mean there were orchids just dripping from the trees.
There were literally hundreds worthy of Granny's name. I mean,
you could name it after all the dogs and cats,
all the fish in the lake, all my friends I
haven't known over the years, people in the pub down
the road. Everyone could have had a new species of
(19:48):
orchids and named after them. Absolutely, it was astonishing. I'm
not an expert in orchids, but even I knew there
weren't just new species that I was coming across. There
were new genera. We saw quite literally hundreds of varieties,
and my guess was that some were highly endemic to
this area, the darry And Gap.
Speaker 2 (20:09):
Thinking that as time was up, Tom did something that
technically is illegal. He began to pluck the orchids.
Speaker 1 (20:16):
During captivity, going from camp to camp with the orchids.
I thought, there's no harm in that. It's aware of me,
keeping my sanity.
Speaker 2 (20:23):
Really, he later wrote in his book The Cloud Garden,
I was taking orchids from everywhere, from trees and from rocks.
I carried them behind my ears and in my hair
to get them to the camp. Eventually, Tom's orchid fever
takes over. He had to explore this irresistible array of flora,
(20:46):
so he asked the gorillas to come with him.
Speaker 1 (20:49):
I asked if we could go on these armed or
kid patrols to our captors that untied as by them
and were reasonably nice. They wanted to kill you, that
talked to you and kill you, but they were nice
to a decree, so they allowed us to gun these
old orchid controls, bring back orchist to the cap and
I started to make gardens. I started to make these
orchid gardens, Bromeliad gardens. Was quite bonkers, and it was
(21:12):
aware of me, completely distracting myself from from the thought
of execution. The scariest time was three months into our captivity,
during the sixteenth of the year two thousand, when they said,
you've got five hours mate, before before we blow your
heads off, and horribly talk to you beforehand. Then blow
your heads off. Oh okay, And as he turned his back,
(21:35):
he was just thirteen in this chat with a gun
that was with rocket launcher attachment, about four foot taller
than in.
Speaker 2 (21:43):
I mean, that's terrifying. How do you find solace when
you're in captivity? You got endless time to kill and
are a constant threat of being killed. But Tom was
finding ways to both kerbis fears and fill the hours
gardening and planning, and.
Speaker 1 (22:01):
Opened up my diary and started scribbling. I started to
draw a mini map of what would turn into the
world garden. Were just a way of distracting myself, ware
of me trying to think of Granny and to try
and show them who I was a gardener.
Speaker 2 (22:17):
Turns out the kid never returned to finish them off,
and as time went on, Tom started thinking more and
more about this world garden idea what.
Speaker 1 (22:27):
Turned out to be the next six months in captivity
until Christmas, drawing and fantasizing about this garden that I
could do in the Tuaca Old area back home. It
literally saved my life, just distracting myself from these murderous thoughts.
Speaker 2 (22:43):
Far from home and far from his dream garden, Tom
kept tending to his orchid plot and his captor's encampment
until one day it was all gone.
Speaker 1 (22:53):
When they really became very murderous. They burned all the orchids,
so I never had any orchids to bring back. Of course, Leek,
I can't bring them any orchids back anyway, but they
burned them, They stamped on them all in the end,
and never brought one back.
Speaker 2 (23:07):
Tom the gardener was now without a garden. But then
around Christmas time, after months in the jungle, one of
the gorillas turned to Tom and Paul and began speaking
in Spanish.
Speaker 1 (23:24):
And my Spanish was not brilliant, so it was very
much trying to get everything, trying to desperately understand some
us what they were saying, you know where we're gonna
die or not, And they just turned around to Just
and said, Happy Christmas. Get lost. If you come back,
will horribly kill you. And if you bring me friends back,
we'll kill them as well.
Speaker 3 (23:54):
Not everyone is conscious of how what they do affects
the natural world and how much we've displaced. The house
that I live in is in a very beautiful neighborhood.
We've got wild open spaces and pastures. But I look
out my window and I don't see any native plants
(24:15):
in my environment. The land that I live on was
once a sugar plantation, so all the native plants that
were here were removed to plants. We've completely altered the
landscape here in terms of the plants that are here.
The only native plants that you can find are often
in very remote areas, often on cliffs that are inaccessible.
(24:38):
And I think this is true all over the world.
True native plant communities are incredibly difficult to find, and
all of them are threatened by climate change, deforestation, exploitation
by humans.
Speaker 2 (24:56):
Tom Arenda pinpoints one of the great ironies of a
place like Dari Gap, it's not suffering from these problems.
It remains one of the most biodiverse, species rich places
in the world. And it's not because it's a protected area.
It's because people are too afraid to go there. In
(25:16):
a twenty twenty study in Scientific Reports, researchers wrote that
armed conflicts can create quote positive effects for biodiversity. Conflicts
have disrupted illegal timber poaching in Nicaragua and harmful farming
practices in Sierra Leone. Meanwhile, some peace agreements have been
shown to hurt the environment. When FARK, the armed guerrilla
(25:39):
group in Colombia, signed a peace agreement with the government
in twenty sixteen, a significant portion of Colombia's land finally
became open to exploration. Now after that truce, the rate
of deforestation increased forty four percent by some accounts. And
that's the cruel reality Tom hart Dyke faced when he
was a prisoner in the Darien Gap. All of those
(26:00):
new orchids, all of that great biodiversity he observed, much
of it new to science, was being unwittingly protected by
a bunch of teenagers with guns. After being released, Tom
and Paul plunged into the jungle, leaving their captors far
behind them. They had gotten everything back, their passports and
(26:23):
bank cards. The militants even gave them directions.
Speaker 1 (26:27):
Their directions were so rubbish. We got completely and utterly
lost in the swamps and spent four days starting to
really acquire trench foot that we ran out of food
and we were just a jungle was killing us and
we were sleeping on floating logs, barely floating. I mean,
we were just soaked for days, and our feet it
(26:47):
was trend trop Our feet were beginning to split and
just began to decompose. I've got on my toes now
and everything's fine, But any more of that and we
would have had serious medical problems.
Speaker 2 (26:59):
That's when Paul realized they would have to go against
every instinct and do what they felt impossible.
Speaker 1 (27:08):
So Paul turned around to me and said, we've got
to go back for directions. We had to go back
for a map. So back up the hill, this is
honestly true. Back up the hill we went. We followed
where we'd been. We'd had a machete still, and we'd
marked the trees with the machete so we could tell
where to go. We went to this radio mass, some
sort of tower that our captors were to be captors
(27:29):
for a few more minutes anyway, reguarding, and you could
see them put their hands on their heads shake that
dropped their guns and no, it's those two idiots from England.
We can't get rid of them. They'd come back for directions.
I mean, it was almost you can't make it up.
So back up the hill we went and explained that
it as our fault we got lost. It was their fault, really,
(27:51):
but we blamed ourselves to not aggravate them. And they said, okay,
you turn right instead of left, you idiots. All right,
so we knew the mistake we'd made, and they gave
us money. They paid us, our captors paid us to go.
In the end, I mean, it was quite extraordinary. They
re released us with better directions, and within forty eight
(28:13):
hours I was back here in England via a speedboat,
private jet, bulletproof cars and the ambassador's residence in the
Colombian capital, Bogatar.
Speaker 2 (28:25):
When they arrived in Bogata, they were greeted by the
British ambassador to Columbia and his wife, who presented them
each with a box of Pherrero Rochet chocolates.
Speaker 1 (28:37):
The ambassador's wife is spoiling as the chocolates were amazing
Me and Paul demolished the chocolates, thanked her very much,
and she turned to us and said, you two are
walking ghosts. Mate. When you're kidnapped, you either die, you're
either ransomed off, or you have some sort of prisoner
exchange of some description. You two have just walked straight
(28:58):
out after ten months in captivity. That will never happen again.
And I've been in this post for years and I've
seen everything, and I can tell you in fifty years
as a civil war, I've never seen that.
Speaker 2 (29:12):
Shortly after Tom decided to dedicate his life to building
the World Garden, the idea that helped keep him going
in the jungle in his own backyard.
Speaker 1 (29:21):
That experience was the embryonic start to it, but the
enthusiasm it's got even stronger because you survived that experience.
It's turned me even more towards the passion for life,
which is mere shown through the world of brilliant plants
and so on. And I think that Colombian experience, as
the word galvanized, it really into even more stronger sense.
(29:45):
I'm meant to do this. I'm meant to talk to
you to broadcast the enthusiasm for plants I have and
to generate interest in that field. It's almost like a mission.
It's turned into all thanks to kid kids that were
just in their teens beguns. I mean, the more you
think about it, the more it's a very unlikely story,
but it's absolutely true.
Speaker 2 (30:09):
It's a silver lining and if anything, a cautionary tale
because our favorite plants aren't just located in some of
the world's most dangerous places. They're also being picked and
sold by some of the world's most dangerous people too.
(30:30):
Coming up. If people are willing to pay high prices
for these things, criminal networks wouln't want to supply that.
Speaker 1 (30:38):
So in this vacuum, institutional vacuum, that's where we believe
that the Mafia ROAs.
Speaker 2 (30:46):
I'm Summer rain Oaks, join us again next time for
Bad Seeds. Bad Seeds is a production of School of
Humans and iHeart Podcasts. I'm Your Host Summer rain Oaks.
Lucas Riley is our writer, Gabby Watts is our producer,
and Amelia Brock is our senior producer. Fact Checking is
(31:07):
by Savannah Hugily and Zoe Farrow. Original music is by
Claire Campbell, sound design and scores by Jesse Niswanger. Development
was by Brian Lavin and Jacob Selzer. Our show art
is by Pam Peacock. Executive producers are Brian Lavin, Elsie Crowley,
Brandon Barr, Virginia Prescott and Jacob Selzer.
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