Hothouse Flower and the Nine Plants of Desire: A Novel

Eat, Pray, Love meets The Orchid Thief in this rollicking debut novel about plant magic, spiritual discovery, and romantic fever in the jungles of Mexico.

Shortly after her divorce, advertising executive Lila Nova purchases her first plant. It’s a bird-of-paradise, and the seller is David Exley, a rugged “country-sexual” who seems to promise a paradise of his own making. Lila is immediately obsessed—with plants and with the man who sells them—but when David introduces her to the myth of the nine plants of desire, and when she meets a man named Armand who claims to own the nine plants, her obsession reaches unexpected heights: if she can possess all nine plants, the legend goes, her wildest dreams will be fulfilled.
But Lila is too trusting, and as a result she is soon off on an adventure she never meant to take: in the Yucatán, alone, hefting a backpack full of travel guides and expensive shampoo, and learning more than she ever wanted to know about the rain forest—and about herself.

Plant mythology, shamans and charlatans, mysterious spirit animals, orchid obsessives, scorpions,
poisonous snakes, and handsome Huichols . . . they’re all here in this tale of mystery, adventure, and
heat—in every sense of the word.

Bird-of-Paradise
(Strelitzia reginae)

Native of South Africa, member of the banana family, 
prized for its tall, highly colored structures. 
This plant is not for the easily disappointed, impatient, or bossy, 
as it can take seven years to produce a single bloom. 
Perfect for the person who gives and gives 
without getting anything in return.

You know who you are. I inadvertently became interested in tropical plants because that’s what the man at the Union Square Green Market sold me.

I used to believe that sentence, but now I know better.

Now I know that it was meant to be.

Here’s how it happened.

I had just moved to Fourteenth Street and Union Square, into a small, newly renovated studio with absolutely no character. It was a square-shaped box with parquet floors, no molding, no details, white paint, and low ceilings. It was exactly the kind of apartment I wanted. Its newness meant that there were no memories trapped in the walls or the floorboards. No arguments or harrowing scenes of unrequited love staring at me from the bathroom mirror. It was brand-new. Just like I wanted my life to be.

I thought a bit of foliage might spruce the place up, no pun intended, and add some much-needed color, so I walked across the street to the Union Square Green Market to make my purchase.

The man at the plant stand was a throwback. He had streaky blond hair and a dirt-colored tan that came from being outside all the time. In his worn-out flannel shirt and beat-up Timberlands—worn for work, not fashion—he stood out in stark contrast to the manicured metro-sexuals perusing the market, wicker baskets in one hand, Gucci sunglasses in the other. This man was different. He was a rugged country-sexual.

He asked me to describe my apartment not in terms of the square footage or the make of the stove and the fridge, but by the amount of light, temperature, and humidity. I told him that I had floor-to-ceiling windows, which was mostly true, although they were more ceiling-to-heating-unit than ceiling-to-floor. I told him that I had an unobstructed south-facing view, hard to find in New York City, and that as long as the sun was shining it was hot and sunny all day long, even in the winter.

I hadn’t lived in my apartment through a winter, so I’m not sure why I said that, but I guess it sounded good to me, and also to him, since he bent down amongst his plants, head covered with purple flowers, butt in the air, and emerged with a big smile and a two-foot-high bunch of leaves.

I was disappointed.

“What is it?”

“A bird-of-paradise,” he said, holding it up toward the sky and twirling the pot around with his fingertips.

“A tropical plant?” I asked, zipping my coat against the late-March wind and picturing its imminent death.

“Hawaiian, to be exact. Strelitzia reginae. A member of the banana family. She needs lots of sunlight, not too direct, and let the soil dry out between waterings. She’s tough to raise, and she won’t flower for five or six or maybe seven years, depending on the weather. And the love,” he added with a wink.

I unzipped my jacket.

Six or seven years? My marriage didn’t last that long. Do you have anything that flowers sooner, like in a week or two?”

“This is the plant for you,” he said. “She’s a beauty.”

“How much?”

“Thirty dollars, and I’ll throw in a brochure on rare tropicals so you know how to care for her.”

“Three zero I could go to the deli on the corner and get a dozen roses for ten dollars that have great big sweet-smelling flowers on them right now.” “You could, but they’d be dead in a week. You’d have to buy new ones every Saturday. If you do the math, I’m a bargain. And besides, this bird is tropical. Think balmy ocean breezes, swaying palm trees, cabana boys, and piña coladas on white sand beaches near warm light-blue water.”

I don’t know whether it was the piña coladas, the cabana boys, or the sky blue of his eyes, but as a person who worked in advertising, I had to respect a good sales pitch. I paid him, and he handed me the plant, the brochure on rare tropicals, and his card, which said “David Exley, Plant Man.”

“Sounds like a superhero,” I said.

“Well, I do have a little something special with the flora and fauna, if you know what I mean.” I didn’t, but I nodded anyway.

“Come back if her leaves start turning yellow around the edges. I’m here every Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday from six in the morning till ten at night.”

“They better not,” I said over my shoulder. “For thirty dollars they better stay bright freakin’ green.”

I walked through the market with my bird-of-paradise held out in front of me like an offering. It felt good to be carrying around a piece of the earth. I thought it made me look like one of those women who cooked satisfying meals on a nightly basis for their Steiner School children while wearing Birkenstocks and reading from the Cabala, instead of the single, childless, plantless, divorced thirty-two-year-old woman that I was.

Back in my apartment, I set the bird-of-paradise down on the window ledge. The base of the pot was too wide, and it teetered. I caught my thirty-dollar tropical right before it crashed to the floor. Not five minutes with me and its life was already in danger. No surprises there. The bird-of-paradise was the first living thing I shared space with since my divorce. No pets, no plants, no people, no problems had been my motto for the past nine months.

I met my ex-husband at work. He was cute and smart and successful and he was a huge mistake. He was a man who drank like a fish and wanted lots of babies. I was a woman who didn’t want lots of babies and drank like a human being. I know that most marriages are complex and multilayered, but ours was not. Our four-year marriage went something like this:

Year one—“I love you, Lila.”
Year two—“I love you, Lila.”
Year three—“I love you, Lila.”
Year four—“I’m leaving you, Lila, for the producer at the advertising agency.”

The producer at the advertising agency, aka the woman who brought him coffee and made his plane reservations. What a cliché. At the time I wondered how something that sounded so much like a made-for-TV movie could hurt so bad.

But in truth it wasn’t the drinking or the producer. The problem with our marriage was genetic.

My husband came from a big Irish Catholic family where everyone got married and had kids unless they were gay or terminally ill. I came from a family where no one ever got married unless they had kids first, and usually by accident.

My parents, whom I love madly, divorced when I was young. Post divorce, they both dated furiously, like teenagers, without ever remarrying. My sister and brother, both older, had children but no spouses.

A lot of people get married to keep with tradition. I was a rebel. I married to break with it.

The strange thing was, against all odds, I loved being married. I adored the little rituals. The cute nicknames. “Honeybear” for him. “Wild Rose” for me. I loved shopping at Whole Foods, cooking beef stews and chicken soups in huge pots with lots of vegetables. I loved washing the dishes while listening to Curtis Mayfield. I liked washing, drying, and folding the clothes. For Christ’s sake, I even loved the vacuuming. I think it’s fair to say that during the years of my marriage I became the single most boring person in the entire world, and I totally loved it.

Turned out, my ex, who by all external appearances and family history was the solid, marrying kind, absolutely hated it. He was a space freak. He grew up in a tiny house with lots of siblings, and he couldn’t stand the proximity to another person. He kept dragging me around to buy bigger beds and move into larger spaces. In the end, we were sleeping on a mattress so wide we could lie spread-eagle and our fingertips ?wouldn’t touch, and we were living in a loft the size of an airplane hangar.

Just to make sure I wasn’t crazy, I took a survey on the bed. My friend Oliver, who was a well-known interior designer, said it was the largest piece of furniture he’d ever seen in a Manhattan apartment. My friend Lisa said it made her feel tiny, like a baby who’d crawled into her parents’ bed. My mother offered to have special sheets made for it. And my co-worker and good friend Kodiak Starr, who was a surfer, said that with its blue-green comforter it reminded him of the ocean. It was official. My bed was as big as the Atlantic. I was sleeping in New York, and my husband was all the way on the other side of the mattress, in London.

My big Honeybear, my rock, turned out to be a piece of pumice stone. Flaky and crumbly under pressure, and unable to talk about or even know what he was feeling. In our giant apartment with the giant bed, he moved farther and farther away, until one day he simply never came home at all. No kidding. Just like that.

Turned out my real rock was my co-worker Kodiak Starr. Kody was a bit of a philosopher/crunchy surfer for someone with such a glamorous name, and he was more beautiful than most of the women I knew. He used annoying words like “cool” and “dude,” and he was into things like transcendental meditation and lucid dreaming. He would probably be considered New Age if he hadn’t been born in 1984, eight years after me. Because we shared an office, Kody did most of the day-to-day heavy...