If you see someone wielding a chainsaw on the trunk of a large tree in the heart of Winter Park, there’s a good chance that David Roark is already en route, riding a bicycle and armed with a putty knife.
But no, the ever-genial Roark is not going to brandish his putty knife as a weapon to prevent a flagrant act of arboricide. There are times, he fully realizes, that once-majestic trees reach the end of their lives and simply must be taken down.
In fact, it’s not the ailing tree but those clinging clusters of rare wild orchids attached to its gnarly branches upon which he’ll employ his putty knife—and his keen eye—to try and rescue. (Anyway, to adapt an old adage, everyone knows that you don’t bring a putty knife to a chainsaw fight.)
For the last three years, Roark has been on a mission to protect one of the city’s smallest and most overlooked native treasures: orchids—albeit tiny ones, quite unlike the hybridized showstoppers that are associated with Theodore Mead, namesake of Mead Botanical Garden.
The clusters of tiny flowers, which are native to Florida and sprout high in the city’s aging tree canopy, can be found in the crooks of camphor, live oak, cedar and cypress trees. You may not have noticed them because usually they’re 25 to 30 feet above the ground.
However, if you know where to look, you’ll discover an enchanted ecosystem that in some cases is older than the city itself. Therefore it should be preserved, says Roark, who adds with a chuckle: “Nowadays, the tree guys see me coming and say, ‘The orchid guy is here.’”
Blooming History
A native of Winter Park, Roark, 68, remembers as a youngster riding his Schwinn Sting-Ray along Genius Drive, then a dirt road surrounded by groves, and traversing the brick-paved streets of such nearby historic neighborhoods as Comstock Park, College Quarter and Osceola Shores.
Bonita Drive—located within Comstock Park—remains notable for its giant camphor trees with outward-growing branches that nearly reach the ground. “That street was fully canopied,” he recalls. “Other streets were also a fairyland. You knew, even as a kid, that these places were special.”
Indeed, they’re still special, in large part because they encompass some of the city’s most historically significant homes. Bonita, for example, is the address of the rambling wood-shingled estate dubbed Eastbank (now known as the Comstock-Harris House), the oldest home in Winter Park. In fact, Bonita served as its private driveway until the 1920s.
But the home hasn’t always looked so fancy. The original (and far less grand) dwelling was a vernacular farmhouse built in 1871 by Wilson Phelps, an unheralded local pioneer whose enthusiasm for the settlement, then called Osceola, attracted developers Oliver Chapman and Loring Chase, generally regarded as the progenitors of Winter Park.
The version of Eastbank that we see today emerged after the property was bought in 1883 by a wealthy Chicago grain merchant named William Comstock, a seasonal resident who, surprisingly, chose not to demolish the farmhouse and instead had his architects design a Queen Anne-style mansion around the rustic structure. Comstock also installed the lush camphor arborway that now harbors those ubiquitous orchids.
On Genius Drive sits “Wind Song,” a Mediterranean-style showplace built in 1937 for Richard Genius, a physician whose late wife, Elizabeth Morse Genius, was the only daughter of industrialist and city benefactor Charles Hosmer Morse. It was Morse who, in 1920, bought the 150-acre tract and planted an orange grove there.
The Geniuses had a daughter, Jeannette Morse Genius, who married Hugh F. McKean, then an art professor at Rollins College, in 1945. Hugh and Jeannette, enchanted by peacock pulchritude during a vacation to Asia in 1950, ordered a pair of the exotic birds for themselves and kept them in the yard of Osceola Lodge, their home on Interlachen Avenue that had also previously been occupied by Morse.
But because the stunning but shriek-prone show birds disturbed the peace among neighbors, the McKeans relocated them to the more remote property surrounding Wind Song, which Jeannette inherited when her father died in 1941.The following year, the McKeans also decamped to “Casa Genius” (the estate’s other name) and were delighted to see the peacock population eventually grow to at least 100.
Descendants of these haughty hollerers still preen around present-day Windsong, a luxury subdivision built in the 1990s that abuts the 48-acre Genius Preserve (sometimes called the Genius Reserve). That perpetually protected enclave is what remains of the original wooded expanse, where Hugh and Jeannette had welcomed the public to view the feathered, free-roaming flocks. (The property was closed in 1987, after incidents of vandalism increased.)
Wind Song (the home) also stands in the preserve, unoccupied for decades but meticulously maintained. This hidden paradise exists thanks to the Elizabeth Morse Genius Foundation, begun in memory of her mother by Jeannette, who died in 1989. (Hugh died in 1995.) The preserve is today managed as an ecological laboratory by the Rollins College Department of Environmental Studies.
These properties and their magical backstories are broadly familiar to most longtime Winter Parkers. But the unexpected magic that Roark discovered in these neighborhoods required him to look upward. And it wasn’t until decades later that he did exactly that—and saw, hiding in plain sight among the tree branches, tiny twinkling flowers.
“I lived in Winter Park, but I never really got to enjoy it,” says Roark. “After I retired, I could take these three-hour walks through places that I hadn’t been in for 30 years. I slowed down. Walking under those trees my entire life, I had never seen the orchids.”
Budding Botanist
Roark’s career often kept him on the road as senior manager of Global Advertising Photography for Yellow Shoes Creative Group at The Walt Disney Company. His love for cameras began as a teenager in the early 1970s, when as a high schooler he worked as a set-builder for noted studio photographer Bill Parrish in Orlando.
Traditional academics, admits Roark, never held much appeal for him. “School was never my thing,” he notes. “I’d rather learn from the world. In high school, I spent most of my time waiting for the bell to ring so I could go surfing.” After graduation he studied commercial photography at Daytona Beach Community College (now Daytona State College).
While in college, Roark met his future wife, Katie Eagle, who landed a photography job at Sea World while he worked at Circus World before migrating to Disney in 1982. The Disney job took him around the world—to every continent that he wanted to visit, except Australia and New Zealand. Then, after 41 years (“and 30 days,” he adds), it was time to call it a career.
Neither David nor Katie were unfamiliar with orchids; their home, which they had bought in 1985, featured a huge magnolia tree in the front yard from which neighbors hung their storebought orchids because the low-hanging branches were easily accessible.
The Roarks, who nurtured the flowers for their friends, eventually became the neighborhood’s de facto botanists. That’s why their backyard has become a well-maintained collection of orchids, graceful bonsai and pollinators such as giant salvia, sweet almond, marigolds and milkweed for the bees and butterflies.
But orchids would come to play an even more significant role in his life after Roark, also a longtime avid cyclist and Masters swimmer, began to take those leisurely walks along the same streets he had traversed on his bike as a boy. One day, along Bonita, he passed a dead camphor tree and spotted some tiny flowers that he didn’t recognize affixed to its branches.
“I took a picture and used my plant identifier app and found it was a native orchid,” says Roark. “I saved 20 plants from that tree.” It was that first rescue, he adds, that compelled him to view his walks as being about much more than relaxation and exercise.
The species in question, it turned out, had been discovered around 1846 near Tampa Bay, most likely by military doctors whose names are lost to history. Samples were sent to New York botanist John Torrey, widely considered a founding father of systematic botany in North America.
Torrey, in turn, forwarded the samples to English botanist John Lindley, then the world’s foremost expert on orchidology, for his study and classification. Lindley described and documented the flower in 1847 under the name Epidendrum (a species of orchid) tampense. Today, it’s called the Tampa Butterfly Orchid or the Florida Butterfly Orchid.
Known for its tiny, fragrant, butterfly-like blooms with green and brown petals and white lips with purple markings, the unassuming epiphyte—whose seeds drift through the air in enormous numbers and thrive on organic matter that accumulates on trees—is all but invisible until it bursts into bloom for just a few weeks each June.
“You can smell them,” says Roark. “It’s like cotton candy.” He soon began to notice the subtle difference among the orchid clusters in different neighborhoods—variation in colors, petal shapes and blooms that hint at a diverse local gene pool. He adds: “The seed pod is like a puff of smoke with millions of tiny spores.”
As Winter Park’s historic tree canopy ages and redevelopment accelerates, these unusual orchids face a threat as trees increasingly disappear. “There’s so much lot clearing,” says Roark. “The tree workers just don’t know what they’re seeing or how to save it.” Now, though, the fragrant flowers have a champion.
When neighbors and friends hear a chipper or chainsaw, they often call Roark, who patiently uses his handy putty knife to carefully remove orchids before toppled trees are hauled away. Sometimes he digs through debris piles. Sometimes he arrives just in time.
Roark also has become an informal educator, sharing his first-hand knowledge with tree crews, homeowners and even landscape architects. One new-home project, he says, was actually altered by a benevolent architect after the amateur orchidologist pointed out the flowers thriving high in a tree that was slated for removal.
But then what? Well, the Roarks have created a “recovery room” for rescued plants on their property. Over time, they learned to mount orchids on bark salvaged from local trees and re-create the conditions that they need: wind, filtered sunlight and long periods without watering. “They don’t want to be babied,” he says. “But you can’t just pull them from their environment.”
Spark of Genius
Roark’s efforts gained momentum last year when he met Doug Woodman, executive vice president of the Elizabeth Morse Genius and Charles Hosmer Morse foundations. While walking near the foundation’s sprawling Charles H. Morse Park on Interlachen Avenue—across from Osceola Lodge—the “orchid guy” noticed flowers growing in trees that had suffered major canopy loss, thereby allowing too much sunlight to hit the blooms.
Further, a crew was preparing to remove the damaged trees, orchids and all. Roark stepped in and, politely as always, explained the situation to the thankfully receptive crew chief, who postponed work and connected Roark with Woodman, whose responsibilities include managing the foundation’s properties.
The pair identified orchids elsewhere in the park and developed plans to relocate the vulnerable plants to a healthier location within the foundation’s nearby preserve, which occupies a peninsula nestled between Lake Virginia, Lake Mizell and Lake Berry.
Says Woodman: “I wasn’t sure what I was going to see when he first called. But once he pointed them out, I was amazed how many there were.” Now Roark, thanks to Woodman, has a permanent place to re-home the salvaged flowers, which mostly come from neighborhoods in what he calls “The Valley of Lake Osceola.”
The quirky preserve, which in many ways epitomizes Old Florida, is an ideal place for such an effort. In addition to Wind Song, the property encompasses the impeccably restored Ward House, a two-story, wood-frame cracker cottage built in 1886 that once belonged to Harold A. “Harley” Ward, who managed the local business interests of none other than Charles Hosmer Morse.
Next to the Ward House is an equally pristine vintage citrus packing plant that remains unused despite being flanked by the largest remaining commercial orange grove within the city limits of Winter Park. Peacocks, of course, roam ostentatiously around centuries-old live oaks heavily draped in Spanish moss. You can hear them if you don’t see them.
This is without question an other-worldly place—a secluded time capsule where one might expect to encounter the ghost of Rod Serling standing alongside the iron gates to introduce a very special episode of The Twilight Zone. What better place to preserve furtive flora? After all, notes Roark, each plant rescued also preserves a piece of Winter Park’s natural history.
But you don’t have to explore the preserve to see these wind-borne little wonders, which were carried here generations ago by wind currents and tropical storms up from South Florida and the Caribbean. In addition to the older neighborhoods mentioned in this story, they can be found anywhere in the city where there are mature trees. Roark’s advice: “Just look up.”