The Orchid Keeper

By Jim Dodson

The wonderful thing about orchids is this: you never quite get to the end of them,” Jack Webster says with a paternal smile while leading a visitor on a tour of a greenhouse attached to his home in Weymouth Heights.

This green house and two adjacent ones are where Webster, one of the top orchid growers in eastern America, keeps more than 1400 orchids under glass and in a state of nearly constant blooming profusion. At this moment in late May, the earthy-sweet-smelling room is illuminated by a work table crowded with iridescent Cattleyas and Laelia purpurata, spangles of spectacular lavender and deep magenta flowers that appear delicate and fragile — but are, in fact, among the most resilient flowering plants on earth.

“The variety is endless,” allows the soft-spoken retired advertising executive, pausing to show off Maxillaria Tenuifolia, a plant with small buttery blooms that give off the faint smell of coconut. “I collected this one in a swamp in Belize,” Webster explains simply. “It was just hanging on a tree, waiting for me to come along.”

He points out that there are more than 25,000 natural orchids in the world, plus over 160,000 different hybrids. “Without question, “ he says, “orchids are the most prolific plants on earth, but only about 1,000 varieties are sold to the public and appear at exhibitions. “

Webster knows about orchid exhibitions. Near the crowded shelves of horticultural books that fill his delightfully cluttered greenhouse office, a facing wall stands covered with ribbons from the various regional and national orchid organizations he belongs to, including eight different orchid organizations in the Tar Heel State alone, most of which he helped establish or served as president at one time or another.

A cardboard box at the edge of his desk sits brimming with blue, red and yellow ribbons, piled two feet deep and spilling out onto the floor — just some of the 500 individual awards Jack Webster has collected at State Fairs and orchid exhibitions over a long and illustrious career with the mythic plants.

On the wall above his desk hang half a dozen framed awards of merit from the American Orchid Society, an honor that granted the winner the privilege of officially naming his award winners, which number more than twenty. He named them for his wife, Jean Webster.

“Strangely enough,” Jack says as the tour proceeds, “just four or five years ago, I could have walked through the average orchid show and told you the name and something interesting about each orchid, where it came from and its growing characteristics, and so forth. But I’m afraid times are rapidly changing. When I started in orchids forty years ago, they were scarce, expensive and nobody knew much about them. That circumstance has completely changed. Now you have orchids flooding the market from the Orient and other places, available at Home Depot and Lowe’s and the local supermarkets for less than $10, producing some very unexpected situations.”

Not long ago, Webster received a phone call from a gardener in Pinehurst who’d found what she believed to be an exotic orchid growing wild — of all places — in a drainage ditch near her home. Jack agreed to come have a look.

“It was a lovely Phalaenopsis. The peculiar thing is that one hundred years ago, when the English were sending armed expeditions to South America and the Pacific to bring back orchids, that little orchid growing over in the ditch in Pinehurst — clearly pitched into the garbage after its blooms had faded by someone who didn’t feel it had much value to keep and nurture — would have cost the owner a fortune to own, probably at least one thousand pounds sterling.

“Now orchids are getting so commonplace and economical, a once extremely rare plant is simply tossed out with the trash.”

Webster pauses and shakes his head wonderingly at such a thought, as if he simply can’t imagine such a fate.

Whatever else is true, there is nothing remotely common about Jack Webster’s extraordinary love affair with perhaps the most beguiling plants on earth.

He was born and grew up in Argentina, the son of a Scottish-born Lloyd’s of London auditor whose wife passed along her gardening interests to her son. After college and military service in Buenos Aires, Jack went to work as an auditor for the Ford Motor Company’s Argentina office. A short time later, he switched careers and signed on for legendary J. Walter Thompson, the largest ad firm in the world.

The company had regional offices all over South America and over the next two decades, during which Webster met his wife Jean in Chile and began a family of his own, Jack rose through the ranks managing and streamlining regional Thompson offices in Chile, Ecuador, Peru, Venezuela, Bolivia and Paraguay. At age 50, he was named to the board of directors and made executive vice president for the famous agency with 120 branches around the globe.

It was during his time running the office in Paraguay in 1966, however, that orchid fever struck.

“I would typically spend the week working with clients and have my weekends at a hotel. One of my duties was to drive to a small town called Iguazu near the Brazilian border that was famous for its waterfalls. The road out there was perhaps 100 miles in distance – and it was bordered by millions of wild orchids, an incredible sight. “

Orchids, which grow from deserts to the Artic Circle, prefer temperate climates and cool, mid-mountain and rain-cloud forests rather than steamy tropical jungles (as once mistakenly assumed by early collectors from Europe). Most can be found at the tops of trees at elevations between 3,000 and 7,000 feet, where rainfall averages 100 inches or more. The neotropical South American nation of Columbia, for example, is believed to be home to ten percent of the world’s orchids, more than 3,000 different species.

“I began collecting these incredible wild orchids and bringing them back with me to my hotel, where I would keep them in pots on my hotel room floor. I remember how anxious the manager was, worried that the rugs would be ruined. But he needn’t have worried all that much,” Webster adds wryly. “Only I was ruined by them.”

Back home in Buenos Aires, Jack paid a call on a local German grower who specialized in cultivating his own orchids. By that point, Jack was already planning to build his first greenhouse.

“During one of our first visits with the man,” Jean picks up the tale of orchid mania, “he pulled me aside and confidentially advised me, ‘Mrs. Webster, please don’t let your husband get into growing orchids, because it’s a sickness and he’ll never stop.”

“Jean laughed at that,” says Jack. “That was the last time she laughed, I’m afraid.”

“He didn’t listen,” she agrees. “Orchids became Jack’s passion.”

Jack put up twin 40x20-foot greenhouses and filled them with orchids he purchased from other growers or collected during extensive field trips that took him all over South America and increasingly a wider world, including more than 15 collecting forays to Guatemala alone. In time, he came to know every significant orchid grower in South America.

pon early retirement 27 years ago, the Websters considered making a new home in Asheville or Charlottesville before settling on Southern Pines. They purchased a handsome bungalow-style Aymar Embury-designed house at the corner of South Valley and Oldfield and shipped “seventeen tons of luggage, three dogs, and a lot of orchids to the garden spot of North Carolina.”

The grounds of their new home featured nearly three acres of planned gardens that were largely neglected. Fortunately, both Websters were ardent gardeners. “I pretty much focused on the shrubs and outdoor plants,” says Jean, a former president of the Southern Pines Garden Club, “while Jack resumed his life in orchids.”

In time, three greenhouses went up. “There’s never been a day I didn’t find something new or interesting about orchids,” Jack Webster notes, leading a visitor past a strikingly beautiful birdbath in the residence’s side yard that turns out to have been a discarded street lamp Jack found in the city dump in Buenos Aires. He salvaged it and attached a sculptured symbol of the city — a woman holding an infant, standing astride a ship — creating not only a unique sanctuary for the birds but a novel prop for his orchid fever.

“I used it in an exhibition once,” he explains. “I filled it with orchids and created quite a stir at a show.”

But the real show proceeds in his tidy greenhouses or out back beyond the pool where many of his prized plants spend their summer months, basking in fresh air under shade netting and daily irrigation.

“I’m simply looking after them,” the orchid keeper of the Sandhills informs a visitor. “Every day is a new pleasure and drama with these plants. Come and let me show you something most interesting,” he suddenly adds, motioning his visitor to follow along the garden path.

“It’s a lovely Grammatophyllum scriptum, the largest orchid known to man,” Webster provides with the gentle fervor of a man still sweetly in the grip of orchid fever, leading the way back to his main greenhouse.

“Your timing is excellent,” Jack Webster comments. “One just happens to be blooming this week. In the wild, it can circle a tree and grow to enormous proportions. You won’t wish to miss this.” PS

 

 

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The Story of a House: Centerwood

For one hundred years, this hidden gem, the first privately owned home in Pinehurst, has welcomed generations of visitors with rustic charm and Southern hospitality

By Jim Dodson

“The ornament of a house,” Ralph Waldo Emerson observed in his famous essay on domestic life, “is the friends who frequent it.”

The Sage of Concord might well have had Pinehurst’s venerable Centerwood in mind when he expressed such a convivial view – for the rambling log house of Bert and Parker Hall on Vista Way in Pinehurst has been a focal point of gathering friends and Sandhills visitors for nigh on a century.

“From the beginning of its life,” Parker Hall explained to several dozen guests during a recent supper on the lawn celebrating the house’s 100th anniversary, “this wonderful house has been a way of life as well as a home.”

Known simply as “The Log Cabin” during the first few decades of its life, the original part of the 5,000-sqare-foot structure — occupying an entire block on Carolina Vista between Shaw, Magnolia and Azalea roads — dates to 1908 when a chum of Pinehurst scion Leonard Tufts, one John C. Spring of Boston, believed to have made his fortune in the sugar business, built the first private residence in the village not owned by the Tuft family enterprise.

The 17-room home’s original white cedar logs were harvested from area swamplands, and the house was constructed in a novel U-shape to facilitate both living and domestic quarters. Photos of the early house reveal a rustic wooden structure girdled by a moonscape of sand and pineland scrub. In time, the property was softened and greened by Olmstead’s ambitious village landscaping scheme. Today, towering hollies, magnolias and dogwoods, many dating from that first planting, plus mature banks of flowering shrubs, shade the property from street-level view, creating a hidden green oasis in the heart of America’s fabled golftown.

In 1935, another Bostonian, Francis Farr, purchased the house, winterized the property, added a garage and chauffeur quarters, and finished off many of the interior living spaces and bedrooms, leaving exposed beams throughout, highlighted by a living room with its sweeping 8-foot brick hearth.

Twenty years later, local real estate broker Livingston Biddle bought the house and renamed it Centerwood. An occasional visitor to the house and pool was Pennsylvanian Parker Hall, then an amateur horse trainer, ardent golfer, and investment advisor for Shearson-Hammill in New York.

“Around 1962 I began thinking of trying to buy a house in Pinehurst. I heard from my friend Wally O’Neal – a delightful fellow for whom the school was later named — that Mr. Biddle was considering a move to Palm Beach, but that Centerwood was not yet on the market. He thought I should at least go have a chat with the owner.

“I went to see Mr. Biddle and we had a friendly conversation while standing out by the garage. He went inside a few times to consult with his wife, Suzanne, and came back out and we finally shook hands, to make the deal. That’s how houses were sold in the 1960s.”

Hall’s initial challenge may have been the overgrown property. Lady Bank roses and wisteria were devouring portions of the structure. “The grounds were basically a jungle by then, full of vines and overgrown shrubs,” he remembers with a wry smile. “But I was walking through the jungle with Frank Howe of Clarendon Gardens when he identified a small sasanqua bush and remarked, ‘Someone must have really loved this place, Parker. It could be beautiful again with some work.’”

So Hall set about thinning the property’s forest, creating half a dozen separate “pocket” gardens and aquatic pools around the periphery. In time he also added winding footpaths and a pool terrace and gazebo fashioned from cypress logs collected from area swamps. Every Christmas, the garden’s footpaths become the scene of the “Santa Trail,” a candy hunt for the children and grandchildren of family friends.

Hall’s updating of the house was equally comprehensive. The living room space was expanded, new French doors were installed in several key rooms, and the chauffeur’s quarters were eventually converted to a studio for Bert, a former art teacher. The kitchen and pantry were updated but remain sympathetic to the house’s original rustic heritage. Over time, each of the four bedrooms developed its own theme, while Parker Hall’s cozy study became a refuge charmingly freighted with framed prints and other memorabilia from his years as a champion horse trainer and golf enthusiast – including a delightfully worn brassie given him by his hero, Bobby Locke.

“It’s the kind of well-lived-in house,” Hall explained to the birthday crowd, “that people feel very comfortable visiting again and again.”

For many years, Centerwood was the scene of a popular garden party on the Sunday afternoon following the Stoneybrook Steeplechase, and for more than 25 years the Halls hosted the participants of the North and South Women’s Amateur, with a roster of featured speakers that included Harvey Ward, John Derr, Dick Taylor and Bob Toski. Legendary Pinehurst pro Lionel Callaway was a frequent visitor, as were Peggy Bell, Dick Chapman and Carol Semple Thompson, former CBS commentator Ben Wright and football legend Tom Harmon. When he came to town to compete in both the North and South Am and the NCAAs, Nathaniel Crosby billeted in a main-floor nautical-themed bedroom at Centerwood.

Over the past two decades, the house has also hosted the annual Tin Whistles Scholarship Fund Christmas party, an annual gathering of board members, alumni and current scholarship holders, totaling more than 80 recipients. “If there’s anything I’m perhaps most proud of, it’s our association with the scholarship,” host Parker Hall, the fund’s longtime chairman, remarked after his guests sang “Happy Birthday” to Centerwood and the band resumed with Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World.”

“To think of all the delightful people who’ve passed through this house and these grounds gives me such a good feeling of hospitality, especially the young folks we’ve helped send along to college.”

As the first beautiful summer evening of its second century expired over the rustic dowager of Pinehurst, 90-year-old Tin Whistle John Derr was moved to say: “Isn’t this the most wonderful place to be on a summer night? I hope I’m around to see it in another 90 years.” PS