Ask somebody to think of a basement, they’ll probably think of old clothes, tools, the furnace, the washer and dryer, boxes of holiday decorations. Well, Charles Bracker’s basement confounds that stereotype — it is packed with about 2,000 orchids in four environmentally controlled rooms.

“There’s a nice little saying that says once you get an orchid, you have to get another one. You can’t stop there because orchids are addicting,” says Bracker, 68, a retired Purdue professor of botany and plant pathology who lives in West Lafayette.

It was Bracker’s wife, Anri, who started the orchid collection. On a trip to Hawaii in the late 1980s, she purchased two plants. Bracker, having grown up in California, and Anri, being from Germany, didn’t know if they could grow orchids in the Midwest. But the orchids bloomed and thrived, and Bracker began finding more and more orchid plants on his travels and shipped them home to Anri. Eventually, her collection grew to about 40 plants and Anri joined the American Orchid Society and the Lafayette Orchid Society.

Bracker concentrated on his research and teaching and took a spectator role with Anri’s orchids. He wanted her to get all the credit for the success of her hobby.

Anri passed away Nov. 16, 2001, after a three-month battle with pancreatic cancer. Two years earlier, Bracker’s lower back had given out because of degenerative arthritis, causing him to suffer severe chronic pain and forcing him to give up his 40-year career at Purdue. Until shortly before her death, Anri had been caring for Bracker, who was bedridden much of the time.

Bracker was now faced with the decision of what to do with Anri’s orchid collection. Before she died, Anri asked her husband to donate them to the Lafayette Orchid Society, fearing that his physical limitations would prevent him from being able to take care of the plants. But he couldn’t bear to part with his wife’s orchids, so he decided to learn about them from his wife’s collection of books and magazines.

“My hope was to keep them alive,” Bracker says. “I did my best to do just that, and not only did they stay alive, but they started blooming.”

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