Nicholas Kirkwood - Plucking a Commoner From an Exalted Family - NYTimes.com In today's parade of outrageous shoes, Nicholas Kirkwood is the maddest hatter of all. Mr. Kirkwood's shoes are towering heels with architecture worthy of Santiago Calatrava, dressed in a clash of materials that have included stingray, electrical wire, ponytails, glass tiles, silk flowers, LED lights, nuts and bolts, and even a pocket watch. (For the record, his fans swear that the construction and comfort of his shoes justifies the upper-end purchase price. And he is surely doing something right: the fashion conglomerate LVMH just bought a majority stake in his company.) With such an aesthetic, it is perhaps natural that one of Mr. Kirkwood's greatest comforts in life is orchids. The most outer-space-y of flowers, orchids have an outlandish quality that Mr. Kirkwood cherishes. Make that qualities: the freakishly long stems, the shortage of leaves and the fantastic, fragrance-free blooms that last for weeks and even months. Their roots look like something out of science fiction. Most of them don't even grow in dirt, and many are actually parasites. If Mother Nature ever set out to cook up something that looked thoroughly artificial, it would be an orchid. (This is not remotely the case, as Darwin himself explained in his 1862 book documenting orchids as products of natural selection. So there.) Certainly orchids are the only blooms with the fantastic and even perverse diversity that Mr. Kirkwood exhibits in his shoes. There are orchids whose flowers look like monkey faces, flying ducks and doves, lions, bees, egrets and even X-rated gingerbread men. That's just the beginning. Orchids are one of the largest and most diverse families of living things on earth, with tens of thousands of species, from the equatorial Amazon to northernmost Norway. They range from the absurdly familiar - like the flavor-endowed vanilla orchid - to the ghost orchid, that almost mythically rare wraith of a flower that Susan Orlean wrote about in "The Orchid Thief." "They really don't look like any other kind of flower or plant," said Mr. Kirkwood, who recalled first being bowled over as a child in London by a collection of rare orchids in the home of his upstairs neighbors. There's this sculptural element to them, and this purity. They're fascinating objects, whether they are flowers or not. He fell in love with them again as an adult working for the milliner Philip Treacy, researching rare orchids for a show based on them. So, of course it is this wealth of color, shape, pattern, texture and so on that turned Mr. Kirkwood into an orchidophile. Far from being an expert, his passion is more pedestrian. Literally. He buys garden variety orchids sold at the weekly farmers" market near his apartment in the Bethnal Green neighborhood of London. "They only cost about £5," he said. I just get the most normal one, the one that actually keeps alive longer than the other ones. I'd buy a couple for my apartment, a couple for the office. They don't need much looking after. With some of the rare ones, they can make you really crazy. Even so, keeping his orchids alive and healthy until they bloom again has often eluded him. As long as it is still green, I keep hoping another flower will come out, but sometimes it just ends up a stalk and I have to go down and buy another one. Does he know what kind they are? "I don't know," he said. I threw the little thing away that says what they are. A phone call to the American Orchid Society in Miami cleared up the mystery. "Those are Phalaenopsis, but I am not sure what species," said Maria San Juan, a spokeswoman for the society. She confirmed that the Phalaenopsis, or moth orchid, is the most commonly sold genus of orchid: the plain white T-shirt of the orchid world. She added that the blue tint of one of his plants was not natural. "That's been dyed that color," she said, likening it to dyeing a poodle pink. She was skeptical about an orchid lover finding rapture in a Phalaenopsis. "Most orchid snobs want something a little more unusual," she said, suggesting what, orchid-wise, are considered more worthy options. Paphiopedilum, Oncidium, Dendrobium, Vanda. For his part, Mr. Kirkwood is content to live with the commoners of the family. His shoes, for all their seeming exuberance, require an inordinate intensity of focus and care; he is not eager to bring that kind of duty to his downtime. "They're like training orchids," he said. If only every parasite were so self-sufficient.