The Orchid Maker

April 11, 2023

Robert Palmer’s passion for orchids began when his mother, Betty, gifted a reed-stem orchid to him when he was young. He now has over 100,000 orchids living in his nursery, including one he named after her in 2002, Cattleya Betty Palmer.

East of Bradenton, Florida, two paths of pavement wend their way toward ribbons of dark water that carve through oak hammocks before climbing up to dry prairie — one of the state’s most diverse landscapes. In this part of southwest Florida, the pines and palmettos used to run right into the Gulf of Mexico, and “out east,” as locals call it, you can still get a sense of that. It’s where Robert Palmer built a home and a personal nursery four decades back. 

The property was halfway between where he worked farther east in Arcadia and where his former wife worked in Bradenton. Today the place is a magnet for people cultivating their own obsession with orchids, because more than 100,000 orchids live here spread across three greenhouses on 10 acres.

In November of last year, during one of two yearly open houses, the property hummed  with visitors winding through the greenhouses Palmer built for his own collection. Folks walked around hugging orchids to their chest while trying to steal a moment with Palmer or his daughter, Ashley, maybe her husband, Jake, just somebody that they could talk to about these plants. They had questions. Lots of questions. 

You could call them fans. Their gaze held the sort of reverence you see at book signings or when celebrities walk by. Gawking. Fealty. Something like that. 

Growers from around the state milled about, trading stories, eating tacos, pawing at beers. Some came with gifts for Palmer, a rare fruit tree they’d grown from seed or a pile of cereus cactus. Hobbyists searched methodically through the greenhouses, trying to find what they’d take home, fawning over this and that, sniffing and thinking.

Some peeked inside a new greenhouse built just for the mother plants, the heart of the nursery. Others ambled around looking at the hundreds of orchids Palmer mounted on trees around the property, some plants older and taller than the people. The occasional visitor slipped unnoticed past a chain into Palmer’s personal collection.

He wouldn’t call it branding, but he’s long had a set of “signature” plants. At one point, it was big white phals, short for phalaenopsis. “That was in the old days,” Palmer said. “Now you can get them anywhere.” Hawaiian intergeneric oncidiums. Seed-grown natives like Encyclia tampensis. Heritage Cattleyas. Grammatophyllum from the Philippines. The yellow coconut orchid, as opposed to the magenta one. Lady-slippers from Peru. As many people will tell you when you’re after something strange, “Go see Robert Palmer.”

Palmer was the first to bring what was registered in 1999 as Vanda Pachara Delight (bottom) to the United States. The plant continues to be a staple in blue-colored orchid collections around the world. (Top left) Vanda Junior Scott and Phalaenopsis OX Red Sesame.

A few weeks later, in December, he wandered out of his house, walked across a vein of crushed shell beneath a strand of shade, then made his way into the main greenhouse that holds the lion’s share of the orchids living here. Hanging from the live oaks dotting the place, some of the staghorn ferns looked dry, so he bounced around from faucet to faucet and sprayed. Then, as he walked through the greenhouse devoted just to the vandaceous genus of orchids, he started to talk story — his first collecting trips to Southeast Asia, the scandals that hung over the orchid world, and why every sale was not a good sale. 

He showed me dozens of palms he’s collected and the tiny creek out back, where Hurricane Ian left a lattice of laurel oaks. On the way there, we passed the michelia trees that he learned about from cab drivers in Taiwan who hung the flowers from their rearview mirror. “Smell that,” he said as the familiar scent of a magnolia washed over us. 

“I got stuff you can put in the yard, stuff you can put on the dinner table, stuff you can take to a show,” he told me later of the range in the nursery. Some stuff costs $10. Some specimens were upwards of $1,000.

A handful of dogs and several cats sat in the sun. Some came with the five acres Palmer bought across the street. “The owner was going to take them to the pound, and I said, ‘Man, you ain’t turning those in.’”

At one point, Palmer planned to give them to a nearby shelter. He made a donation to persuade the shelter into taking the animals. But he never went, and the animals stayed. “I don’t collect cats or buy cats,” he said. “They just show up. People dump them on me.”

Palmer had already been feeding the occasional straggler, helping goats untangle themselves from the fence across the road, and eventually, he bought the neighboring property instead of playing caretaker. The purchase “was more for protection than anything else,” he said of the development marching east from the coast.

“It’s better for business,” he said of the constant stream of residents moving to Florida, “but it’s just too many people out here. I was in the boonies when I first moved out here in 1981,” he added. “I used to drive to I-75 and never pass a car, so it was hard for people to find me back then.” Today, Florida is the fastest-growing place in America, with more than 900 people moving to the state each day. Across the road, a goat was calling to us.

Behind his house, a serpentine creek climbs through the woods from Lake Manatee to Palmer’s property. “We’ve got plenty of land,” he said. “We can build more greenhouses if we need to.” Along the little branch, bundles of palmetto encircle live oaks and red cedars. You’ll see, strewn throughout the property, trees with orchids mounted on them alongside ferns, bromeliads, and air plants. 

Technically, Palmer’s “retired,” but each time I went, some new structure was being built or he was driving east to consult for his longtime day job at a nursery. A vast canopy was going up between two houses. In the new greenhouse for the mother plants, a new hybrid was just getting acclimated to its spot on the bench while another was on its way out, rotting in a basket. Some were just back from a show in town, a first-class certificate following them home. And there was Palmer wandering around, waiting for his contractor to arrive, taking calls. When I asked him what the rest of his day looked like, he told me in his quintessential Southern je ne sais quoi, “I just wander around. I just fiddle-fart.”

After a cursory glance at the thousands of orchids intermingled with palms and cactus, ferns and tropical trees from the Southern Hemisphere, alongside the cats and dogs, the friends, the family, it was clear orchids were not the only thing Robert Palmer cared to collect. To call him an orchid collector would be an understatement. Curiosity is central to his life. The plants are simply a byproduct of that, one form of nutrition to feed his head. 

Visiting Palmer’s property, I wondered what drew people there, to collecting and growing orchids. The conventional notions of why seemed too simple: that we tend to turn toward collecting when things feel out of control; when we need to look for order. But after watching people return to his greenhouse, month after month, I thought that they wanted to retain some of the care reflected in orchids by looking after one. They wanted to play a small role in their history and heritage, or, rather, they wanted to own a portion of the curiosity that animates Robert Palmer’s life. Each plant was for each person an attempt to make meaning, to learn about something that seemed mysterious as ever.

For Palmer, it started with a gift: A tawny, terrestrial orchid that threw long spikes from the top of its stem and opened into a bouquet of Aperol-orange flowers. It became the first plant in Robert Palmer’s collection. His mother, Betty, was to blame, or rather, to thank for the gift. It was a reed-stem orchid, or what’s known as Epidendrum radicans, an orchid that grows in the ground throughout Central America. There was little sign that it would alter the arc of his life, but the gift took root.

Next, she gave him a Florida butterfly orchid native to the hardwood hammocks along the Gulf of Mexico in Sarasota, Florida, where they lived. It is known as Encyclia tampensis. His mother nurtured her son’s curiosity, a byproduct of her own fascination with the plants, but his father galvanized it.

Palmer’s father, an eye surgeon, set up an internship for his son, through a patient of his, at a local nursery that sold spring bulbs, cut flowers, and orchids at the edge of town. 

The place was called the Sun Bulb Company, a family-run outfit that belonged to the Hollingsworths. Out east on Bee Ridge Road in Sarasota, the business grew up along the sleepy west coast of Florida back when citrus groves and cattle outnumbered condos and golf carts. 

Palmer was 15. Soon he started to collect orchids himself, encyclias from southern Mexico, Honduras, and Belize, their delicate chandelier of flowers like those of the butterfly orchids hidden in the woods he grew up in. The fragrant, pendulous flowers produced by foxtails followed. He imagined traveling to India or Thailand, where they grew wild, their exposed roots hanging from trees the way Spanish moss did in the American South. It set his mind on fire as he tried to put hands on each of the different species in that genus. And when he left for college at the University of Florida just a few hours north from Sarasota, that curiosity followed him.

On a pre-med track in school, Palmer couldn’t imagine being inside all day. He just stared out the window during class, watching the light turn. “That’s all I did in high school,” he said. “Couldn’t wait for the bell to ring.” 

He changed gears from pre-med and by senior year found himself living at Schumaker Nursery in Gainesville with the woman he’d later marry, Pamela. He built a lean-to out back of the cottage for his plants, set some chairs in the center, and studied there. By the time he was set to graduate with a degree in ornamental horticulture, he was just 20 credits away from a master’s degree, but as he said, “I just wanted to get out and start making some money.”

A day after finishing his final exams in 1979, he packed the car and drove south to a trade show in Tampa for Sun Bulb. It was his first day as an employee. “It wasn’t just an orchid show,” he explained. There were cooling, shade, and mist systems and chemicals. There were revered growers from all over the state. “That was an education. You saw the same guys at the shows, and a lot of people did more business at the hotel bar after the show than they did at the show.”

Forty-three years later, he still works for the company as its head grower and consultant. “I didn’t even take one single day between college and starting to earn a living,” he said. “It was just luck of the draw that I had this opportunity to start with them.”

At that point, the company started growing in greenhouses and shipping its products from  Arcadia, Florida, a tiny town east of Sarasota with a deep well of agrarian history along the Peace River. Palmer’s wife worked for the farmers throughout Florida’s fruit belt as a plant pathologist, developing management practices for tomato growers at a spot in Bradenton. “She did a lot of research on post-harvest disease, shelf life, and shipping,” he said.

Two years later, they purchased 10 acres closer to town in eastern Manatee County, a midpoint for them between town and the nursery farther east on State Road 70. “She went that way, and I went this way,” he said, pointing east. As soon as they cleared the scrub and palmetto, he started planting trees and set to building a wooden A-frame for his own personal greenhouse. “I just started putting stuff in the ground,” he said. “Unusual things.”

When the first posts went into the ground back in 1981, Palmer dropped a hammer on his face while up a ladder, and he agreed to leave the building to the contractors. When I went to see him in December, construction was still taking place. A year earlier, I’d seen the impenetrable palmettos flanking the edge of his property cleared, a foundation laid in their place, and a new greenhouse built for the plants used to clone and create hybrids. “The mommas,” as one person put it.

There was the sense that something always needed to be done, something to move, to spray, to find. On this morning, an eastern diamondback rattlesnake at the edge of the property needed to be relocated instead of killed. 

Despite the long list of tasks, Palmer himself seemed unhurried as he passed me a beer from a fridge in a shed. All around us were tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of chemicals to treat the plants — fungicides, insecticides, bactericides, fertilizer. The conversation veered toward diseases, tissue culture, and Latin classifications. I stood there, nodding, mumbling, hopelessly trying to hide how little I understood. As his son-in-law told me, talking plants with Palmer is like listening to a different language. 

Skinneri. Schomburgkia. Alata. No fucking clue, I thought.

As a family, orchids include around 30,000 plants in the wild. In the last century, growers introduced another 100,000 flowers through hybrids and intergeneric species. They are the second-largest perennial family of flowers, the most sophisticated, and may be the strangest flowers on earth. They are so carefully attuned to their natural environment that the slightest element out of place spells certain death, but they’re also wildly resilient and in turn possess this sort of ancient quality. Serious collectors appoint an heir in their will for their plants because some can live for a hundred years or more. 

The first mention of orchids appeared nearly 5,000 years ago in China. Soon the flower became integral in Chinese medicine to treat fevers. The Aztecs believed it had medicinal properties, too. Orchids’ care and cultivation ascended to an art in Japan; they became the subject of Chinese painters for over a thousand years, while Europeans made sport out of collecting them. This thirst for the flowers led to species disappearing completely throughout the Americas and South Pacific. And still does.

During the Victorian era, explorers hired by tenacious English collectors often disappeared, returned half alive, or were murdered by other explorers in search of new species. As one orchid hunter put it a century ago, “The lure of the orchid was not to be denied.” Since then, they’ve found the plant all over the world. 

Their cultural significance in America, though, is one of exoticism despite the more than 106 species that are native to Florida and more than 250 throughout North America. If you walk into Home Depot or Trader Joe’s, you can find them. Today, the global market for the plant exceeds $290 million.

(Left) Encyclia Dr. Robert H. Palmer and Catyclia Green Dragon

Some orchid flowers unfurl and form what looks like a swarm of bees. Some smell like rotting flesh. Others, like orange blossoms or cotton candy with a hint of cream. Some are leafless, germinated by a mycorrhizal fungus, and grow deep in a green, wet wilderness in the heart of Florida’s Everglades, while others find their way up thousands of feet in the hinterlands of the Philippines. One found in the swamp throws a flower that resembles a giant moth, its evolutionary counterpart, and is nearly impossible to see. Aptly, they call it the ghost orchid.

While she was on a flight home from Cancun to New York in 1994, a copy of the Miami Herald found Susan Orlean. She read a short piece about the arrest of John Laroche and three Seminole Tribe members for poaching orchids in a place called the Fakahatchee Strand, a dense, thick swamp outside Naples. Neither the state of Florida nor flowers were on her radar, but as she said, “When I landed in New York, I knew exactly what I was going to do.”

She flew to Florida for Laroche’s hearing, learned of his obsession with the ghost orchid, among other things, and soon found herself in his van tracing the edges of his love for the plants in a series of New Yorker pieces. Eventually,  she traversed the state with Laroche and wrote her 1998 book The Orchid Thief. In it, Laroche’s intoxicating curiosity is magnified by Orlean’s own curiosity as she weaves together the history of the Seminole Tribe, orchid growers, and eccentric collectors. Ultimately, she shows people just how surprising Florida can be.

“Sometimes I think I’ve figured out some order in the universe,” she wrote, “but then I find myself in Florida, swamped by incongruity and paradox, and I have to start all over again.”

Hollywood optioned the book, and hired Charlie Kaufmann to write the screenplay. The film, directed by Spike Jonze and starring Meryl Streep, Nicolas Cage, and Chris Cooper, was far from what anybody could have imagined Orlean’s manuscript becoming. “The studio dithered for a while before showing it to me,” Orlean said, “knowing I would be — how shall I put this — surprised.” 

A cult grew up around the book and the film. It was a corollary to the culture it mirrored.

“I had to laugh when I read The Orchid Thief because I know all the players,” Palmer told a writer 20 years ago. “Everybody knows everybody; you play fair because word travels fast.”

In a worn binder, there’s a picture of Palmer’s own tenacity. It shows one of the first crosses he made in 1979, Phalaenopsis White Waters x Phalaenopsis Susan Shipley. Then, some pages and decades later, is the 603rd orchid he made. The process takes shape through a series of choices. First come the parent plants and a set of questions. What will the mother plant impart to its offspring? What time of year will it flower? How many times per year? How long will it flower? Will it be fragrant? Cumbersome? Compact? 

“Does it make good seed?” he asked. “Does it breed true?’

Once the parent plants flower, they’re pollinated. A seedpod forms. Millions of microscopic seeds mature, and they’re harvested along with pollen. Together, they’re sent to a handful of labs hired by growers to sterilize the pollen, and grown in specific conditions until the invisible seedlings form roots and leaves. They’re placed in small tubes or containers known as “flasks,” mailed to the growers, and then set in a pot or hung. 

By the time a buyer enters the frame, the plants are about 7 years old, sometimes more. At that point, they might produce their first flowers. The flowers might be mutant or surreal. That’s when the grower or hobbyist sees whether those seven years were well spent.

“I can tell it’s going to be a good bloomer just by the foliage, and the way it’s growing,” Palmer  said. “Good root tips; pigment in it; fat, stubby growers. There’s a lot of ways to grade them without a flower.”

Over a few weeks last year, I followed Palmer through his greenhouses in a blur. We passed a Vanda luzonica, a native of the Philippines that grows a cone of white and fuchsia flowers, this one almost as old as me. Because of  the market’s desire for this specific plant, the mountains where it once grew are empty. “They’re growing them from seed, and releasing them back into the wild,” Palmer explained. He sends plants as part of a reforestation program there.

In the breeder house, Palmer showed me his Encyclia cordigeras from Mexico, an orchid he’s become synonymous with for breeding them. There’s Encyclia randii alba, a green and white version of the orchid found from Peru to Brazil. The first time he tried to make this specific cross, he bought tiny plugs of the plant for $60 each, and they all rotted. He went back to the same grower the next year, bought the same plants at $200 apiece, and they set good seed. “I made a fucking shit pot full of them,” he said. “The last couple of years, these have shown up on the market, but they came from my breed.”

A few benches away, the translucent chartreuse flowers of a digbyana seemed to lure us toward them with their lime scent and face-sized flowers. First Class certificates, the American Orchid Society’s highest award, seemed to apply to every flower in the place, although Palmer didn’t mention this. Pretense is not in his bones, but he admitted, “Everybody wants bragging rights.”

“Green on the back” is what I heard as I followed Palmer down the edge of a long bench. “Absence of color” is what I heard next. “Not open enough to smell it,” he said after bending down to sniff. 

Then, just as abruptly, he said, “See, I’m a palm collector.” We were staring at a red sealing wax palm. “These things will croak below 50 degrees,” he said.

Areca. Fishtail. Aechmea, he continued.

Again, I thought: No fucking clue.

Papilionanda Noriko Sumida, a Vanda hybrid (left), is one orchid of many that live in Palmer’s three greenhouses in Manatee County, Florida.

Back in the 1980s, when he was building his own personal business and cementing his place at Sun Bulb, Palmer and his wife traversed Sarasota and Bradenton selling cut flowers for $3.50 apiece to different florists. “This was just a sideline thing,” he said of his own greenhouse, where he’d meet people after hours or during the weekends.

For years, Palmer and his wife bought cut flowers from growers in Tennessee and New Jersey, divided them, and sold them ahead of Mother’s Day or to arrange in corsages ahead of prom. “I was just trying to find my little niche,” he said. 

Some nights, he gave lectures to orchid societies. On others, he met with hobbyists after work, oscillating between how to move 1,000 orchids and how to sell just a single one. “It’s tricky,” Palmer added. “You’ve got to find your own calling.” 

The place he cultivated among growers with his personal nursery was a stark contrast to the approach he helped mold at Sun Bulb. But it was clear that the two informed each other.

When Palmer joined Sun Bulb, the company brought in different flower bulbs for each season. “We were basically just a broker,” he said.  Bulbs planted in spring, like caladiums and gladiolas, came from India. Fall-planted bulbs, like tulips and daffodils, came from Holland. But the patriarch of the Hollingsworth family started selling juvenile orchids in little bags, what would come to be known as “baggy babies.” And soon they’d moved away from the bulb market and toward orchids, baskets, and potting media. “We don’t even sell bulbs anymore,” Palmer said. 

That shift irrevocably altered the market for orchids. Sun Bulb’s baggy babies and mature orchids were sold under the moniker of Better-Gro to Home Depot and then ultimately Lowe’s, Target, and a cadre of big box stores. Suddenly, folks who were shopping for house paint or lumber could buy rare plants from Indonesia and Australia. With that, the price of orchids dropped. They showed up in grocery stores, hardware stores. “It pissed a lot of people off,” Palmer said, “but it was just a way to make orchids available to the everyday person. It just drove down the price.”

The exotic, strange stuff still lived in the specimen-oriented nurseries or garden centers, but as Palmer said, “We just got them started, and then we got them hooked.” Orchids became as commonplace as Christmas lights in America’s hardware stores, and Palmer’s influence was just as ubiquitous. It was just that nobody could tell.

Looking back to when he was 15, sweeping up around Sun Bulb’s nursery, he remembered, “I was just fascinated. I knew that’s what I wanted.” Before he even finished his sentence, he pointed to a pink and brown cluster of palm-size flowers called a Vanda sanderiana. Vanda mariae next, dark amber petals with an opaque yellow rim. “Flowers all year,” was all I got before he said, “See,” turning toward an orchid twice as tall as me. “Green on green,” Palmer said of a white and green vanda that’s become maybe his most enduring signature, an alba cross. He scans the wall of roots between us. “Jen’s moved it,” he says of some mystery plant. “I need to find out where that went.”

And like that, he disappears behind a curtain of green and I’m left there swimming in flowers.

There’s a lot of history bound up in the scent of cedar baskets and tube heaters for Ashley Palmer. The smell carries her back to when she was a kid growing up in her father’s greenhouses. The diffused light and how humidity wraps itself around you like a blanket in the greenhouse do the same. Now the tube heaters are long gone, but that medley of propane and dust burning off still hangs around. She never thought she would move back to Florida. She never thought she would work at a nursery. And yet here she was, the third generation of Palmers tending to orchids.

The overwhelming feeling of participating in a rat race reached her in Texas during the second leg of her Ph.D. in sociology. “I’d gone through a divorce,” she said. “I was a young mother. It was just hard in a way that I was maybe not equipped for.” Waco started to wear on her. Academia, too. The conservatism of central Texas gnawed at her. “I just needed to not be there anymore.”

She had always been a writer, but the formal academic environment of a doctoral program didn’t exactly nourish that. She started to wonder about a more creative setting, and she applied to grad school for an MFA in nonfiction. 

Soon she found herself in Wilmington at the University of North Carolina. The plan was that her ex-husband and daughter would come, too. “Anyway, that quickly was not the case,” she said.

Her ex and daughter left Texas, but they decided to move home and be close to family in Florida. “That’s when I pretty much lost the battle of not living in this area.” There was nothing warm or fuzzy about returning home, but that was where her family was, so she bounced between Bradenton and Wilmington for three years.

At orientation in 2013, she met Jake Bateman. They took to each other, and after graduating, she lured him farther south to Florida in 2016. She started teaching at Ringling College, and he commuted up to St. Petersburg for an editing gig. When her father told her he’d lost his longtime manager over Thanksgiving, she volunteered to fill some gaps when she could. Soon she was there full-time. And then, in the course of the pandemic, online orders poured in, and Jake started lending a hand with shipping and building out the website. Soon he was full-time, too. 

“It was really sort of redemptive for me to feel like I had some footing here,” Ashley said. “It made me feel better, then fine and good about being here in this area — an investment or just a bit of something meaningful other than just family.”

The notion of returning home felt distant then. “Now I just don’t think of it in those terms,” she said. They’d remade a home in town.

Palmer’s daughter, Ashley, never thought she’d work in a nursery or move back to Florida after college, but fate had other ideas. After her father lost his longtime manager, she volunteered to fill in some gaps while teaching at a nearby college. Eventually she and her husband, Jake, began working full time.

For Jake, the business was weird. “I didn’t think about plants,” he said. “Ever.” 

At first, he started swimming in books, lectures, just about anything he could find. The plants were weird. The customers were weird. The notion that customers interacted with the grower from the point at which they buy a plant until it dies was weird. There were the folks who fell under the spell of orchids and collecting metastasized into a kind of madness, what was once called “orchidlerium.” They came almost every week, if not multiple times per week. And then during the pandemic, the place hummed anytime they opened to the public. 

For many customers, it seemed like a sort of therapy to be surrounded by all these living things. Others were hell-bent on bringing the latest gossip of life outside the nursery. Some just wanted to see what was flowering. There was some semblance of control in taking this thing, this tiny little plant, and succeeding in growing it while the rest of the world fell off its axis.

And within the nursery, the success took on a different meaning when it became a family business. “We’re such a small team,” Jake said before Ashley added, “Not that I know what a family business is in the traditional sense, but it doesn’t feel like that to me.” The adjustment to working with her father didn’t stick out in her mind. It felt fluid. “I don’t think I understood how sharp he is before we worked together. It’s not that I didn’t understand that he was a storied grower or whatever, but it’s just a different thing.” 

As for the work, it was also different. “There’s always something to tend to,” Ashley said. “You can’t finish a day exactly. The weather keeps going, and the plants keep growing. It’s just constant.”

After Palmer’s father retired as an ophthalmologist, he spent a lot of time helping his son around the nursery. “He’d just be in the background sweeping floors, just farting around, killing weeds.” In 2009, Palmer made a new cross. He called it Encyclia Dr. Robert H. Palmer, a primary hybrid between Encyclia cordigera and Encyclia pyriformis. In 2020, the year his father died, he registered the plant. Some days later, Ashley showed me another plant he’d made, something he named for himself. Along its curvy, almost sultry rim, the flower had a creamy peach tint that melted into a creamsicle-like orange at its center. Painterly was the only thing I could think while looking at it. “I try to make the orchid fit the person,” Palmer told me. “Something really fragrant.”

He’s named plants for his ex-wife, his girlfriend, Ashley, her daughter, his boss’ daughter even. Multiple orchids bear the name of his granddaughter, plants that didn’t exist before, plants that ultimately stake out the edges of Palmer’s family and might outlive some of its members. Of course, in 2002 he named an orchid, Cattleya Betty Palmer, for his mother, who started all this with that reed-stem. Orchids are less a pretty, carefully considered plant that flowers or smells nice than an investment of time — sometimes a decade. In that way, they’re an intellectual piece of real estate. They’re the way Robert Palmer shows that he cares for you. 

We walked a few steps, and he looked down at another flower before he said, “I made this.”