By Cody Ellerd

Outside, the biting air nips away at unprotected fingertips and a chilling breeze rattles the naked branches of winter. Today, the solstice heralds a settling in of barrenness and gray.

In mid-Mercer Island, Terry Lee walks a path of pebbled dirt and decayed leaves to enter a world where the same lake air breathes warmth and carries the damp odor of fertile soil. Quietly he crosses the threshold of his old greenhouse and vivacious emerald orchid leaves stand outstretched, welcoming him into his sanctuary of winter color.

“It’s great on a cold day when it’s pouring outside to be in here where it’s warm,” says Lee, “just working on plants.”

Here the retired Islander is surrounded by 400 specimens of orchids, in varieties that hail from all over the world, mostly in places where Gor-Tex is unknown.

Numerous orchids grow here. Right now, his favorites — the Cattleya Molly Tylers — are blooming. Their throats are a deep, velvety purple. It’s a color you might get lost in if not for the flower’s petals, outbursts of iridescent violet that shout out loud, saving you from enchantment. “The color and composition are very nice,” Lee said.

Molly Tylers prefer the temperature between 70 and 85 degrees, down around 60 at night. Strong humidity is good, too.

Lee is happy to oblige. The former systems engineer houses them in the warmer of his two greenhouses that he inherited when he bought his Island home in 1976. The previous owner had an existing orchid collection that needed to be kept alive.

“The only gardening experience I had was growing tomatoes and cutting grass,” Lee said. So he decided to learn. He joined the American Orchid Society and spent several years reading books on how to make these finicky flowers thrive. The mature plants he adopted that first year are still cycling through the changing seasons, year after year, unfurling their beauty at the proper time. Some are now more than 50 years old.

“Orchids are not particularly attractive in their own right,” he said. They only bloom once a year. But when they do, they are breathtaking. “It’s quite amazing what you get out of these homely plants,” Lee said.

His friends and neighbors might attest to that. Many local teens wore Lee’s orchids on their corsages to dances throughout the years. Islanders buying orchids from Mercer Island Florist may very well have taken home some of Lee’s cultivations as well.

In the early `80s, Lee got a farmer’s license and sold flowers out of a stall at the Pike Place Market. He said it was good for his kids, now age 38 and 35, to help out there and experience the market from “the other side of the table.”

Eventually Lee’s green thumb earned him somewhat of reputation. Islanders who didn’t have the right touch knew where their ailing orchids could go for some warmth and loving care.

“Sometimes they’ll just show up out of nowhere,” he said. An orphaned flower is occasionally left at the door of his greenhouse like a baby in a basket. Lee does his best to nurse it back to health. Not all survive, but he figures that the ones that do “were meant to be here.” Sometimes he finds out who left the plant, and he’ll render them a happily recovered patient. Others, though, he never knows. “They feel guilty about abusing it,” he said. Then the orchid becomes a permanent member of his family.

Once an exotic rarity in the United States, the orchid has surged in popularity here. Only poinsettias now sell more. The natural world gives them plenty of hospitable habitat, from Thailand to Brazil to California. But where the rain falls in cold drops and the morning coats all lingering green with a crispy white frost, Terry Lee provides them a warm place to winter.