The Orchid Giver

One alum's gift to his alma mater blooms year after year.

Alan Brout '51 has sent almost 1,000 loved ones off to Dartmouth: two daughters—Ellen Brout Lindsey '81 and Amy Brout McHugh '85—and more than 950 orchids.

Brout s love affair with the distinctive bloom began in 1967, when a friend gave Brout his first, an oncidium sphacelatum with small yellow and brown flowers. Brout and his family had just moved to a house they built in Larchmont, New York, where Brout had constructed a 10-by-15-foot greenhouse.

With that first orchid, Brout was hooked. "There are at least 25,000 species of orchids," he says. "When you start growing, you want to grow them all." Brout developed a special fondness for miniature orchids native to the Andes region of South America ica. "Next thing I knew one greenhouse was filled up so I decided to clone it. I built an additional greenhouse beside it."

After retiring in 1990 as a partner with the accounting firm BDO Seidman in New York City, Brout and his wife began splitting their time between family in Westchester and California. In the mid-19905, as the Brouts prepared to sell their Larchmont home and buy a much smaller condominium, they pondered what to do with the flowers. The solution came during a visit to the Murdough Greenhouses at Dartmouth, where he spotted just a few lonely orchids.

"I had been up to Hanover for reunions and one day I decided to see what was going on on the fifth floor of Gilman, the life sciences building," says Brout, 75. He looked around and was surprised to find that orchids, the largest plant family, were so underrepresented in the greenhouses. "That put the bug in my head," he says. Brout made the College an offer: He would donate his entire collection.

Professor Mary Ann Guerinot was chairman of the biology department at the time. "I got a call from someone in development saying, 'We have some guy who wants to donate his orchids. Do we want them?'" Guerinot recalls. She quickly answered "yes." "We thought at the time that it would be really nice to have an orchid collection we could share with everybody. Most people like orchids and they're very difficult to grow. We're always trying to raise the profile of plants."

Brout made his unique donation, now called the Brout Orchid Collection, in October 1996, a few months before he and his wife moved into their condominium. Brout says dropping off the hundreds of orchids left him feeling an emptiness reminiscent of when he dropped off his daughters at Dartmouth. To make sure the orchids were well cared for, Brout provided an endowment to pay for the collections maintenance.

"I always say," Brout says, "they've never been as happy as when they got a college education."

Alan Brout