A stroll past the front-yard garden of wildflowers to the backyard of Larry and Gwen Kamiya’s Kaneohe home is like walking from reality into the imaginary forest of the film "Avatar." Giant bromeliads, in purple, green and gold, grow shoulder-high. More hang like alien creatures from the rafters of a greenhouse that fills every inch of space between the house and the hillside. Bamboo palms with Christmas-red trunks arch over the door to Kamiya’s happy place, his 30-by-40-foot orchid house, chock full of 1,000-plus orchid plants.

Some of his orchids look like dragons; some are only 1 millimeter long, growing 60 to a stem. The orchid house holds blooms that smell as sweet as the vanilla beans that grow behind the screens and other orchids that smell like rotted meat.

Though Kamiya, 66, says his roots were first planted in a papaya grove, his fascination with orchids goes back to the 1950s when he worked in a nursery. "I was too young to get wages, so I was paid in orchid plants instead," he said.

He grew up on a farm that grew fruits and vegetables, and his dad bred the island favorite, Kamiya Laie Gold Papaya. Describing his small-kid days, Kamiya says, "We lived on the farm. Our house was a converted rice mill. We fished for crayfish and opae (shrimp), went frog hunting and tended the cucumber plants."

After Castle High School he signed up for culinary classes at Kapiolani Community College, then signed on to cook on a Navy ship in Vietnam. Mustering out, he headed back to the farm and University of Hawaii classes to learn something besides cooking. There he met Gwen. In 1974 they were married in the bromeliad section of Foster Botanical Garden on Vineyard Boulevard.

His career included five years of papaya farming, 18 as a landscape engineer for the Royal Hawaiian Center and the past 10 years as chief engineer at Windward Mall. For pleasure he grew orchids.

Now Kamiya is one of the most active members of the Windward Orchid Society, preparing for its 34th Annual Spring Orchid Show, Friday through Sunday at King Intermediate School in Kaneohe. The organization was established in 1952 with 20 members. Today the membership is over 200.

Despite his full-time job, Kamiya is tending, propagating and hybridizing more than a 1,000 orchid plants, just in his backyard. He chuckles and waves his hand in the makai direction and says, "Then there is the other orchid house I have over in my sister’s backyard." Every orchid has a name tag that spells out the credentials. "That is unless the tag falls off; then I have to repot and wait until it blooms to know the name," he said.

Kamiya says he’s grown just about every orchid, starting with dendrobium, moving to the frilly corsage-style cattleyas and then his favorite, the one he is noted for, the paphiopedilum. He says he liked the orchid because it has beauty along with hairy warts and curly, long tendrils. He also knew they liked a darker environment.

"When my orchid house fiberglass roof aged, it got dark, and the other orchids didn’t do as well," he explained, adding, "There weren’t many hobbyists growing the ‘paph’ at that time."

As his reputation grew, he began to experiment with hybridizing. One orchid, the Paphiopedilum rothschildianum, caught his fancy.

"When I found out that it sold for $10 an inch, at $240 per plant, it was just not in my budget," he said. Calling it "too rich for this farm boy’s blood," he resorted to bartering. Luckily his orchid house was filled with prized plants to trade for the plant of his dreams. His biggest cash investment was a $500 flask with a Phragmipedium kovachii seedling.

"It died," he said.

"I’m a very bad businessman. When I hybridize something, I know when it should be sold, but then I want to keep it to see how it blooms."

When a collector from Japan came to buy Kamiya’s paphiopedilum hybrid, "he offered me $500, and I said, ‘No, I can sell it to you for $200 but not more.’"