If this is autumn around Puget Sound, it is spring time in Brazil and heaven at Bill Freeman's house.

Heaven lurks behind Freeman’s Tacoma home. In a greenhouse populated by whirring fans, dripping hoses, rotting bark, an orange tabby cat named Nicodemus and a palette of the deepest pinks and purples, reigns Freeman’s heaven.

Freeman’s greenhouse is a testament o the American Orchid Society’s welcoming statement in its handbook: “The world of orchids is a land which, once you enter, you may not ever want to leave.”

Freeman, 83, is a retired machinist who among the orchid growers presenting these intriguing flowers to the world this weekend at the Tacoma Orchid Society show at the Lakewood Mall.

This one-way trip eternal land of orchids began 35 years ago when a fellow machinist named Frank Burnett stopped by Freeman’s house one evening.

“Come out to my car,” Burnett said, “I’ve got something for you.”

Burnett bequeathed Freeman a lifetime of joy – a few potted orchids that needed a good home.

“I bloomed them all”, Freeman said. Had’em set-up on a couple of card tables. They started taking over, so the wife (Eleanor Freeman) said they had to go.

“So, I built myself a greenhouse. Pretty soon, it was full.”

Freeman’s brimming greenhouse has been expanded four times. Besides one drowsy tabby cat and more than 500 orchids, the green house is home to a brilliant bird of paradise bush, a lemon tree bursting with fruit, a kaleidoscopic rack of green, white, red, purple, and prize blue ribbons won at orchid shows around the Sound, and a drizzly jungle aura.

“Everyone dreams of having something on the exotic side,” Freeman said, “but orchids are easy to raise. It’s better to neglect ’em than water and feed ’em too much.”

Freeman carefully neglects his cattleyas, with their fluffly ruffles; and phalaenopsis, with their prim oval petals; and cybidiums, with their eager acceptance of out cool maritime climes; and oncidiums, with their dancing iris-like leaves; and odontoglossums, with their prismatic lacy sprays; and vandas, with their splashy five-petal blooms.

The growing media is Freeman’s own recipe of bark laced with crushed pumice and a dab of charcoal. He mists the orchids once a week. Every month, he daubs th orchids with a weak foliar fertilizer fortified with Epsom salts.

For inspiration, Freeman goes a safari – Not Brazil or some Central or South American birthplaces of orchids; in Freeman’s controlled habitat of the greenhouse, the orchids think it is spring, that they are in Brazil and it is time to bloom.

Come May or June, in our Northern Hemisphere’s spring, Freeman heads to Snoqualmie Pass and Blewett Pass.

“Up by Denny Creek on the Snoqualmie Pass is a little walkway with half a dozen different orchids just everywhere,” Freeman said. “You can find lady’s slipper orchids all around Blewett Pass.

“Down in the lowlands, you can find coral orchids growing in alder thickets. They bloom one year and then they die. You know, 39 wild orchids grow in the woods of Washington.”

Freeman has tamed the mysteries of orchid hybridization. He bred a species of vanda orchid and named it “Vanda Sandrania” for his daughter, Sandra. He bred another vandal named Potsy.

“When Eleanor and I were first married,” he said, “I called her Potsy because she was always potsying around.”

And in the greenhouse is a small, delicate hybrid cross, a purple orchid with yellow tint. Carl Montgomery, a Tacoma pharmacist and orchid show judge, named the orchid Bill Freeman.

“I have a little bit of everything in here,” Freeman said. “It’s a nice place to work in the wintertime. I can work in a T-shirt when there’s snow on the ground.

‘I like this one coming up here. It’s a cattleya Portia. The fragrance will run you right out of the greenhouse. Get a whiff of that. It’s a little bit of heaven.”