Human Flower Project

Sunday, January 22, 2006

Bottoms Up—Hibiscus

One of the showiest garden flowers shows up in Caribbean ice pitchers, in Asian kitchens, and now in Tanzanian “jerricans,” as wine

Hibiscus sabdariffa, specimen
Photo: Swedish Museum
of Natural History

To be a rural woman in Tanzania, you don’t get any breaks in the business world.  Hilda Mwesiga apparently didn’t need a break, just solidarity, chutzpa and hibiscus.

“In rural areas, where women come together in times of happiness and sadness, we felt that we needed to start up an economic activity to help us earn a living. So we formed a group and learnt how to process wine,” Mwesiga said.

A retired nurse, Mwesiga began making wine from roselle, the local hibiscus flower, and has now joined forces with other women of Bukoba, her community, to produce over 120 litres each week.  The wine sells for 1200 Tanzania sh. per bottle (about $1.07 USD) but people who can’t afford that much “buy her wine in containers and jerrycans. (Mwesiga) plans to expand her market as the East African Union market grows.”

Calyxes of hibiscus
Photo: Phuket Jet Tour

This excellent webpage from Purdue University offers encyclopedic detail about Hibiscus sabdariffa. “The Flemish botanist, M. de L’Obel, published his observations of the plant in 1576, and the edibility of the leaves was recorded in Java in 1687. Seeds are said to have been brought to the New World by African slaves.”

In the Caribbean, where hibiscus grows abundantly, the flower combined with ginger is a popular tea. Tantalizing, here is Carol Bareuther’s tea recipe from the island of St. Thomas.

In Mexico “flor de Jamaica” (actually the dried calyxes) can be found at most local markets. A Mexican restaurant outside D.C. offers a “chayote (tropical squash) salad accessorized with crumbled cheese, peanuts and a sharp red dressing of hibiscus flower and onion.” (We’re working on getting that recipe, folks.) The Purdue horticulturists also note that in Africa, hibiscus calyxes “are frequently cooked as a side-dish eaten with pulverized peanuts.”

Ready to imbibe: Nile Valley “Hibiscus Mint Tea”
Photo: JT65b4b

The national beverage of Texas may have once been Lone Star Beer, but the municipal drink of Austin, the state capitol, is hibiscus tea. Awad Abdelgadir’s Nile Valley Teas, a company based not on the Nile but the Colorado River, has made the music capitol ruby-throated, and also benefits Awad’s hometown in the Sudan. (In Egypt hibiscus tea, known as Karkade, is enormously popular.) Hot or cold, it’s delicious and, like cranberry juice, awakeningly tangy. If you’d like another endorsement, see what this blogger-skeptic has to show and tell.

Hibiscus tea is also brewed and drunk in Asia, though these recipes tend to skip the Caribbean’s ginger. The flower also makes a preserve, like cranberry, especially good for livening up poultry dishes.

We look forward to hearing how the Tanzanian women’s enterprise with hibiscus “spirits” develops. And we recommend that the company sell its wine with a roselle-tea “chaser.” In Guatemala, an infusion of roselle flowers is a popular hangover cure: pink hair of the pink dog.

Saturday, January 21, 2006

With Flowers, ‘Here’s to the Republic!’

Note: Many thanks to Lubna Kably, photographer and travel writer based in Bangalore, for her report on a horticulture show that doubles as a patriotic celebration in India.

Floral urn, Republic Day Flower Show, Bangalore
Photo: Lubna Kably

By Lubna Kably

An annual horticultural show held to celebrate India’s Republic Day – January 26, reminds the city folk that Bangalore is also India’s garden city. (On the 26th of January 1950, India became a sovereign state, governed with its own constitution.)

Lal Bagh, Bangalore’s local botanical garden, was laid out by the monarch Hyder Ali during the 18th century. It further flourished under the care of his son Tipu Sultan. Today this @250-acre garden boasts of over 1,000 species of flora. This garden also features a glasshouse, modelled on London’s Crystal Palace. It is believed that Prince Albert Victor ordered this glasshouse to be built.

If one thought, that this was enough history – there is more. The oldest rock formation in India, dating back about 3000 million years, stands right in the middle of this garden. A notice posted by the Geological Society of India at the bottom of the hillock calls it: “a typical exposure of ‘peninsular geneiss’”—the geological term for a complex mix of granite rock that developed in Peninsular India 3000 million years ago. Mr. W.F. Smeeth, of the Mysore Geological Society, gave the phenomenon this scientific name in 1916. A watchtower erected by the founder of Bangalore – Kempe Gowda—stands atop this hillock.

Fruit mountain, with Bird of Paradise flowers
Photo: Lubna Kably 

A locus of so much history, Lal Bagh seems the right place for a fitting tribute – with flowers- to celebrate India’s Republic Day. Every year the Horticultural Society organises a horticultural show. This year, while fruits and vegetables were on display, the cynosure of all eyes was the flower show. An interesting decoration - an urn made of flowers was the centre of attraction. Riots of colours were everywhere – carnations, dahlias, roses, lilies.  The show, generally a ten-day affair, commences on the weekend prior to the Republic Day (January 26).

Bangalore may today be a technology hub, but the horticultural show reminds us that it is also India’s Garden City. (The special exhibition at Lal Bagh runs through Jan. 26th.)

 

 

Friday, January 20, 2006

Smuggling Slipper Orchids

A scientist who traded in endangered flowers of Malaysia is sentenced to a London jail.

Slipper Orchid (Paphiopedilum Holdenii)
Photo: Jo’s Orchids

Orchids have a peculiar effect on people. In the eyes of some folks (who will go unnamed), they’re ghastly flowers, resembling either insects or genitalia. (Perhaps this attitude stems from wearing the floral equivalant of a dog tongue too near one’s face at a long Easter service 40 years ago.) Other people are so captivated by these odd plants, they’ll risk prison time for them.

Dr. Sian Lim clearly falls on the latter side of the line. He was caught at Heathrow Airport in June 2004 with more then 100 endangered orchids. Lim, employed by an English drug company, appears to have collected the plants in Borneo, Indonesia and his native Malaysia. The Independent reported, “126 plants of the 130 ...seized from his luggage were all Asian slipper orchids - one of the rarest of all the 750 orchid genera, or groups of species. They are distinguished by a voluptuous lower petal, or lip, and are closely related to Britain’s rarest wild flower, the lady’s slipper.” Call them Paphiopedilum.

Paphiopedilum rothschildianum
Photo: Grobraschener Orchideen

Because the habitat for these flowers is disappearing and hungry fanciers have over-collected the plants, trafficking in many varieties of slipper orchids is forbidden by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES). Check out this unbelievable gallery of endangered orchids; then, if you feel tempted, check out the story of Lim’s arrest once again.

Lim pleaded guity to 13 chages of smuggling and was sentenced to four months behind bars.

Susan Orlean explored this not-so-rare form of floral obsession in an article for the New Yorker, which morphed into her book The Orchid Thief, which morphed into a weird and excellent movie called Adaptation a few years back.

We don’t know whether Lim brought the orchids to England to keep or to sell—according to the Independent, “Some specimens can change hands for thousands of pounds.” The judge in the case ruled that Lim had demonstrated “a view to commercial gain”—as well as bad judgment and (some might say) hideous taste in flowers.

Thursday, January 19, 2006

Roses Sway the Delaware State House

To defeat a bill on stem-cell research, opponents came on strong, with masses of red roses in the Legislative Hall.

Legislative Hall, Dover, Delaware
Image: Penny Post Cards from Delaware

Who says politicking requires a big stick?

In Dover, the Delaware capitol, yesterday it was mounds of roses that appeared to have clobbered a bill permitting research with human embryos. The measure had passed smoothly through the Delaware State Senate last June and looked like a certainty in the House, but last week, supporters of the bill began buckling under. “The first sign that the plans might not work out came last Tuesday morning in Dover, when the roses started arriving at Legislative Hall. By the time legislators began filtering in for their opening session, the lobby was filled with their aroma. When House members took their seats, each was greeted by a vase of the flowers, each stem bearing a card with the sentiments of a constituent who opposed the legislation.”

The campaign had been organized by a group called A Rose and a Prayer. Dedicated to opposing human cloning and embryonic research, this organization revived the red rose, a symbol of the anti-abortion movement since its early days. The Delaware group solicited donations “to cover the cost of purchasing and sending a rose to your legislator as a message that you want him or her to vote No on Senate Bill 80.”

The pro-life movement has delivered red roses to political leaders for at least two decades, in Washington, D.C., in Nebraska, in Missouri (though these were silk roses), and elsewhere as fragrant photo-opportunities. Flowers—or so many people appear to believe—can seize the moral high ground in a controversy, a quiet claim that “Nature” (perhaps God) is on “our side.”

Did red roses actually change the outcome of the stem-cell vote in Delaware? We don’t know. We DO know that “Roses…sent to lawmakers to represent constituents opposed to the measure, flooded Legislative Hall offices last week,” and that’s when favor on the Sentate Bill began to deteriorate. And we know that despite months of careful groundwork to move the bill through, yesterday “the House voted 32-3 in favor of a gutted version of the bill that sets a $1 million fine for human reproductive cloning and a $100,000 fine for sale of a human embryo.”

Proponents of stem-cell research might want to drop by a flower shop there in Dover for a consultation.