Human Flower Project

Thursday, September 07, 2006

At the Place d’Alma Tunnel

Flowers laid August 31 wilt in remembrance.
Photo: Julie Ardery

Walking over toward the the Eiffel Tower, you may note an odd sculpted torch above the Place d’Alma tunnel and cars streaking down the hill. If it’s early September you’ll also see memorials to Princess Diana, who died after a car crash in the tunnel August 31, 1997, her driver racing away from photographers on motorbikes.

Obviously photographers of the non-professional, slow sort, are still chasing “Lady Di.” And so are Parisian admirers, with letters and of course flowers.

Tuesday, September 05, 2006

Le Roi de Deadheading

Marie de Medici may have ordered the Luxembourg Palace built, but thirty gardeners sweat to keep the grounds gorgeous.

Sylvain Piperno gestures from the main parterre to
other reaches of the huge Luxembourg Garden that he
and thirty other full time gardeners, keep looking royally
beautiful.
Photo: Bill Bishop

The Parterres of the Luxembourg Garden in Paris are bright as jewels in Louis XIV’s crown: dahlias, coxcomb, geraniums, begonias, and more, backed with tall stands of white nicotina and pink and white cleome. Every bloom we saw in this huge garden (covering 24 hectares)  was stout and bright.

If you think plants just grow that way, you should have seen Sylvain Piperno out methodically trimming the edge of the flower bed this humid and hot September day. He worked slowly along with a pair of large clippers, tossing each trimming carefully into a large plastic bucket. In the half hour or so we watched, he probably worked around about a twentieth of the huge oval.

Taking a short break, M. Piperno told us he’s worked here at the Luxembourg Garden for 18 years, first at its Orangerie but in more recent years taking charge of these beautiful geometric beds behind the palace. July and August, he says, are the most strenuous months of the years, requiring constant work to stay ahead of the vigorous plants and keep them at full tilt bloom. He says there are 30 gardeners on staff and another 40 who “do paperwork.” We noticed that there also were gendarmes calmly stationed beside some of the flower beds. Now that’s terrific community policing!

While the rest of the world knows better—slathering on the sunblock—the crowds at this beloved Paris park were stretching out their legs and tossing their heads back, as we used to say, “laying out,” for their bains de soleil. Very likely, though, all that preening was just pretext, to hang out here and savor M. Piperno & company’s handiwork.

Those bright geraniums alone are enough to bring freckles out on your nose.

Sunday, September 03, 2006

Whatever Happened to Norman Spannon?

Calling out a history of daring designers.

Arrangement by Norman Spannon, 1962
Photo: National Archive of Australia

Is there a Department of Florists History? If not, we’d like to create one right here at the Human Flower Project, to learn more about designers of the past.

This ephemeral art form has been a fairly anonymous one, too. And there is definitely power in anonymity: when ideas and methods aren’t owned, bought and sold, they have a way of sluicing through cultures with ease. Further, there is something basically repugnant about turning shapes and color combinations into “intellectual property,” though increasingly people are attempting just such antics.

Several days ago we ran across this photo in the National Archives of Australia, an intriguing arrangement of “dried Australian Streletzia” flowers. Who would have thought of drying Bird of Paradise blooms? Norman Spannon, that’s who? But who was (or is) Norman Spannon? This arrangement, from 1962, looks daringly “modern.” We find it marvelously sculptural, almost fiery.  And check that dramatic lighting—enough to turn Martha Stewart’s hair jet black.

In the days and weeks to come, we welcome visitors, especially our florist friends, to send us photos of daring, original or otherwise memory-making designs, with as much or as little information as you may have. For the purposes of our history project, we’re especially interested to see designs, say, pre-1972—that’s the year Miss Vicki and Tiny Tim were married on the Johnny Carson Show amid 10,000 tulips and seems a reasonable milestone in the popular culture of flowers.

So (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) and tales.  We’re eager to learn more about the florists, famous or “anonymous,” of the past and do some singing about these unsung artist/craftspeople.

Saturday, September 02, 2006

Counting in Kurinji Years

The hills around Munnar, India, are turning blue, for the first time in a generation.

Neelakurinji: See it now or wait till 2018
Photo: Ian Lockwood

The anticipation’s been building since 1994. Now all the tourist offices around Munnar are swelling to full holler. “The Neelakurinji flowers (Phelobophyllum Kunthanum) have picturesquely carpeted the entire hillside,” a phenomenon that only happens every twelve years in this mountainous region of Southern India.

The kurinji plants live along the slopes between Kerala and Tamil Nadu. According to Mohan Varghese, chairman of High Range Wild Life and Environment Association,  “About 30 percent of the flowers have already blossomed.” The rest will unfurl in the next two and a half months, covering 250 acres in all.

The kurinji is beloved, almost mythic, here. One blogger went nearly apoplectic with happiness upon seeing his first bloom last October. “I felt a sharp pulse of electric excitement: ‘Neelakurinji!’” Like seeing a comet streak overhead, the kurinji places us back in a larger, loftier design. And, metaphysics aside, the event is beautiful.

Stamp commemorates the 2006 kurinji bloom
Photo: The Hindu

The kurinji’s limited range has been shrinking, due to competing tea and cardamom plantations and intensive timbering. Now, especially as they see the potential for tourist dollars, officials in Tamil Nadu and Kerala are cooperating on preservation efforts.  To mark the 2006 bloom, the Indian government issued a commemorative stamp, too.

Care to visit? This site gives directions to the kurinji fields of Kerala. If you’re within ogling distance, don’t miss it, for the kurinji blooms just once in a generation (Okay, “a generation” used to extend for 70 years, but apparently, that’s changed).

This excellent site provides intriguing “human/kurinji” associations, literary and otherwise. We’d heard of counting in dog time (7 X human years) , and now we learn “The Muduvar tribe, which inhabit the mountain ranges around Valparai (Tamil Nadu) and Munnar (Kerala) in the Western Ghats, calculates its age with blossoming of the Kurinji.” How fine, to be 4 1/2 again!