Human Flower Project

Monday, September 27, 2004

Nose-Gays, They’re Not

Stories from Malaysia and Australia disagree on “the world’s biggest flower,” except how it smells.

Put a handkerchief over your nose and send up a muffled cheer.

Titum Arum, the world’s biggest flower, has bloomed for only the second time in Australia. Officials at Sydney’s Botanic Garden Trust are thrilled and choking. “It has the smell of rotting fish,” says executive director Tim Entwhistle.

Amorphophallus titanum looks like its Latin name, an excited giant, and can grow as large as 2.9 metres. It blossoms slowly and should climax about October 7. Check out the United States Botanic Garden’s specimen that bloomed in July.

The New Straits Times Press (Malaysia) reports today on a different flower, Rafflesia, claiming it’s “the world’s biggest.”

“The flower has been used for centuries by the Orang Asli as a remedy for internal injuries, and is especially prescribed for women after they give birth.” The expanding interest in herbal remedies has set off a collecting spree, so that now some local healers worry that the plant may become endangered. Law permits the Orang Asli to harvest the rafflesia buds even in protected areas, but with prices for the plants ascending, some tribespeople are selling to middlemen.

Rafflesia blooms look like the flower babies in the Land of Oz. Only a metre in diameter, they can’t hold a candle, as it were, to Titum Arum. Except they smell like dead meat, too. Eau de Carrion, anyone?

Sunday, September 26, 2004

And a Pink Carnation

The boutonniere that made Marty Robbins’s blues bluer is a show of adolescent daring in Robert Graves’s autobiography. In other words, “The Language of Flowers” doesn’t translate well.

Occasionally today you’ll hear mentioned “The Language of Flowers,” a system of symbolic reference that was popularized, but without much success, in 19th century Europe. In this language, for example, the lily “means” purity and mallow “means” forgiveness—so that, presumably, sending someone a bouquet of lily and mallow would mean, er, “Thank you for having the purity of heart to forgive me” or perhaps “I forgive you for being a puritan.”

Today’s florists sometimes reach for this system of significances, almost as a marketing technique. But they always fumble trying to connect each flower with the right virtue. Symbols can’t be decreed this way. Such associations must build over time and persist only because people continue to use and understand them. When you see a pansy, honestly, is the first—or the 80th—thing you think of “The Holy Trinity”?

Flowers communicate so powerfully not because they embody particular concepts or principles but because they are ambiguous. They invite us actually to look, smell, touch, wonder, reflect.

In his autobiography Good-Bye to All That , poet Robert Graves describes the vicious antagonism between the “Bloods” (jocks) and the scholars ("nerds") at his English boarding school circa 1910.

These two gangs of boys clashed during Graves’s years at Charterhouse, a school whose strict social hierarchy had always permitted the athletes unmercifully to bully the rest of the student body. The nerds finally stood up to the Bloods in what Graves calls “the bravest deed ever done at Charterhouse.” They broke with a longstanding Sunday custom, where the “First Eleven” jocks had always asserted their power by daring to arrive for chapel after the rest of the students had sheepishly filed in.

With delight, Graves describes his scholar-friends’ historic entrance: “On this Sunday, then, when the Bloods had entered with their usual swaggering assurance, an extraordinary thing happened.

“The three sixth-formers slowly walked up the aisle, magnificant in grey flannel trousers, slit jackets, butterfly collars, and each wore a pink carnation in his lapel. Astonished and horrified by this spectacle, everyone turned to gaze at the Captain of the First Eleven; he had gone quite white.”

The Language of Flowers calls the carnation a symbol of “bravery, love and friendship.” Maybe the English school boys of 1910 really DID know and use this floral code, but a pink carnation? I translate this as “Effrontery,” “In-Your-Face-Sensitive.” Or how about just “Take That!”?

Though many an American florist has a mini-glossary taped to the front counter, “The Language of Flowers” never caught on in the United States. If it had Marty Robbins could never have written “A White Sport Coat, and a Pink Carnation.” No bravery here. Just a dope in a rented tux. He’s been stood up for the prom. Pink carnation ~ sucker.

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Saturday, September 25, 2004

Red Stars in the Morning

Cardinal Vine Seed, while it lasts....

My father claims that flowers have wills of their own. “Some years they decide they’ll bloom, and other years they say, ‘Nope. I don’t believe I will.’”
I’ve found this to be true. This summer, for example, I spotted what looked like cardinal vine, its telling feathery leaves, sprouting in one of my flower beds. I coaxed it along and now have about twenty feet of vine woven through an iron railing. It’s managed to survive the Texas summer and is putting on a fine show.

Cardinal vine (ipomea X multifida) is an annual. I bought one plant three years ago that barely bloomed. So explain why this vigorous plant—just one of them—emerged in June of 2004. Cardinal vine resolve is as good an explanation as any.
It looks as if I’ll have seed to give away. Send a comment here with your address and I’ll mail out as many mini-seed packets as I can. That is, if you can stand a strong-willed, unpredictable addition to your garden, star-shaped and bright red as the button in Pasha’s hat.

Friday, September 24, 2004

Flower Envy

How can Philly’s flower judges go gaga over an invasive plant?

Philadelphia’s flower arbiters are ivy league. Their garden clubs and flower shows, some of the oldest in the nation, set floral trends for generations. But recent Gold Medal winners named by the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society cast doubt on the sanity and—dare I say it?—the taste of this grande olde organization.

For, along with Korean fir and an orange variety of winterberry, the PHS chose Gelsemium sempervirens"Margarita" (Carolina jasmine) as a 2005 winner. We call it Carolina jessamine here in Central Texas. I think of it as cowboy forsythia, garish enough to survive our drought and alkaline soil. It’s everywhere.

This spring it was I who deserved the gold medal, for having hacked out a thicket of the stuff six feet high and twenty feet long. Already new clumps are fighting back.

So how could a plant that kindly Austin nurseryman Scott Thurman calls “a workhorse” captivate Philadelphia’s garden connoisseurs? Greg Grant, one of my favorite flower scholars, nailed it: “Gardeners want what they don’t have.” So while Carolina jessamine may deserve excitement and a little nursing in Zone 6, here in Texas, most of us can’t love it—it won’t go away.

Thursday, September 23, 2004

Divided We Survive—Daylilies and More

In the U.S. now’s the time to divide perennials like Siberian iris and daylilies, to improve next spring’s flower display and butter up the neighbors too.

Gardening is social, because everybody got her plants from somebody else. If you’re lucky, you got some of yours for free, from a neighbor both generous and wise, somebody who notices how crowded daylily beds quit flowering. It’s share the wealth or lose it.

Today’s Washington Post offers good tips on dividing and transplanting perennials, with a focus on daylillies. Check it out, and then start digging or begging.

Passalong Plants is a good, breezy book on this subject, with color illustrations of the most common varieties shared across the Southern U.S.

Back in Kentucky, a popular passalong was Celandine Poppy, low-growing with rich yellow flowers. It’s one of the earliest spring bloomers in Louisville and Lexington. Friends back home call it “Peggy Poppy” because we all received our “starts” from Peggy Courtney, a beautiful lady who shared her plants with all of us. Peggy’s no longer with us, but her yellow flowers still bloom every early spring in Louisville yards and across the Bluegrass.

Wednesday, September 22, 2004

Permian Girls Steal Friday Night Lights

Students at Permian High School in Odessa, Texas, observed a riotous custom Friday, sporting gargantuan mums for the homecoming game September 17 vs. Amarillo.

Homecoming mums used to be fresh flowers but since the mid-1980s, fabric flowers have taken over, turning the once-ephemeral corsage into a trophy of one’s adolescence. These status symbols range in price from $25 up to more than $200, some bearing battery-operated lights and music boxes.

Permian High was the subject of H.G. Bissinger’s best seller Friday Night Lights. The movie version, starring Billy Bob Thornton, will be released in October. The real-life Permain Panthers, 3-0 for the season, beat Amarillo’s Sandies 41-17. but the real winners last Friday were the girls fortunate, bold and crazed enough to wear mums big enough to beat both football teams and both bands.

From Safe-Cracking to Rose-Feathering

A new Brit television show “Going Straight” sets up a group of ex-cons under the tutelage of a premiere floral designer.

Can flowers rehabilitate a criminal? “Going Straight,” a reality television show new this season in England, will test that question, or maybe it’s just a good excuse to snicker. Let’s watch a thug wire a rosebud.

Producers of the show say no. An article in the Guardian quotes the program’s executive producer, Hilary Rosen. “We wanted to look at why unemployment and reoffending are such a problem for people who have left prison,” she says. “But we wanted to do something positive - to offer people a chance to help themselves with advice and training.”

Six ex-offenders will work with floral designer Paula Pryke and a business consultant to set up a working shop by Mother’s Day, THE big day for florists in England. The show will track the difficulties ex-convicts face buckling down to an honest living and building public trust, as well as, presumably, keeping iris fresh longer than three days.

For Brits, the show can’t help but allude to “Buster” Edwards. Edwards participated in “The Great Train Robbery,” a notorious 1963 heist, when the Royal Mail Train was relieved of 2.5 million pounds. After his release from the penitentiary, Edwards quietly opened a flower shop outside the Waterloo station. As England’s “Bird Man of Alcatraz,” Edwards and his story intrigued the nation, a surreal combination of ruthless crime and delicate sensibility.

Good luck to the budding florists. Surely they know how Buster’s business ended. He was discovered hanging in his potting shed in 1994. Associates claimed that he’d been in on another string of train robberies, had come under suspicion, and couldn’t bear the idea of being locked up again.

Tuesday, September 21, 2004

Vietnamese Town Capitalizes on “Eternal Spring”

A city in Vietnam’s central highlands plans to open an international flower auction next year, another development in its longstanding romance-for-profit.

Beauty sells itself. Just ask anyone in the travel business who’s booked trips to Sevilla but not Malaga, Niagra Falls not Buffalo.

Just so, the city of Da Lat located 300 km from Ho Chi Minh City has long been a favorite destination of travelers in Vietnam. “Dotted with waterfalls, lakes and evergreen forests, (Da Lat) is often called the City of Eternal Spring and is a favourite spot for honeymoons.”

Asia Pulse reports today that Da Lat plans to build an international flower auction by next year, taking advantage of its year-round temperate climate and adding a pretty business to its architectural and natural attractions. Eco-tourism, it’s not just for Westerners, never has been.

Chinese flower growers and sellers have advanced this year, with exports up 15% in the period January-July, according to today’s Xinhua. And Asia Pulse reports: “Da Lat has recently sent officials to China to learn about organising flower shows.”

Monday, September 20, 2004

Big City Window-Boxes

Two European architects spruce up homely buildings with vertical gardening.

A huge, plain 10-story apartment building in Paris’s 17th arrondissement has become the city’s tallest planter. Architect Edouard Francois transformed it into a “Flower Tower” with wraparound window-boxes and drip-irrigated bamboo.

Jonathan Glancy reports in today’s Guardian that Francois’s innovation brings shade, life and wind-rustle to an otherwise undistinguished block of the city. The architect “has long observed how, given the chance, Parisians will cultivate the tiniest balcony, nurturing surprising greenery in this tightly packed, densely occupied city. He has formalised this hobby....”

Glancy participated in a similar feat of vertical gardening himself 10 years ago in London, hoping to improve and preserve the Hayward Gallery on London’s South Bank: after a design competition, the building was covered with trailing plants.

Francois is also the force behind Montpellier’s “Sprouting Building”. “Straightforward, well-planned apartments were tucked behind what appeared to be a very unlikely rock face, made of concrete covered in a mesh of steel cages filled with loosely compacted stones....

“There was a rush to live here, for not only does each apartment enjoy a more or less enclosed rustic timber balcony - like a potting shed in the sky - but residents knew that, sooner or later, the wall would bloom, as indeed it has.”

Now that’s Urban Renewal, Babylon-style.

Sunday, September 19, 2004

Bad Guys Bloom in Sayles Movie

In the new film by director John Sayles, Silver City , the old association of flowers with evil rises again.

There’s a big vase of flowers beside the dastardly preacher’s pulpit. When fictional Colordao senator Richard Pilager welcomes big-time donors to his mansion in the mountains, red roses and gerber daisies festoon the banquet table. Even the parade for El Dia de Los Muertos, Day of the Dead, with its loads of traditional marigolds, is directed by a cruel coyote who exploits and even murders immigrant workers.

John Sayles’s new movie Silver City tips us which characters are his bad guys: they’re the ones with flowers on hand. Even the wicked lobbyist, who’s snaked our hero’s girlfriend, has a big basket of red chrysanthemums on his front porch.

As anthropologist Jack Goody discusses in his magnum opus The Culture of Flowers , flowers have been associated with depravity in many eras. After the Roman Empire fell, early Christian church leaders forbad flowers except for medicinal use. Other phases of austerity have followed. By linking flower blossoms with the black hats in his latest release, John Sayles proves that this old association is alive and well.