Human Flower Project

Friday, December 31, 2004

Yemanja!

On the coast of Brazil, both December 31 and January 1 are feast days of Yemanja, Queen of the Sea.

On Copacabana Beach, Rio de Janeiro, celebrants light candles amid white gladiolas in rites for the ocean deity Yemanja. 
Photo: Silvia Izquierdo for AP

Times Square offers one kind of New Year’s celebration, the beaches of Brazil another.

Afro-Brazilians, especially in the Bahia region, honor the ocean goddess Yemanja by sending blue and white flowers out over the waves. Custom says that if the flowers come ashore, Yemanja is displeased and will bring a poor fishing season; if the flowers vanish, she has accepted the offering and a year of good catches will follow.

February 2nd (Ground Hog Day/Candlemas) is her major holiday, but December 31 and January 1 are dedicated to her also.

Yemanja came to the shores of Brazil with African slaves. A central figure in Yoruban religion, she is known by many names across West Africa and the Caribbean-- including La Sirene, the mermaid goddess of Haiti. “In the Yoruban pantheon, Yemanja rules the top half of the ocean while Olokun, a hermaphrodite with long flowing hair, rules the bottom half.” A regal and protective figure, she became associated with the Virgin Mary.

This site, en espagnol, may interest our Spanish-speaking visitors. And to welcome the New Year, here’s a clip of neo-Yoruban music by Jorge Amorium and Hank Schroy, their invocation of Yemanja.

On land and sea, Happy New Year!

Company Recalls Lily Remedy

After sulfites were discovered in some similar products, a California company is taking its dried lily flowers off the market.

Lily bulbs and flowers are old herbal remedies, used both in the West and East.

Wei Chuan USA is recalling its dried lily flowers because “labels failed to disclose that the product may contain sulfites, which can be deadly to those allergic to them.” Consuming sulfites can send asthmatics into shock.

In Chinese medicine, boiled lily flowers and honey before breakfast are sometimes prescribed for patients with hemorrhoids. Euphemism or higher consciousness?—another source recommends dried lily blooms to “calm shen,” or soothe the spirit.

Some Western herbalists exalt the lily’s “antimicrobial oil,” akin to the juices of garlic and onion. The flowers have been used to heal cuts and bruises, and one source deems them “Perfect for removing splinters.”

For now, herbalists would be wise to find alternative anti-epileptic remedies, anodynes (pain relievers), and splinter aids. Another company had to recall its dried lily flowers in 2001.

Thursday, December 30, 2004

“Paradise” on Parade

Saturday brings the 116th Tournament of Roses Parade; from horse-drawn carriages festooned with blossoms, the floats are now computerized, lacquered behemoths that take a year to make.

In 1890 the residents of Pasadena, California, decided New Year’s Day was a bragging opportunity.

“‘In New York, people are buried in snow,’ announced Professor Charles F. Holder” of the Valley Hunt Club. “‘Here our flowers are blooming and our oranges are about to bear. Let’s hold a festival to tell the world about our paradise.’ “

The Tournament of Roses has an outstanding website, with links to the big commercial float-building companies and all-volunteer armies. All it takes, according to one professional outfit, is “20 million flowers, 8,000 gallons of glue and 16,000 volunteers.”

Stanford Decorated Car, 1909
Photo: http://www.tournamentofroses.com

The Rose Parade is a five star chamber-of-commerce spectacle. A photographic timeline shows how the shaggy early floats, designed and executed by manic frat boys, evolved into the rolling kinetic sculptures of today.

Malaysia float, 1990
Photo: Charisma Designs

Even the sleek 21st century floats must be sheathed only with live flowers and other organic matter. “Dinosaurs and dragons often feature Brussels sprouts, cranberries and squash; underwater scenes may include kale and cauliflower; halved raw potatoes are ideal for a cobblestone walkway.” But spinach doesn’t hold up well.

The Rose Parade themes have been a fairly la-di-dah mix of patriotism and fantasy, though there have been some windshifts through the decades. In 1936, the parade recounted “History in Flowers.” 1968 brought the “Wonderful World of Adventure.” “Thanks to Communications” was the 1988 theme, and for 2005 a decidedly Bushy theme: “Celebrate Family.”

The South Pasadena committee has entered “Mom’s Flight School,” as its float in this year’s competition: “featuring a mother dragon lying on her back, protecting her toddler and unhatched egg.” Hard to tell whether this entry celebrates single-motherhood or in vitro fertilization.

A pop cultural heroine emerges from the fumes: Isabella Coleman, the glue goddess whose innovations in the late 1920s took float-building from backyard hobby-craft to kitsch commercial art (granted, one that appeals to a 7-year old’s aesthetic: polar bears, Fred Flintstone and the Bedrock gang, a 210-foot ice cream sundae, and Dinah Shore in sparkling chariot of white blooms).

The parade begins at 8:00 a.m. (Pacific Time, of course) on New Year’s Day.

Bed of Roses, San Francisco’s float, 1931

Wednesday, December 29, 2004

In Mass Mourning

The world grieves for thousands who died after Sunday’s earthquake off the western coast of Sumatra.

A burial ground in Cuddalore, India.
Photo: Arko Datta for Reuters

Sunday’s violent earthquake on the western edge of Indonesia has killed tens of thousands of people in 11 countries across Asia and Africa.

(Oxfam reports on its relief efforts.)

Flower petals were scattered off the southern coast of India, to remember and bless those who disappeared at sea. But death on this scale makes the sacred and ancient rites of burial impossible, another cruel fact of life for survivors. Across Indonesia and South India, many of the dead must be buried before they can even be identified, unceremoniously, in the interest of public health.

This photograph by Claude Renault gives some sense of the how people in Tamil Nadu customarily mourn the dead—a funeral in Kanchipuram.

And here is a Buddhist prayer from Sri Lanka.

Vannagandhagunopetam
etam kusumasantatim
pujayami munindassa
siripadasaroruhe.

Pujemi Buddham kusumena ‘nena
punnena ‘metena ca hotu mokkham
Puppham milayati yatha idam me
kayo tatha yati vinasabahavam.

This mass of flowers endowed with color, fragrance, and quality
I offer at the lotus-like feet of the King of Sages.
I worship the Buddha with these flowers:
by the merit of this may I attain freedom.

Even as these flowers do fade,
so does my body come to destruction.

Sunday, December 19, 2004

A Holiday Meditation (or Parlor Game)

This “snowflake” is actually a white petunia, transformed by photographer David Bookbinder into a Flower Mandala. Welcome and thanks again to David for pointing us to his beautiful images. The photographer solicits your thoughts.

I’d like to invite you to participate in a project I’m doing with the series of mandala images I’ve made from photographs of flowers. I’m planning to put together a book with a word and a meditative phrase or quote associated with each image. I’ve posted the images in a forum on the University of British Columbia Botanical Garden web site and am hoping people will help me with the text part of the project.

I hope, eventually, to create a book of 52. In addition to text to go with the images, I’m also interested in any other sorts of comments you might care to make.

Thanks --
- David
David J. Bookbinder Photo Transformations

Queen Anne’s Lace

Note: It takes just a moment to register on the UBC Garden Forum site, but for your trouble you can see all 50 of David’s photos and join one of the finest gardening forums around.

Human Flower Project is on the road for the next few days. We’ll resume the weblog soon. Meantime, to all visitors and friends, Happy Solstice, Merry Christmas!

Poinsettia: a Little Legend, a Lot of Marketing

We call Euphorbia pulcherrima—a.k.a. nochebuena, poinsettia—the “traditional” Christmas flower of the Americas. But traditions, like all dimensions of culture, aren’t decreed by Nature; they’re human-made.

So who turned a highland weed into a consumerist sacrament?

Fifteen years ago during a dusty busride in the Guatemalan highlands, we passed a huge hill covered with red bushes: poinsettia, wild, blooming like mad in early August. How weird to see a whole mountainside of them in the summer sunlight.

Joel Poinsett, the first U.S. ambassador to Mexico, must have seen something like this nearly a century ago. An amateur botanist, he brought the plant back to his native South Carolina, sharing it with “John Bartram of Philadelphia, who in turn gave the plant over to another friend, Robert Buist, a Pennsylvania nurseryman.”

For months, from Delaware, to Texas, to Xochimilco (the famed flower district of Mexico City), growers have been toiling to meet the huge holiday demand for poinsettias. From the White House to the beautician’s counter, they’re everywhere. It’s traditional.

The legend of the nochebuena , as the plant is called in Mexico, is a Christmas story that smacks of the Little Match Girl and Little Drummer Boy. I don’t know where the tale came from or how far back the association of this starry red flower with Christmas reaches. But I can guess.

Paul Ecke, Sr.
harvesting poinsettias
Photo: Ecke Ranch
It was a miracle of marketing, performed by Paul Ecke, Sr.. In the 1920s, Ecke, a California nurseryman, recognized that the poinsettia “would make an ideal official holiday flower. But the question remained: how to promote and market a plant that most people had never heard of or even seen, let alone associate it with the holiday season?”

The Ecke Ranch website offers a wonderful history, an unabashed example of what Eric Hobsbawm calls “the invention of tradition.” Ecke’s success involved intensive cultivation, roadside sales in Hollywood and Beverly Hills, innovative use of greenhouses, and—perhaps most important of all—strategic product placement.

Paul Ecke, Sr. (1895-1991)
Photo: Ecke Ranch
Ecke “made certain that poinsettias became a necessary part of the holiday experience. No holiday scene could be considered complete without at least one poinsettia in it. On a larger scale, the Ranch worked with television, such as The Tonight Show and the Bob Hope Christmas Specials, to make certain that poinsettias were always a part of the holiday sets.”

And speaking of product placement: “the United States produces more poinsettias than any other country, patenting new varieties and reaping some $260 million a year in sales, and Mexico, meanwhile, can’t sell the plants in the United States because of restrictions on importing Mexican soil.”

Does it drain some of the magic out of Christmas poisettias to learn that they were foisted on us all by an industrious Californian, with Bob Hope as his promotional Blitzen? Maybe. But Santa Claus hadn’t managed to get those blooming plants from the Mexican mountains to Home Depot by December 24. Mr. Ecke looks like an elf to me.

Saturday, December 18, 2004

Two Views of Bangalore, Both Floral

Business folks have staged a splendid flower show in Hosur, outside Bangalore, to encourage flower industries in the area; Ronnie Johnson sings the region’s floral praises too, in a very different key.

“O taste and see...” the psalmist sang. Following flowers in life and on the WWW means just that, and O the variety on every hand…

The Hindu reports on an international flower show in Hosur, India . The exhibit, arranged “through videoconferencing,” isn’t tourist-driven like most of India’s best known flower shows. Instead, a spokesperson explains, it was designed “to attract more investment in the floriculture sector and promote the region as a reliable supplier of cut flowers and foliages in the world market.”

Check out that arena-sized arrangement!

A related story reports the chief minister of Tamil Nadu (Hosur’s province) has asked area flower farmers to grow for export, making the most of the region’s new “export zone.” Clearly, flowers look to many Southern Indians like a profitable product.

Ronnie Johnson of Bangalore sees flowers in a different light. His quixotic and personal Flowers of Bangalore is a tribute to his mother, Anne, and a gift to his children. At least I assume that’s who these young people are, mugging in the hollyhocks.

“Bangalore, what we can offer is some respite before you crumple into the ground,” Johnson writes. His outlook on the region’s flowers, anything but industrial, steps up close to photograph single blooms and remember the old-timers whose rose and palm gardens he still reveres. These aren’t flowers for export but flowers of nostalgia and introspection.

Call it bourgeois, romantic. Whatever you call it, it demonstrates better than a behemoth arrangement the longevity, beauty and power of Bangalore’s flowers.

Daffodil Visitors, Yes; Daffodil Pickers, No

As Cornwall prepares for the glory of daffodil season, tourists are welcome, but flower laborers less so.

The head of a cut-daffodil operation is butting with residents of Hayle over his plan to set up an encampment for seasonal workers. Cornwall, in southwest England, is famous for its temperate winters and early daffodil crop.

Alan Garrard wants permission to accomodate 250 workers on the outskirts of Hayle: “They are brought in on contract, they’re here for two months or three months and then they leave when the work has dried up,” Garrard said. The chairman of the Hayle Chamber of Commerce told the BBC, “We have 80,000 visitors a month in the high season and we have trouble enough keeping basic infrastructure concerned going.”

According to the BBC, some 3000 foreign workers come to labor in the Cornish bulb fields annually.

Actually this season looks peculiar. Flowers all over England have been blooming far too early. The Hayden Chamber of Commerce, Mr. Garrard, and the migrant workers may have more than a zoning problem.

Friday, December 17, 2004

A Convert to Cut Flowers

After having thrown out floral gifts, vase and all, Sarah M. Crow makes an arrangement and “gets it.”

I learned by teaching poetry (are you already wincing?)… the way to interest someone in a subject is to have them try it themselves.

Archduke Charles
December 17, 2004

Just so, Sarah Crow recounts how her antipathy for flower arrangements changed. I know how she feels: might-as-well-be-fake fern and some odorless roses with a Mylar balloon attached.

What turned Crow’s head around was growing her own flowers and one dreary afternoon cutting a few to bring inside. In the doing, she “look(ed) at all that beauty close up. No wonder city dwellers frequent flower shops and make heroes of florists.”

If you find flowers negligible, try growing a rose and bringing one indoors for a close encounter. 

The Worker Behind the Flower

An international labor rights group, tracking working conditions in the cut-flower industry, asks retailers to buy only certified blooms.

Increasingly, flowers are grown in the Southern Hemisphere for Northern consumers. The U.S. Agency for International Development began bankrolling floriculture in Colombia 40 years ago as a crop substitute for coca. Ecuador, Kenya, Uganda and Zimbabwe are in the business now. And to wean Afghanistan from opium income, the U.S. may try the Colombian experiment again.

European and U.S. buyers see first hand the benefits of equatorial flower farming. What they tend to overlook are the people, primarily women, who grow, tend, cut and package their inexpensive flowers on another continent.

Though it’s more than a year old, this report on Codes of Conduct in the Cut-Flower Industry gives a helpful summary of the global situation and clearer pictures of working conditions in Colombia, Ecuador, Kenya, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe.

We learn that “only four percent of Colombian flower workers belong to unions,” whereas in Zimbabwe, where 90% of commercial lands have been taken from white owners and redistributed to black farmers, political upheaval had induced more openness to unions. Zimbabwe farms have also more readily accepted a Flower Label Program:  outside inspectors certifying that flowers were produced under safe and fair conditions.

So have those carnations you just picked up at the grocery or the roses from your local flower shop been grown on a farm where pregnant women get fired, where workers are poisoned with pesticides and unions are busted? Are your flowers “certified”? Ask! This report, by the International Labor Rights Fund, says that any successful labeling program requires “the active participation of large U.S. importers and retailers.” And retailers may not bother buying certified flowers (or even know about them) unless somebody pops the question.