Human Flower Project

Thursday, February 17, 2005

Iron Rule in a Red Begonia

How do you wish happy birthday to a dictator? With a show of 30,000 flowers, all named Kimjongilia.

In celebration of North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il’s 63rd birthday, Pyongyang cranked up the exuberance machine yesterday. There were “feasts of pheasant and venison for the capital’s elite,” fireworks, “extra rations,” and reports of increased production of shoes for the hoi polloi. According to the United Nations, 6 million of North Korea’s 23 million citizens are malnourished.

Images of Kim Jong-Il and his late father Kim Il-Sung loom above the red begonias that are North Korea’s enough-already national flower, February 2003.
Photo: Julian Rake, for Reuters

Kim Jong Il came to power in 1994, upon the death of his father Kim Il-Sung. In 1988, dear old Dad had Japanese botanist Motoderu Kamo produce a flower to honor Kim the Younger’s 46th birthday. Kimjongilia, which for English-speakers sounds like a large lizard or venereal disease, is actually a bright red perennial begonia. Lovely. But lovely won’t do.

Earlier this month North Korea’s central news agency carpet-bombed the nation with declarations of Kimjongilia’s intergalactic dominion. 

“Immortal Kimjongilia is now appreciated by people at home and abroad as a ‘flower of the sun revered by all people’, ‘valuable flower representing the times’, ‘the best flower in the world’, ‘king of flowers’... This flower was awarded a special prize, gold medal, diploma and other top prizes at the 12th International Flower Show held in Czechoslovakia in May 1991, the Nordic Flower Show in Sweden in March 1995….”  Etc. etc. “The facts go to clearly prove that Kimjongilia is the most beautiful flower in the world.”

In years past, Kim’s birthday has featured displays and design competitions of the red begonia, even synchronized swimming events with plastic Kimjongilia props.  This year, 30,000 Kimjongilia flowers were massed in Pyongyang. One occupational hazard of a tyrant’s job: it’s so hard to know where to draw the line.

On Dear Leader’s behalf, the central news agency took credit for this year’s “unseasonable blossoms of wild flowers, citing them as divine evidence that nature was also celebrating the birthday, the ‘common holiday of the humankind.’”

Wednesday, February 16, 2005

Christchurch’s Motley Festival

Christchurch, New Zealand, needs more than a week for its ingenious Festival of Flowers and Romance: smell it, see it, ride it, wear it.

The Garden City of Australasia —Christchurch, New Zealand—may spoil you for ordinary flower shows, the kind with a couple of rose and chrysanthemum competitions, a parade and garden tour.

The New Zealanders have other ideas and loads of them, enough to fill nine whole days. This year’s Festival of Flowers and Romance, February 11-20, is the most ambitiously unconventional community flower show I’ve heard of yet.

Getting in the spirit
Festival of Flowers and Romance
Christchurch, New Zealand, 2003
All photos: Festival of Flowers and Romance

Yes, there are garden tours. Yes, there are parades, three daily, and one more on the evening of the 17th. Floral attire required, and by that we don’t mean rose-print fabric or a necktie with daisies. All the paraders are flowers, in sepal-collars and narrow long-stemmed skirts.

Wearable Flowers Parade, 2003

The centerpiece of the event is a “floral carpet” along the main aisle of Christchurch Cathedral, a magnificent indoor garden with the church’s rose window hanging like a red jeweled sun above it.

Floral Carpet, Christchurch Cathedral

During festival week, as floral trams roll through the city, Christchurch holds a photography contest and “garden makeover” competition. In the botanical garden, fairies tell children stories. This year a Scented Garden for the Blind has been planted at Cathedral Square, to be “uplifted” to Abberley Park after the festival ends.

There’s more. Check the festival schedule even if you can’t attend, and gather some idea of the difference between a flower show and a human flower project.

Tuesday, February 15, 2005

Delivered across 2,000 Light Years

NASA finds a rafflesia flower in the constellation Lyra.

Photo: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Harvard-Smithsonian CfA

Ever wonder why we associate flowers with mortality?

Using NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, astronomers found this “flower” in the Ring Nebula, 2,000 light years away.

A nebula is created as a star dies. “The ‘ring’ is a thick cylinder of glowing gas and dust around the doomed star. As the star begins to run out of fuel, its core becomes smaller and hotter, boiling off its outer layers.”

Writers for Space Flight Now see “the delicate petals of a camellia blossom.” We see a rafflesia flower. No matter. This is a star’s funeral. Nobody’s ever quite seen the likes of it before.

New Caledonia: One in All the World

Welcome to our recent visitors from New Caledonia. As we looked for information about this South Pacific island, we had the good fortune to correspond with Australian writer Philip Game. Thank you, Philip, for this fine introduction to New Caledonia.

By Philip Game

How does one assess natural wealth? If biodiversity be any measure, then the fifth richest country on earth is an unlikely contender: New Caledonia is a refuge for some of the most wildly beautiful and primitive plant species found on earth. Like Australia it is a fragment of the primordial continent of Gondwanaland, cast adrift 80 million years ago.  The world’s finest collection of ancient trees features the Araucarian conifers: monkey-puzzle trees and kauri pines.  Palms, orchids and giant grevilleas enliven the maquis as well as giant geckos and skinks, the cagou and the world’s largest wood pigeon.

The southern half of New Caledonia is no tropical paradise. The bedrock and overlying soils are fabulously rich in metals (nickel, copper, cobalt) but almost toxic to plant life.  Almost every living thing here is unique to the area.

Montrouziera gabriellaei
Endemic to nickel-rich soils
of the maquis minier
Photo: www.travelgame.org

A single Nepenthes, a delicate pitcher plant grew between the rocks.  We stopped to admire a single specimen of the majestic, spreading candelabra tree, Araucaria muelleri, covered in creamy flowers rather like a wattle.  The tree flowers without warning, then dies.

Understandably, the first French settlers made a few false starts in coming to terms with the New Caledonian flora. Faux tabac, false tobacco, has big, broad glossy leaves with medicinal applications.  Faux mango wafts a jasmine-like fragrance but its fruit are poisonous; whilst false mimosa is distinguished by long seed pods

The 400-hectare Madeleine Falls Botanic Reserve conserves a rare and fragile landscape, a haven for the last known stands of several endemic plants.  On the riverbank grows the only known stand of Neocallitropsis pancheri, a cypress-like araucarian conifer once harvested for its essential oils but now totally protected. Authorities are busily replanting to repair the degradation caused by campfires and tramping feet.