Human Flower Project

Tuesday, May 31, 2005

Flowers of the Knife

Paying homage to the sculptor/florists in kitchens everywhere.

Photo: via Kitchen Capers

In nature, flowers bloom before a plant bears fruit. But in culture, things aren’t so orderly. A bored sous chef with a love of flowers may just go hooty-wild. The organic clock starts spinning in reverse, and fruits crinkle back into shapely flowers.

Eternal thanks to Cyndy Clark for sending us this unbelievable gallery of watermelon carving, featuring a downhill skier, dragon, Russian dolls, and portrait of Vincent Van Gogh.

Less daffy and most beautiful are the carved flowers, pink leaves tinged with the white of melon rind. I tried to extract more information from the blogger about who made these beauties, and where. I’m guessing they came from China via the Singapore weblog but am by no means certain.

The revelation of them inspired a hunt for other floral fruit and vegetables.

Edible Centerpieces
Photo: Josie Liming, for Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Here’s a short how-to link, with directions for carving your own flowers, and an article from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on making an edible centerpiece.  This site has instructions for marshmallow gardenias, for a troop of vava-voom girl scouts or aging jazz singers, we presume. And this one gives instructions for a leek daisy, carrot tulips, and cabbage anthurium.

If you find better photos or information on the web, please send it along. Our search turned up only these attempts from the Donna Reed House of Bored Housewifery. Fun to make, I guess, but pretty awful to behold.

...nothing so gorgeous or crazy as the batch Cyndy sent. Somewhere out there is a fruit carver who can see a bouquet of chrysanthemums in a watermelon, and the Taj Mahal. Kitchen artist, please step forward and identify yourself! The contemporary art world, short on humor and beauty, needs you.

Monday, May 30, 2005

With Wreaths

Why do circular flower arrangements mean “in memoriam”?

Memorial Day and Halloween are the only two dates on the calendar when U.S. citizens admit to death.  The other 363 days a year, we’re getting ahead, we’re working out with weights. We’re just fine!

Keven Outman
at the grave of
Lt. Michael Joseph Blassie
St. Louis, MO
Photo: Associated Press

Today’s solemn occasion was first observed 137 years ago, when an Illinois Union general sent an order to Civil War veterans. John A. Logan wrote:

“The 30th day of May, 1868, is designated for the purpose of strewing with flowers or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion, and whose bodies now lie in almost every city, village and hamlet churchyard in the land. In this observance no form of ceremony is prescribed, but posts and comrades will in their own way arrange such fitting services and testimonials of respect as circumstances may permit.”

In many places throughout the U.S., Memorial Day will be publicly observed with the laying of wreaths; aboard the U.S.S. San Diego; at Hollywood Cemetery, near Richmond, Virginia, “honoring 76 former John Marshall High School cadets killed in the service of their country”; at the Intrepid Museum in New York. In Newport, Oregon, a fleet of boats will take memorial wreaths out into Depoe Bay, a custom six decades old.

And of course at Arlington National Cemetery, President George Bush laid a wreath this morning at the Tomb of the Unknowns.

Why all the circular arrangements? This story about the history of Memorial Day notes: “The fact that the (Civil) war ended during the flowering of springtime had much to do with the form the holiday eventually took. Some historians, including the one-time Chicago newspaper editor Lloyd Lewis, have also seen the day’s roots in the North’s elaborate grieving after the April 14, 1865, assassination of President Abraham Lincoln.”

In other words, this holiday for remembrance of the war dead was born in a flowering season, and in a floral era, when public expression took form in roses and sweet peas rather than opinion polls and souvenir t-shirts. That explains how flowers became part of Memorial Day, but why have they—floral wreaths in particular—endured, an observance even in our decidedly non-floral times?

Pres. George Bush
Arlington National Cemetery
May 30, 2005
Photo: Mannie Garcia, for Reuters

According to Nora T. Hunter’s essay in The Centennial History of the American Florist, the wreath symbolized eternal life, eternal love, and “victory over death.” Before flat sprays came into fashion, in the latter part of the 19th century, “the wreath was the most requested sympathy design.”

I see wreaths used today, in the U.S. anyway, as emblems of collective sentiment, something different from personal emotion. As sympathy arrangements, they usually come not from the bank president but from the bank, not from John Wilkes Booth, but the Booth Family.

Likewise, when Bush lays the wreath at Arlington, he does so not as George Bush grieving a fallen soldier, but as the President of the United States honoring all of the nation’s war dead. Perhaps wreaths used to convey faith in everlasting life. Now, it seems to me, they symbolize community itself, whether of the living “posts and comrades” who present them or “the Unknowns” who receive them.

Wreaths acknowledge what Karl Marx called our “species being.”

Sunday, May 29, 2005

Flores de Mayo

When the rains come to the Philippine Islands, out come “las reynas,” beauty queens who balance red lipstick and piety.

Stacy Hillen, Reyna Flores of Austin, TX

As May, the month of Mary in the Roman Catholic faith, nears a close, the Philippines celebrates its bounty—human, floral, cultural, religious. The rainy season begins and the landscape bursts forth with tropical flowers. Devotions to the Blessed Virgin abound. And humanly, “the sap is rising.” It’s prime time for love.

Combining all these elements, Flores de Mayo is the Filipino spring festival.  John Reyes writes that after the Vatican “proclaimed the dogma of Immaculate Conception in 1854, the devotion to Mary known as Flores de Mayo (Flowers of May) blossomed...in the province of Bulacan and spread like wildfire in the southern Luzon provinces of Laguna, Batangas, and Pampanga.”

In many parts of the Philippines, this season is celebrated with recitations of the rosary each afternoon. In southern Luzon it’s known as “Alay kay Maria (offering to Mary),” people bringing garlands, bouquets and long, long, long hymns to the church.

Ofelia Templo
with a statue of Mary
Texas State Capitol
Photo: Bill Bishop

The holy month culminates in what’s known as Santacruzan, a ritual that, at least in part, memorializes Santa Elena and her discovery, while journeying in Jerusalem, of “The True Cross.” Santa Elena convinced her son Constantine to convert to Christianity and, Constantine being Emperor of Rome, others found themselves converting too.

Here’s where the lipstick comes in. “The townfolk choose pretty young ladies to represent the various characters of the commemoration: the ‘Accolades of Our Lady.’ Each one is dressed in an exquisite, colorful gown, looking as regal as the Reina (Queen) she portrays. Reina Fe (Faith), Reina Esperanza (Hope), Reina Caridad (Charity), Reina Mora (Muslim), Reina Banderada (Flag), and Reina Justicia (Justice) walk with their consorts under hand-carried bamboo arches decked with color-themed native flowers.” Dressed in white, the girl chosen “Reyna Elena” is the procession’s climactic queen.

Alvina Roche, Reyna Elena
Photo: Bill Bishop

In Austin, Texas, yesterday, two Filipino-American organizations brought the festivity and glamour of the Santacruzan to the Texas State Capitol. Participants came from as far away as Houston, Killeen, and San Antonio, to enjoy the “showcase of Filipino culture” and honor longtime activist Evelyn Garcia. Bearing the flag of the Philippines in front, the procession walked up to the steps of the capitol singing. Ofelia Templo bore a statue of the Blessed Virgin, and the gorgeous teenage queens followed, each beneath a portable floral archway: Reyna Caridad in red, the Queen of Sheba and her princesses in gold.... Each representing a Bible story or spiritual virtue, the queens had all maxed out with make-up, costume jewelry, and artificial flowers. Not one hair shirt or Puritan shoe buckle to be found. In a word, “heavenly.”

Alvina Roche was this year’s Reyna Elena, the picture of pious self-confidence with a large crucifix and pink silk flowers across her arm.

Saturday, May 28, 2005

The Sudden Gardens of Tashkent

Can urban flower plantings be acts of political repression?

Tashkent placard
with the city emblem
Photo: Galen Frysinger

The nation of Uzbekistan is in upheaval, a polite way to say that people there are being killed for what they think.

Two weeks ago in Andijan, a group of demonstrators were attacked by soldiers. “Uzbek authorities claim 169 people died on May 13, most of them ‘Islamic extremists’. But activists like Muzaffarmirzo Ishakov, head of the Human Rights Society in Andijan region, say the real figure is closer to 700, overwhelmingly civilians.”

This recent account from the Institute of War and Peace Reporting describes the violence there, and the mourning. An IWPR reporter, working under a pseudonym, writes, “Some of those I interviewed said their loved ones had been shot in the back of the head, including a father of three who died when he went out to buy bread. His body was found by his father in a flower garden at the side of the road.”

While the U.S. and other nations have called for an investigation, Uzbek president Islam Karimov has dismissed these demands, claiming national sovereignty.

One especially odd story emerged from the Central Asian nation this week. Agence France Presse reported that the streets of the capital, Tashkent, are being torn up, “with gardeners...watering flower beds where only a day before there had been busy asphalt-paved road.”

The state-controlled media calls these works of “beautification,” but on the disappearing streets of Tashkent, people think differently. They say “the changes are to block easy access to the city center and thereby thwart the kind of mass rallies witnessed in the past two years in Tbilisi, Kiev and Bishkek - capitals of other ex-Soviet republics that saw protests sweep out veteran regimes.”

This intriguing article points out that after Ukraine’s “orange revolution” last year, “the main wide alley in Mustakillik (Independence) Square, where Independence Day celebrations are held, disappeared, replaced by narrow pavements surrounded by trees.”

And when citizen protests turned the leader of Kyrgyzstan out of office in March, “sections of two key roads - Sharof Rashidov Street that leads to Mustakillik Square and Buyuk Turon Street that crossed so called ‘president’s road’ - also gave way to gardens.”

In Tashkent, authorities have already banned motorcycles. The move is clearly on to obstruct people-power by clogging up public space, otherwise known as “divide and conquer.”

The sudden gardens of Tashkent are reminders that flowers are rarely innocuous or “mere decoration.” As soon as the trowels come out, we know that human purpose has stirred, whether for liberation or repression.

Friday, May 27, 2005

Chelsea Flower Show: Bring Your Snoot

Robin Lane Fox reports on his delicate sensibilities, as prickled at England’s foremost flower show.

Photo: Royal Horticultural Society

“England is the most class-ridden country under the sun. It is a land of snobbery and privilege, ruled largely by the old and silly.”

George Orwell said it, not me. And I will let Robin Lane Fox go about proving it to you. Fox is garden writer for the Financial Times, the London daily published on “someone left the cake out in the rain” pink newsprint.

He reports today on the Chelsea Flower Show, England’s premiere horticultural event, which closes tomorrow. The exhibition, under the auspices of the Royal Horticultural Society, began in 1862, which qualifies it as “old.”

As for silly, consider Robin Lane Fox’s review, Flowering Achievement, for example, this discourse on hydrangeas:

Blaumeise
Photo: Northamptonshire

“I never expected to study an array of large-flowered hydrangeas with such interest, but the exhibit from Ashwood Nurseries in the west Midlands was exceptionally varied and thought-provoking. Many keen gardeners have already found it one of the most stimulating in the show. In recent years, the nursery has drawn our attention to Japanese varieties in other popular garden families. This year, it had reached out far and wide and had not hesitated to show the biggest and brightest, the sort of hydrangea that used to be associated with vintage years at Royal Ascot. On a second look, these big varieties were far better than anything Ascot ever found. If you want the deepest and most impressive blue on a big-headed lacecap, I now know the answer. Choose Blaumeise, which means Blue Tit, although English growers also call it Teller Blue. It is an exceptionally deep colour and would be amazing in a formal town garden. Among the forms with heavier heads, I succumbed to the subtle shade of one called Decateur Blue. Maybe these forms are still too New Age for you, and if so you would like the small-flowered off-pink variety of Hydrangea Serrata called Miranda.”

This is quite amazing writing: “the deepest and most impressive blue on a big-headed lacecap"..."the sort of hydrangea that used to be associated with vintage years at Royal Ascot”? Let’s keep going, into begonias:

“More than 40 years ago, my Chelsea visiting began in amazement at the begonias the nursery was staging. Since then every civilised gardener has bolted away from begonias and is now hiding timorously among ornamental grasses. The begonias are still stunning and it is only our prejudice that stops people from finding the right place for them. Please believe me when I say that even the most sensitive soul would welcome a pale yellow begonia called Charlotte. Another yellow, Golden Hinds, is not at all as brash as you might suspect.”

“Please believe me....” This plaintive appeal sheaths the axe of Taste.

Merrill Lynch Garden

Fox also finds “very impressive” an exhibit by Merrill Lynch, one of the event’s “discreet sponsors.” M-L had Andy Sturgeon design “a workplace that is an extension of the home”—that being, we presume, a “workplace” for someone who sits on his keester, examining a stock portfolio all day.

And this being garden writing, Fox closes with a dig, at TV personality Diarmuid Gavin, for starters:

Gavin “had set himself the task of a garden that might belong around a tall block of unfavoured flats and be seen from above as well as at ground level. The main planting was lavender, which had not come into flower, but in among it were repeated rounded objects and bits of clipped box. If I lived in a flat, I would not like to look down on Diarmuid’s green balls from on high. The entire garden is going off to Dublin where it may well be very welcome.”

You want to choke the guy. The rub is that what’s most detestable about the English-- the precious snottiness—is so funny.

In the essay cited above, Orwell writes that while the English “are not gifted artistically,” they possess an inordinate “love of flowers.” How true. Orwell says it’s part of the English insistence on liberty” “to have a home of your own, to do what you like in your spare time, to choose your own amusements instead of having them chosen for you from above.”

...in other words, a society where no critic could force yellow begonias on anyone, or shame them out of “green balls.”

Thursday, May 26, 2005

Survivor!

Mount Diablo buckwheat, a plant botanists believed was extinct, has turned up east of San Francisco.

Eriogonom truncatum,
Photo: Associated Press

Okay, so it’s not as racy as the ivory billed woodpecker.

For botanists the discovery that, unlike James Dean, Mount Diablo buckwheat has survived the 20th Century in California, is cause for euphoria.

Eriogonom truncatum , a pink wildflower, looks like baby’s breath. “It was found in a remote section of a Contra Costa County park that is popular among hikers, scientists said Wednesday.”

The plant, last seen 69 years ago, had become “the holy grail for botanists” in this region, according to Cal Berkeley’s Barbara Ertter, Curator of Western North American Flora at the Jepson Herbarium.

Michael Park, 35, Mt. Diablo hiker and grad student
Photo: Save Mount Diablo, Scott J. Hein, for AP

Nearly as heartening as the discovery is the discoverer, Michael Park, a first year doctoral student in integrative biology at Berkeley. Park had been surveying Mount Diablo for his senior thesis when he spotted the plants in bloom. Let’s hope his marvelous find will inspire others to plunge in to the study of ecology and remind everyday hikers to keep their eyes and field guides open.

Wednesday, May 25, 2005

The Flowers that Settled Western Canada

Many thanks to Oana Capota of Vancouver, for this fascinating slice of Canadian gardening history. I had known flowers were part of the westward expansion in North America but, until now, hadn’t realized that flower gardening spurred that expansion.

Capota is a curatorial assistant at the Port Moody Station Museum, also a gardener and, quite obviously, a writer. 

May the force—and spring temperatures—be with you, Oana.

Canadian Pacific Railway train west of Glacier, B.C.,
circa 1886
Photo: Canadian Pacific Railway, the O. Lavallee collection

By

Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) stations across Canada once boasted gardens alongside the tracks, growing both vegetables and flowers.

The vegetables had an easy explanation: produce from the gardens went to the stationmaster’s table, fed the railway men and sometimes even the passengers in dining cars.

The abundant flowers in these gardens made sense, too.  They were a marketing ploy:

When the CPR was incorporated in 1881, it received 25 million acres from the federal government and then sold much of this land to settlers over the next five decades. Vegetables were part of the railroad’s effort to sell land—as in 1884 when the CPR transported vegetables from experimental prairie farms to the east to show off productivity— but flowers demonstrated fecundity even better. Lush railway gardens attracted tourists and, in the eyes of immigrants traveling across Canada, promised fertile farmland, prompting them to buy acreage from the company.

One of the founders of the railway gardens and later superintendent of gardens across western Canada, David Hysop, lay down the guidelines for making them profitable.  Rail workers tended to the gardens, with seeds, bulbs and shrubs provided free from plant companies.  Steam locomotives discharged water for the gardens in barrels along the tracks; laundry steam heated some greenhouses.

The gardens’ success led to the formation of a forestry department within the CPR in 1907, and by 1912 there were nurseries across western Canada supplying almost 1500 railway gardens.

The last vestige of these original gardens lies in Banff, though it grows only flowers today.  At other locations, like the Canadian Museum of Rail Travel in Cranbrook, gardens are being restored, and still others, like the Port Moody Station Museum, are creating new gardens.

Port Moody Station Museum gardens, summer 2004
Photo: Jim Millar, courtesy of Port Moody Station Museum

The Port Moody Station Museum’s garden, near Vancouver, Canada, is based on the 1910-1912 style. In 2000, a curator led community volunteers in conjuring up the garden from scratch, using mostly heritage seeds and many flowers that were popular in the early Twentieth Century: Crystal Palace lobelia, Golden Gem marigolds, petunias, bachelor buttons, sweet william, red hollyhock and lupines.

The Port Moody Heritage Society, which runs the museum, is part of Seeds of Diversity Canada, a group dedicated to preserving, studying and encouraging the cultivation of heirloom and endangered plants, including ornamentals.

The Museum’s volunteer gardeners meet once a month to work on the garden, and some volunteers come every week.

These flowers not only decorate the museum grounds and the former live-in station where the Port Moody Station Museum is housed, they are also used in floral arrangements at the local public library and at special events.

Tuesday, May 24, 2005

Catch the Cauliflower Bouquet

What prevents breast tumors and is pretty enough to go down the aisle?

It’s cauliflower season in much of the Northern Hemisphere, and big white heads will roll at the market, especially in Brittany, France. There, we learn, some of the tastiest cauliflower in the world is grown, thus its nickname “fleur de Bretagne.”

The vegetable truly is a flower, actually a tight cluster of flowerets and stems all bunched together.  But this bouquet, “helps to prevent tumors before they form. This is especially true of tumors in the breasts and the prostate glands.” Nutritionist Elizabeth Franks adds that cauliflower “contains vitamin C and folate, which helps the blood to work more efficiently and helps to prevent anemia. It’s also important for proper tissue growth, again helping to prevent cancer and also heart disease.”

Mark Twain called cauliflower, “Nothing but cabbage with a college education.” I think this discredits both cauliflower and cabbage. Twain should have had his head examined. Both these cruciferous vegetables are delicious and mighty healthy. Just don’t overcook them. Cauliflower in particular loses nearly all its vitamin B and “84% of its folacin” after just 10 minutes of cooking.

Better to buy it fresh, wash it well, eat it raw. Why would you steam a white bouquet?

(Here’s a recipe from About French Cuisine for a shrimp and cauliflower salad.)

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Monday, May 23, 2005

Vesak: Full Moon and Meanings

With the full moon today, Buddhists around the world rejoice, meditate and mourn together.

This May 23 is one of the most sacred days of the year for Buddhists. Known variously as Vesak, Wesak, or Visakha, it marks three phases in the life of Siddharta Gautam, known as the Buddha.

Washing a lotus
Kelaniya temple, Sri Lanka
May 23, 2005

Photo: Anuruddha Lokuhapuarachchi, for Reuters

”For it was on this day that the Buddha was born, and 35 years later awoke to the unexcelled right self-awakening, and another 45 years later passed away into total nibbana. In each case, these events took place on the full-moon day in May.”

As such, it’s a day of joyful celebration and parades, but penance and meditation too, of focus on service, and blessing with flowers.

In Sri Lanka, Buddhists washed lotus blossoms. (Further, the Sri Lankan Army announced last week it would arrange Vesak celebrations and, quite reasonably, lift the ban on public movement so that people could attend these celebrations: “to promote better understanding between communities and religious amity and to stress permanent peace in the country,” according to a major general).

In Portugal, Bathing Buddha for Wesak
Photo: Buddha’s Light de Lisboa

In England and Portugal, statues of the Buddha are ritually bathed in pools surrounded by blossoms in observance of Wesak.

Not being a Buddhist, I found this passage from Ajaan Lee Dhammadharo—translated from Thai by Thanissaro Bhikkhu—especially helpful:

“We bring flowers, candles, and incense to offer in homage to the Buddha, Dhamma, and Sangha. This is called amisa-puja, or material homage. This is a form of practice on the external level—a matter of our words and deeds. It comes under the headings of generosity and virtue, but doesn’t count as the highest form of homage.

“There’s still another level of homage—patipatti-puja, or homage through the practice—which the Buddha said was supreme: that is, meditation, or the development of the mind so that it can stand firmly in its own inner goodness, independent of any and all outside objects.”

Vesak, in the Netherlands
Photo: Kennisnet

Flower Girls Throw Royal Tantrums

New generation of Canadians loses patience with Olde England.

You’ve been standing out in the hot sun with a wilting flower. You’re half the size of everybody else in the crowd and fear being trampled by a bunch of rubbernecking grown-ups. By the time the old lady with the oversized handbag arrives, you’ve had it and fling yourself on the ground in a fit.

Queen Elizabeth II, leaving church with the Bishop
of Edmonton, meets obstacle Brynn Noble.
Photo: The Telegraph

Makes sense to me.

Two year old Brynn Noble did just that yesterday, after waiting for the Queen to leave church services in Canada’s Jasper National Park. “We told her to wait for the Queen and she had hold of a flower for her,” said Brynn’s mother.

The English monarch is touring Canada for nine days.

In many parts of the world, it’s customary to have children approach visiting dignitaries with flowers of greeting. Why put children up to this? Why can’t adults do their own sucking up?

Likely, it suggests deference to have a tiny person with a flower come forward from the host country. Furthermore, when an anonymous person emerges from a crowd and approaches a world leader or other big shot, it’s no cause for alarm if that person is a weenie. Call off the beefeaters. It’s just a little child.

Losing it, regaining it before the Queen in Saskatchewan
Photo: donga.com

But today’s Canadian youngsters seem to want no part of this ritual. Five days ago, this time in Regina, Saskatchewan, another girl pitched a hissy fit over having to present flowers to the queen. She managed to collect herself once Her Majesty stepped forward. Chastened by the handbag, no doubt, or those big scary shoes.