Human Flower Project

Tuesday, January 31, 2006

Riots in Naivasha

Workers on one of Kenya’s largest flower farms rioted and were repulsed by police yesterday; over 1000 workers had been fired for holding an unauthorized strike over a pay cut and alleged corruption.

The whole world is watching Kenya’s flower industry, or should be. Let’s look more closely today: police and workers clashed near Lake Naivasha Monday and hundreds of people have lost their jobs.

“Police fired tear gas and fought running battles on Monday with the workers, who were among more than 1000 employees at the Oserian farm in Kenya’s central Rift Valley fired for participating in (a) strike...Several injuries were reported in disturbances outside the farm.”

The workers claimed to have been docked their monthly Sunday pay and also complained that the company’s education program, for which it had received “fair-trade” designation, has enrolled only the children of the wealthiest workers. Strikers also said that farm managers had dispatched 100 of them to put out a fire, and that 52 workers, untrained as firefighters, had been gravely injured.

The company, claiming the strikers had failed to give the requisite 21 days’ notice before their action, had fired more than 1000 employees. 

“The developments come as Oserian, which does major business with the British supermarket chains Tesco, Salisbury and Marks and Spencer, is striving to improve its reputation by joining a Fair trade network.” How fair does all this sound to you?

Workers packing roses at Oserian farm, Jan. 13
Photo: Simon Maina, for AFP

Horticultural exports bring in about $100 million to this poor nation’s economy, primarily sales of roses and carnations in Europe.  Oserian Farm, 50,000 acres on Lake Naivasha, is one of Kenya’s biggest producers. But increasingly mindful buyers in Europe now want assurances that the good looking produce they’re buying hasn’t come at an exorbitant human cost.

Oserian earned fair-trade certification in 2002 from a company called Max Havelaar, and agreed to set aside 12% of production costs for the welfare of workers. Such certification and compliance are reevaluated annually, renewed or cancelled each year; last year, according to a representative of Max Havelaar, the farm failed to meet “initial specified targets,” particularly in “distributing the bursaries” as mandated.

The market for fair-trade goods has tripled since 2001 and is on the rise. Meanwhile, conditions in and around Naivasha continue to deteriorate. Do shoppers-of-conscience at Tesco influence agribusinesses a continent away? Yes. They do.

Monday, January 30, 2006

Sunflowers vs. AIDS

German scientists have found a mold-fighting compound in Helianthus that may also fight HIV.

‘Sunflower Dreams’
Photo: Lunar Fractals

At the University of Bonn, ag engineers and biotech scientists believe they have uncovered an antibody in sunflowers that can prevent the spread of HIV, which causes AIDS.

“White stem rot” is deadly to most sunflowers, but some plants manage to fight off the disease, thanks to their production of “dicaffeoyl quinic acid.” This same compound, “can prevent the HI virus from reproducing, at least in cell cultures,” says Claudio Cerboncini, of the Caesar research center. At this point, no one knows whether this sunflower antibody will combat the AIDS virus in a clinical setting. But the researchers have said this compound may open the way for a whole new class of drugs, with fewer side effects.

Medical science already had known of dicaffeoyl quinic acid but until this finding, the compound was thought to be too rare and expensive to warrant further trials. “By using the Bonn method it could probably be produced for a fraction of the costs.”

Sunflower infected with Sclerotina
Photo: Agritel

Sclerotina has caused disasters for sunflower farmers, but the struggle against it may prove a huge boon to humankind.

“The United Nations forecasts that a minimum 45 million people in developing countries will be infected with HIV/Aids by 2010.” In South Africa alone 370,000 people die of AIDS each year. For much more news about AIDS worldwide, see the World AIDS News.

Sunday, January 29, 2006

Flowering Plum

On naked branches, blossoms of prunus mume open with the New Year in China.

Scroll painting
by Cheng, Tiesheng
(程铁生)

“The scent of plum blossoms comes from surviving the bitter cold.”

With this ancient reflection on endurance we greet the Lunar New Year. Thank you, Cheng, Tiesheng (程铁生). Mr. Cheng, a lifelong student of calligraphy, was also a teacher, forcibly retired in the 1950s for his criticism of the Chinese govenment. His beautiful calligraphic scroll, a cherished gift sent to us by his son Wei and daughter-in-law Ying, bring the joy of China’s snowy Spring Festival to the subtropics of Central Texas.

Though the lunar New Year is adorned with many plants (pussy willow, narcissus, and, in Vietnam, bong mai), the delicate five-petalled blossoms of plum are Northern China’s exquisite emblem of beginning.

Translated into English as “plum blossom,” China’s New Year’s branch is actually Prunus mume, a species closer to apricot. The trees bloom in late January/early February, coinciding with the Lunar New Year, appearing on bare branches before any leaves have sprouted. Wei writes, “Plum blossom does not crowd the spring time with all the other flowers to catch people’s attention but enjoys its own efflorescence lonely in the winter. The poets of old time took it as a symbol of pride, noble self-esteem, and perseverence for that cause.”

In Chinese culture, flowering plum has been a touchstone through sixteen centuries of music, as well as painting.

The plum blossom was also central to a complex, numerical system of divination, the “Plum Blossom Number of Changes” developed during the Song Dynasty (A.D. 960-1279) by Shao Yong. Similarly, but more simply, branches of prunus mume in bloom today will be read as good luck signs for the coming year.

Garden, Husan Hill
Photo: China Planner

Scholar and artist Lin Bu lived on Gushan surrounded by only his brushes, books, domesticated birds and trees.

The older the plum tree, the more ascetic it becomes.
At the mountain tower by the river inn is a man, wretched and poor.
Purity becomes complete when the cold fills every crevice,
And only now do I know that we were once the bright moon.

As they observed Lin Bu in concentration and solitude, “The people said the flowering plum was his wife and cranes his children” thus did the flowering plum come to signify “chosen seclusion and moral pre-eminence.”

Through the centuries, Chinese artists and authors of myriad beliefs have tried to make the plum blossom their own. To claim the meihua is somehow to wear armor and a halo simultaneously. Mao Zedong wrote his “Plum Blossom Hymn”; more recently, a documentary film entitled Plum Blossoms in the Snow describes China’s embattled Falun Gong minority.

Prunus mume in bloom
Photo: Wikipedia

Moving from the symbolic to the literal, we’ve learned of a lovely plum tree garden on Hushan Hill in Wuxi, and the City of Guangfu, famous since the Han Dynasty for its plum orchards, renowned throughout China as a “sea of fragrant snow.”

Who can fathom the flowering plum—or any other flower? We hope, in the spirit of the new year, only to begin. With tact and kindness, our friend Wei writes, “The scent of plum blossom is not strong. You can actually barely smell it. But this poem is not really about the scent as you may have seen....”

Continue Reading

Saturday, January 28, 2006

Birds Do It

With berries and flower petals, cedar waxwings go on the make.

Cedar waxing on a floral bough, Quebec
Photo: Claude Nadeau

Thanks to Valerie Sudol of the New Jersey Star Ledger for her remarkable description of cedar waxwing courtship.

“In the mating ritual, the male will bring an offering, usually a berry but sometimes a flower petal, and present it to a potential lady love. If receptive, she will accept the gift, hop to one side to display her wings and their waxen jewels, and then give the food back. They pass the tidbit back and forth any number of times before one finally eats it.”

One website advances a rather joyless premise for why waxwings would bother passing along food rather than just chowing down. It proposes that the tough coating of most berries is too hard for waxwings to digest, so by tossing a berry around for awhile they make it edible. That would explain the exchange of berries, but what about the flower petals, where there’s no tough wrapper to peel?

Range of Cedar Waxwing (Bombycilla cedrorum)

Bombycilla cedrorum appears to handle flowers somewhat the way people to, exchanging blossoms to strengthen social ties and, in some cases, sexual ones. “Cedar Waxwings have an interesting habit of lining up in a long row along a branch, and passing a berry or flower from bird to bird down the row, until one eats it.”

Like gregarious human types, these birds sometimes overdo.  Sudol writes, “When they descend upon a stand of berries in groups of 100 or more, it’s with the enthusiasm of frat boys on midterm break. They will stuff themselves silly, making party chat while they strip the branches clean.

“Some say it is gorging on over-ripe, partially fermented berries that makes them act like drunks, insensible and unable to fly....John James Audubon, the noted artist and naturalist, didn’t have to shoot waxwings to acquire specimens for his paintings. He could just pick them off the ground when they were staggering around under the trees and cart them off to his studio.”

A couple of years ago, we had the good fortune of entertaining a flock of cedar waxwings that had come across our nandina bushes. We hope that more masked beauties will return: “Drunk or sober, y’all come.” Hey, all you florists, wondering whether Bombycilla cedrorum visits your town? Cornell University offers a map and more information.

This chart (California-centric) describes plants and flowers that various birds species especially like. Summer holly and brown twig dogwood are cedar-waxwing favorites. And here are more photos of this remarkable flower-giving bird.

Friday, January 27, 2006

Nazis & Flowers

“Do you really want to be sent to your death by a perfect gentleman?”

At Sachsenhausen, site of a Nazi concentration camp
International Holocaust Remembrance Day
Jan. 27, 2006, Oranienburg, Germany
Photo: Sven Kaestner, for AP

In observance of the first International Holocaust Remembrance Day, a memorial designated by the United Nations, wreaths and roses pay tribute to those killed by the Third Reich.

“Soviet troops liberated Auschwitz and the neighbouring Birkenau camp on Jan. 27, 1945. Some 1.5 million people, most of them Jews, died there from gassing, starvation, exhaustion, beatings and disease. Other victims included Soviet prisoners of war, Poles, Gypsies, homosexuals and political opponents of the Nazis.”

No one knows how many people were murdered in the Nazi camps. Historians estimate that at least 6 million Jews and 4 million others died, most of them systematically murdered in mass gas chambers.

But the honorific tributes laid at monuments across the world must not obscure other floral memorials due today. These were flowers of deceit, of forgetting, Human Flower Projects dedicated to inhumanity.

Dianthus, by Adolph Hitler
Photo: Hitler Historical Museum

We learn that at the Nazi camp in Dachau, where prisoners were mutilated with medical experiments, there was also a flower garden. Other gardens were planted in the ghetto of Theresienstadt, Czechoslovakia, making it a temporary showplace for investigators from the American Red Cross, before “the Jewish ‘actors’ were shipped to their death at Auschwitz.”

Hitler himself was a painter, quite sensitive in his still lifes of flowers.

Here is an excerpt from the letter 1st Lieutenant William Cowling, a young American soldier who took part in the liberation of Dachau, wrote home to his parents:

“The first thing we came to were piles and piles of clothing, shoes, pants, shirts, coats, etc. Then we went into a room with a table with flowers on it and some soap and towels. Another door with the word ‘showers’ lead off of this and upon going through this room it appeared to be a shower room but instead of water, gas came out and in two minutes the people were dead. Next we went next door to four large ovens where they cremated the dead. Then we were taken to piles of dead. There were from two to fifty people in a pile all naked, starved and dead. There must have been about 1,000 dead in all.”

And here are the flowers Alice Lok Cahana remembered. Her story is related in Laurence Rees’s book, AUSCHWITZ: A New History, reviewed by David Von Drehle for the Washington Post.

“We find workers at Auschwitz, on Oct. 7, 1944, coaxing the shivering, hungry children from Barrack 8 in the Birkenau annex with a promise of warm winter clothes. Alice Lok Cahana, 15, hoped to scrounge a few garments for her sickly sister, Edith. The children were led to a brick building in a corner of the compound and told to strip off their rags.

“Alice did not panic, and the reason is quite horrible. She noticed ‘flowers in a window’ of the building she was about to enter—which was, of course, a gas chamber. Flowers made her think of her mother, who loved violets, and so she felt calm.”

Heinrich Himmler picks flowers at the herb farm outside Dachau
Photo: Dachau scrapbook

Just five years ago Rabbi Josef Polak returned for the first time to Westerbork, the transit camp in Holland where he and his parents waited to be sent to Bergen-Belsen. Polak said it had been “the craziest place on the planet,” the imprisoned Jews there dressing up in coats and ties, lost in a dream of normalcy even as each Tuesday another 2000 people would be marched off to a train, to die.

“By every available account, SS Obersturmbannfuhrer Albert Gemmeker—the man who ensured the weekly flow of thousands of Jews from the Westerbork transit camp in Holland to the death and labor camps in eastern Europe—was a perfect gentleman. But as Rabbi Joseph Polak asked..., ‘Do you really want to be sent to your death by a perfect gentleman?’”

Westerbork’s buildings were destroyed in 1971. “The craziest place on the planet” is now a field of flowers.

Thursday, January 26, 2006

A Run on Thistles

To meet the huge demand on Burns Night, Scottish florists placed their orders for the national sticker in Zimbabwe.

Thistle in May, suburban Glasgow
Photo: Rampant Scotland

The beloved poet of Scotland Robert Burns (1759-1796) was a farm boy, his songs full of daisies, lilacs, and ‘red, red roses.’ But the national celebration of his birthday, January 25, is observed with thistles, this being Scotland’s national flower.

Since local thistles won’t bloom till May, florists have had to scour the world for decorations, for what would Burns Night be, without bagpipes, haggis, and a vase of thistles?

“It’s a bit like taking coals to Newcastle,” Stead Nicolle admitted.  “The 28-year old director of fresh flower importers Sandico (UK) said: ‘I was amazed at the rush in demand we had for thistles this week for the Burns Night celebrations.’” Nicolle and his wife Nicky had thought ahead, importing thistles from Zimbabwe, where it’s summer now.

Queens Head tribute to Robert Burns
Photo: Selkirk Scotland

The Burns celebrations will stretch on into the weekend, both in Scotland and elsewhere. We’ve come across festivities scheduled in Toronto, in Spokane, Washington, and even Houston.

Should you care to hold a Burns Night gathering , this site generously provides a format, from the Selkirk prayer and the presentation of haggis (sheep’s stomach), to the whisky toasts. Whate’er you do, don’t forget your thistles. They’ve earned a place at the party.

“The prickly purple thistle was adopted as the Emblem of Scotland during the rein of Alexander III (1249 -1286). Legend has it that an Army of King Haakon of Norway, intent on conquering the Scots, landed at the Coast of Largs at night to surprise the sleeping Scottish Clansmen. In order to move more stealthily under the cover of darkness the Norsemen removed their footwear.”

Big mistake.

Badge, Knights of the Order of the Thistle
Photo: Scots History Online

At night, the barefoot Nordic soldiers couldn’t fully appreciate Scotland’s wildflower. “One of Haakon’s men stood on one of these spiny little defenders and shrieked out in pain, alerting the Clansmen.” So the Scots prevailed.  Hammering home this story several centuries later King James V named the Order of the Thistle in 1540. Every order needs its own medal, and this one is a beauty.

A silver cross and star surround the image of a thistle and the motto “Nemo me impune lacessit”—“No-one harms me without punishment.” In Scottish, that’s “Wha daurs meddle wi me.” In Texas we’d say, “Don’t mess with Scotland.”

For your reading pleasure, here’s a good introduction to “Rabbie” Burns which includes ‘Auld Lang Syne’ and many other poems, including his ode to haggis…

Robert Burns

...But mark the Rustic, haggis-fed,
The trembling earth resounds his tread,
Clap in his walie nieve a blade,
He’ll make it whissle;
An legs an arms, an heads will sned,
Like taps o thrissle....

(But, mark the rustic, haggis-fed;
The trembling earth resounds his tread,
Grasp in his ample hands a flail
He’ll make it whistle,
Stout legs and arms that never fail,
Proud as the thistle.)

Wednesday, January 25, 2006

Korea’s Lovely Kkotminam

Drawing on ancient chivalry, modern soap operas and cash, South Korean males are proud to be called “flower men.”

Bae Yong Joon, #1 Flower Man
Photo: Dear Bae Yong Joon

Never having mastered the eyelash curler, we are indeed impressed by South Korea’s “kkotminan” —“flower boys.” These are the buffed male beauties of Seoul, nattily dressed, manicured and pretty as a picture.

Even before Salon magazine coined the term metrosexual, the boys of Asia were sampling skin creams and eyebrow pencils. In China, the “‘ai-mei nanren’ (love-beauty men), are spending their rising disposable incomes in beauty salons,” and on cosmetics, an industry whose sales in China rose 8% in 2003.

Movie star Kwon Sang Woo
tenderly flogs skin-creams for The Face Shop
Photo: blog 360

But Korea has led the way. “South Korea is rightfully famous in Asia for its pursuit of beauty. Seoul’s plastic surgeons, fashion boutiques, hairdressers and cosmetics merchants attract customers from throughout the region. People in the industry attribute the phenomenon to an ultra-competitive society, especially when it comes to jobs.”

South Korea also boasts two flower men (Kkotminam) with especially maniacal fans: Soccer star Ahn Jung-hwan has been knocking out cosmetic ads as well as knocking in goals. And TV star Bae Yong Joon (bearing some resemblance to Winona Ryder) has become a continental sensation.

Bae portrayed a “bespectacled, shaggy-haired and turtleneck-loving architect” in a serial called “Winter Sonata,” a drama crowded with all the plot devices of love comics, even, oh my, amnesia.

Rina Jimenez-David, writing for the Philippine Daily Inquirer, contends “The ‘flower man’ is every woman’s idealized lover: faithful and persevering, intelligent and sensitive, and yet also manly and authoritative, not to mention wealthy, well-educated and gentle of manner.”

Now that you mention it...sounds nice.

We also have learned of a much older breed of masculine flora in Korea. The Hwarang (flower knights) were a band of scrupulous warriors organized by King Chinhung 2000 years ago. Set apart in Korea’s beautiful wilds, they learned “to develop patience, mental and emotional control....” The Flower Knights were trained in both martial arts and beaux-arts. “Besides religious instruction, the Hwa Rang were taught dance, literature, the arts and sciences. They were also taught the art of warfare, archery, self defense skills.... Based upon the concept of the unity of opposites embodied in the um-yang, the empty-handed fighting techniques were known for their blending of the hard and soft, linear and circular attacks.”

Korean Boy Scout merit badge
with Mugungwha, the national flower

Would these ancient archers have shopped for mascara? We’re not sure. (Certainly, Korean women’s 20-year march into the workforce has bent genders as much as 7th century archers ever could.) Still, it seems quite plausible that Korea’s legacy of knights in flower, “hard and soft,” made way for the supple Kkotminan of today.

Consider: In South Korea, the Boy Scouts even give a floral merit badge.

Tuesday, January 24, 2006

Graham’s Beardtongue—Speak Now

The U.S. wildlife service at last recommends a Utah penstemon for “threatened” status, just ahead of oil shale mining.

Graham’s penstemon
Penstemon grahamii
Photo: Susan Meyer

Sometimes it requires more than a hiking trip and a field guide. Sometimes it takes the collapse in federal laws, an uplifted legal axe, and the threat of strip mining just to see a flower.

Utah conservationists have been wide eyed about Graham’s penstemon for seventy years. They’ve pressed to add this beautiful lavender wildflower of the Uintah Basin to the list of federally protected plants for two decades.

“The total population is estimated to range between 5500 and 7000 individuals, primarily within lands currently leased for oil and gas development. Graham’s Penstemon has been a candidate for federal listing as endangered or threatened since 1975 and has yet to be listed.”

But last week the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced it would recommend designating Penstemon grahamii, also known as Graham’s beardtongue, as “threatened,” thus eligible for federal protection. A long time coming.

Environmental groups sued the U.S. wildlife service in 2002 to force serious assessment of the risks this plant is facing. Last week’s announcement was, in part, a result of that lawsuit.

But with the latest epidemic of global hydrocarbon-itis, this particular wildflower faces new perils. Graham’s penstemon “is only found on oil shale barrens where most other plants could never withstand the blazing heat.” In Utah, the few surviving plants grow in only three counties: Uintah, Duchesne, and (you get the picture) Carbon.

As fuel prices levitate, there’s been a boom in oil and gas development here. And since regulations were relaxed in 2005, drillers are now coming to the region after oil shale, an extraction process that actually strip mines the land. According to the Salt Lake Tribune, “The Bureau of Land Management just last week awarded research and development leases to six firms in Utah and Colorado to begin experimental oil shale production.”

Jim Wandersee and Renee Clary have eloquently described the human propensity for “plant blindness.” How very strange, that it’s taken lawyers, a war over foreign oil, twenty years of agitation, and now the prospect of a moonscape just to see “magenta-striped throats and fiery orange staminodes”—Graham’s penstemon, up close and for real.

Range of Graham’s penstemon
(red dots in the East)
Map: Utah State University

Would you care to speak out about this lovely species of beardtongue?: “Comments from all interested parties must be received by March 20, 2006. Public hearing requests must be received by March 6, 2006.”

Send overland mail to:
Henry Maddux
Field Supervisor
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
Utah Field Office
2369 West Orton Circle
West Valley, Utah 84119

Email comments: Check here.

To quote the Chambers Brothers: “Time has come today” for Penstemon grahamii.

Monday, January 23, 2006

Evo

After months of campaigning in floral regalia, Evo Morales is sworn in as Bolivia’s first indigenous president.

Evo Morales and his supporters

With a resounding 54% percent of December’s vote, Evo Morales was elected to preside over Bolivia, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. “Evo,” as he prefers to be called, was sworn in yesterday in La Paz.

Morales, 46, becomes the first indigenous leader to hold the high office, and through many years of political organizing he has worn his heritage quite literally: the most flower-bedecked political figure the modern-day Americas has known.

Born into an Aymara Indian family, Morales herded llamas for a living and became a cocalero (coca grower).  He campaigned for the presidency unsuccessfully in 2002 and again last year on a socialist platform, promising to transform the nation’s raw material wealth—notably its coca-leaf and natural gas reserves—into assets for Bolivia’s poor.

“Today the Bolivian gas is controlled by the multinationals,” Morales said in an interview four years ago. “We, the Bolivians, have lost the ownership....  If we are going to sell our gas we must not sell it as raw material.”

Bolivia, as other nations of the Andes, has been under intense U.S. pressure to eradicate coca, the plant processed into cocaine. But Morales rejects U.S. definitions and intervention, arguing that coca has been a traditional medicinal plant among the indigenous people of the Andes for centuries. “I am a coca grower. I cultivate coca leaf, which is a natural product,” Morales declared. “I do not refine [it into] cocaine, and neither cocaine nor drugs have ever been part of the Andean culture.”

Throughout his political ascendancy, Morales has presented a striking figure, appearing at hundreds of public events festooned with garlands of coca leaf and Andean flowers. Yoked with blossoms and greenery, it’s as if he wears the Bolivian landscape, both a resource-rich mantle and a robe of international defiance.

The most striking such event took place on the eve of his inauguration. At a pre-Incan archeological site, Tiwanaku, the president-elect received a spiritual blessing from Aymara leaders.

The blessing by Aymara priests at Tiwanaku, Jan. 21
Photo: David Mercado, for Reuters

“Morales walked barefoot up the Akapana pyramid, donning the tunic and a cap decorated with traditional yellow and red Aymara patterns. Then he was showered with white flower petals, and blessed by Indian priests....  Accepting a baton adorned with gold and silver symbolizing his Indian leadership, he put on sandals and descended the pyramid to address the crowd gathered in front of the Kalasasaya temple.

“Morales thanked Mother Earth and God for his victory and promised equality and justice.”

Wearing a striped sweater to meet heads of state, and addressing the people from inside thick wreaths of gladiola blooms and coca leaves, Morales has embodied Bolivia. May he govern it well.

Sunday, January 22, 2006

Bottoms Up—Hibiscus

One of the showiest garden flowers shows up in Caribbean ice pitchers, in Asian kitchens, and now in Tanzanian “jerricans,” as wine

Hibiscus sabdariffa, specimen
Photo: Swedish Museum
of Natural History

To be a rural woman in Tanzania, you don’t get any breaks in the business world.  Hilda Mwesiga apparently didn’t need a break, just solidarity, chutzpa and hibiscus.

“In rural areas, where women come together in times of happiness and sadness, we felt that we needed to start up an economic activity to help us earn a living. So we formed a group and learnt how to process wine,” Mwesiga said.

A retired nurse, Mwesiga began making wine from roselle, the local hibiscus flower, and has now joined forces with other women of Bukoba, her community, to produce over 120 litres each week.  The wine sells for 1200 Tanzania sh. per bottle (about $1.07 USD) but people who can’t afford that much “buy her wine in containers and jerrycans. (Mwesiga) plans to expand her market as the East African Union market grows.”

Calyxes of hibiscus
Photo: Phuket Jet Tour

This excellent webpage from Purdue University offers encyclopedic detail about Hibiscus sabdariffa. “The Flemish botanist, M. de L’Obel, published his observations of the plant in 1576, and the edibility of the leaves was recorded in Java in 1687. Seeds are said to have been brought to the New World by African slaves.”

In the Caribbean, where hibiscus grows abundantly, the flower combined with ginger is a popular tea. Tantalizing, here is Carol Bareuther’s tea recipe from the island of St. Thomas.

In Mexico “flor de Jamaica” (actually the dried calyxes) can be found at most local markets. A Mexican restaurant outside D.C. offers a “chayote (tropical squash) salad accessorized with crumbled cheese, peanuts and a sharp red dressing of hibiscus flower and onion.” (We’re working on getting that recipe, folks.) The Purdue horticulturists also note that in Africa, hibiscus calyxes “are frequently cooked as a side-dish eaten with pulverized peanuts.”

Ready to imbibe: Nile Valley “Hibiscus Mint Tea”
Photo: JT65b4b

The national beverage of Texas may have once been Lone Star Beer, but the municipal drink of Austin, the state capitol, is hibiscus tea. Awad Abdelgadir’s Nile Valley Teas, a company based not on the Nile but the Colorado River, has made the music capitol ruby-throated, and also benefits Awad’s hometown in the Sudan. (In Egypt hibiscus tea, known as Karkade, is enormously popular.) Hot or cold, it’s delicious and, like cranberry juice, awakeningly tangy. If you’d like another endorsement, see what this blogger-skeptic has to show and tell.

Hibiscus tea is also brewed and drunk in Asia, though these recipes tend to skip the Caribbean’s ginger. The flower also makes a preserve, like cranberry, especially good for livening up poultry dishes.

We look forward to hearing how the Tanzanian women’s enterprise with hibiscus “spirits” develops. And we recommend that the company sell its wine with a roselle-tea “chaser.” In Guatemala, an infusion of roselle flowers is a popular hangover cure: pink hair of the pink dog.