Human Flower Project

Wednesday, May 31, 2006

Ecumenical Flowers

With a flower embrace, two English cathedrals reach past theology.

Carved medallion
Norwich Cathedral
Photo: About Britain

Ecumenicism is bee-bop-a-lou-ah for “unity.” About 50 years ago, it was a much more popular idea—that people of all faiths might come together and get busy working on something more significant than how right they individually were.

So we were encouraged to see this trace of ecumenicism in today’s news, undertaken via —yes—flowers. The Anglican and Roman Catholic cathedrals in Norwich, England, are working together to ”Embrace the World” in a joint flower festival.

A B24 Liberator (front) and a B17 fly above the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist, Norwich.
Illustration:  Paul Osborne

Parishioners have stencilled the streets of Norwich with a mile of yellow flowers, making a trail between the two grand churches. Inside, there will be scores of arrangements by local designers. The Norwich flowers will “focus on famous people of the world, in traditional style, while those at St John’s Roman Catholic Cathedral… will portray countries of the world in modern flower arrangements”—175 floral exhibits in all. The event, running through Monday, is expected to draw 30,000 visitors, and their donations (7 GBP apiece) will support improvements at both cathedrals and the East Anglian Air Ambulance.

We have special interest in Norwich and its air as our dear father was based here during World War II, flying bombing missions over Germany, Norway, and France. We discovered this amazing image on the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist site.  “During World War II” the beautiful Catholic cathedral “was used as a turning beacon for planes returning to Norfolk after bombing missions in Europe, especially by members of the USAF 7th Air Force. Many of them were married here, as testified in parish registers of the 1940s.”

Norwich Cathedral, more than 900 years old, has been called “one of the finest examples of Romanesque architecture in Europe.” Flowers in wood, “nave bosses,” are a permanent part of the cathedral—“a unique and world renowned collection of medieval carvings.”

Carved medallion, Norwich Cathedral
Photo: Julia Hedgecoe

The deans of Norwich Cathedral and the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist began meeting over a year ago “to explore ways in which they could improve their links as they wanted to show all faiths the benefits of working together towards a common goal.” The Very Rev. Graham Smith, Norwich Cathedral, said, “The Festival was born out of the desire of our two Cathedrals to work together to the glory of God and in the service of the wider community”

Why does flower theology seem an invitation to ecumenicism? Our friend John Stokes of Mary Gardens has many informed and illuminating things to say on this subject. In our own view, flowers evidence a beautiful and living power that, without trampling on a violet, presides over all.

Tuesday, May 30, 2006

A Tale of Two Valleys—Where Rose Oil is Born

Bulgaria’s big rose festival begins today; work is hard and “conditions” are ideal.

At Karlovo’s rose festival
Photo: Balkany

Kazanlashka roza—the Kazanluk rose of Bulgaria—receives its due over the next several days. Bulgaria’s rose festival comes at harvest time, when this special breed of flower is at peak bloom and ripe with precious attar.

While the Bulgarians admit their roses are descended from those of Iran, they point out how over four centuries, they’ve made huge improvements, thanks to humid nature and intensive nurture. They call the time-honored techniques of cultivation kesme, a laborious method that involves trenching, the careful relayering of “upper” and “lower” soils, overlapping healthy cuttings, periodic hoeing and shoveling in of “lower” earth, “scarifying the stamped soil” after the harvest, and mounding dirt around the bases of each plant for winter.

The seasoned rose growers here have noticed, “Every five to seven years there occurs a sudden warming during the harvesting time, which hampers gathering, storing and distillation. To avoid the adverse effect of the winds on the rose bushes, (the shrubs) were always planted in hedge-rows,” oriented north/south or northeast/southwest. Formerly, hedges of white roses were planted at the extremities of the field, to protect the more richly scented pinks inside.

Rose harvesting
Image: BPG

To all this human care and industry, Nature contributes genius too. The climate here is, in rose-ese, perfect. “The rainfalls in the Rose Valley are heaviest in the spring, with a peak in June. Daily rainfalls are not abundant, yet the rainy days are many. This kind of weather prolongs the flowering period, suppresses oil evaporation, at the same time increasing the yield of oil and its quality. The mean monthly precipitation in May and June is usually between 80 and 100 litres per square meter. The absence of intensive sunshine prevents undesired liberation of the volatile aromatic ingredients from the flowers.”

Warm and humid without baking sun, temperate and airy without stinging winds. According to one source, flowers of the Striama and Toundzha river valleys (and their human assistants) produce 80% of the world’s rose oil, used in perfumes, to be sure, but also in cooking and cosmetics.

Here’s a general run-down of the festival events, which include dancing, lots of costumes, demonstrations, ritual picking, and the crowing of rose royalty. “The first rose festival in Kazanlak took place in 1903” and Karlovo began its own celebration soon after.  Here are more specifics and photos from Karlovo, where the ritual picking this year will take place June 3. This excellent site offers lots more information about the history of the industry. It notes, for example, that under Communism, rose production “was declared a monopoly of the state.”

While Bulgarian tourism calls the rose festival “a tribute to beauty,” we can’t help but remember what our Bulgarian friend Stela told us—that as a high school student, she and all her classmates were bussed into the rose valley before dawn and forced to pick flowers each morning throughout harvest season.

We’d call the rose festival “a tribute to labor and nature”—with beauty, and sore fingers, its result.

Monday, May 29, 2006

Decoration Day

North and South are still at odds over who initiated Memorial Day.

Civil War veteran salutes with a Boy Scout and a soldier
at a gravesite in Oak Woods Cemetery, Chicago, Illinois
Decoration Day, 1927
Photo: Chicago Daily News
from Library of Congress, American Memory

When we dream of going back in time, to any period of history, there’s one era we would NOT choose to visit: the years of the U.S. Civil War, 1861-1865.

In a small way, though, we revisit this dreadful time each Memorial Day. “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....” So read an order of the Grand Army of the Republic, Washington, D.C., 138 years ago. This may be the U.S. military’s one floral command.

Fortunately, the military doesn’t run this country (yet, anyway). It’s primarily been civilians who have carried out this order, lovingly. The custom goes back at least two years before the army proclamation, when three women in Columbus, Mississippi, decided to decorate the graves of both Union and Confederate soldiers buried in Friendship Cemetery. After the gruesome Battle of Shiloh, “Hundreds of wounded troops, - both Confederate and Union - were shipped south on railroad cars from Corinth, Mississippi, near the Tennessee line to makeshift hospitals in towns such as Columbus.  Many of the soldiers died on the trains; others survived into the late spring and early summer of 1862 but ultimately perished.” More than 2000 soldiers are buried here.

Felder Rushing writes that when news of the Columbus graveyard tribute “reached the North, an article in the New York Tribune cited the ladies for their unselfish act; many people were surprised that Southern ladies would mark the graves of Union soldiers with flowers. But war widow Augusta Murdoch Sykes, one of the Columbus planners, pointed out that ‘after all, they are somebody’s sons.’” The tradition of “Decoration Day” seems to have spread quickly on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line, a reconciliatory custom born of grief and weariness—conditions only flowers of the late spring can meet.

Weirdly, some would extend the battle, over who gets credit for Decoration Day. Here, die-hard Northerners give their version; here, Confederate flag waving, is another view.

Decoration Day, Pineview Cemetery, West Virginia (1996)
Photo: Terry Eiler

Only in 1971 was the federal holiday Memorial Day fixed on the last Monday in May. It “marks the unofficial beginning of the summer season in the United States. It is still a time to remember those who have passed on, whether in war or otherwise. It also is a time for families to get together for picnics, ball games, and other early summer activities.”

In the South, the custom remains strong, though it’s not always observed on Memorial Day. At rural cemeteries where there’s no groundskeeping crew, descendents often set aside a weekend in the spring or summer to meet and clean up the ancestors’ graves. The occasion melds Decoration Day and family reunion. Make sure to see the photographs Terry Eiler took in West Virginia, 1996. Terry’s photo album appears, along with the Chicago picture above and thousands more materials, at the Library of Congress site called American Memory.

Sunday, May 28, 2006

Heartthrob of the Fall Line

Along an ancient border of the American Southeast, it’s showtime for the rocky shoals spider lily.

The Fall Line
where the Appalachians drop to the coastal plain
Image: Dept. of Geography, Kokushikan University

Throughout the land of gracious drawl—the Southeastern United States—people refer to “The Fall Line,” where the Appalachian Piedmont meets the coastal Atlantic plain. “Its name arises from the occurrence of waterfalls and rapids that are the inland barriers to navigation” on all the region’s major rivers. Just as our hometown of Louisville, Kentucky, grew up on the Falls of the Ohio, where folks had to debark and tote overland, many cities of the Eastern U.S. developed along this geological dropoff, from Lowell, Mass., on the Merrimack River in the north, through Troy, NY, Wilmington, Delaware, Washington, D.C. on the Potomac, to the more southern river towns of Columbia, South Carolina; Augusta, Georgia; and Auburn, Alabama. Navigation was tough but water-power plentiful along this escarpment, a good place to unload your grain and set up a mill.

The southern stretches of the Fall Line, with warm water running over rocky shoals, proved the perfect habitat for Hymenocallis coronaria a rare and beautiful spider lily. In late May, the aquatic plant bursts into silvery flower, causing great commotion in Dixie. Landsford Canal State Park on the Catawba River in South Carolina, claiming to have the most Rocky Shoals Spider Lilies in the country, holds an annual Lily Festival, with canoe and kayak trips up river to see the flowers in bloom (sorry, y’all. It was last weekend, though surely some of the lilies are still celebrating).

In Alabama, the same plants are known as Cahaba lilies, since the Cahaba River south of Birmingham suits them. “They only occur in open well-lit rocky shoals of streams and rivers. Other requirements the lilies have are swift-moving and well-oxygenated water free of pollution and sediments.” This Alabama nature site says the flowers’ main pollinator is the “plebian sphinx moth,” a nocturnal visitor “attracted to the lily by the fragrance of the flower and the sugary reward it offers. Once seeds are produced, they drop into the water and sink to the bottom where they are wedged into rock and grow to become new plants.”

The same fragrance also attracted naturalist William Bartram, credited with first describing the rocky shoals spider lily in 1773. “After observing a population in the Savannah River near Augusta, he wrote, ‘Nothing in vegetable nature is more pleasing than the odoriferous Pancratium fluitans, which alone possesses the little rocky islets which just appear above the water.’”

Rocky Shoals Spider Lily - Full Flower Moon
Landsford Shoals, South Carolina, May 1999
Photo: Ted Borg
(Prints of this photo are for sale, proceeds benefiting conservation work in the Catawba River Valley.)

By whatever name, these beautiful flowers are disappearing. Only 50 colonies survive, yet the plant has not been placed on the federal endangered species list.  Dammed creeks and sedimentation from runoff have sent too much soil to settle in the lily’s rocky and fluid habitat, so that other types of vegetation are sprouting here, crowding out the beautiful wild amaryllis. This article describes how botanical scientists are building an artificial stream to replicate the rare lily’s native habitat and study its life cycle. Clemson University’s Botanical Gardeners, given some seeds of Hymenocallis coronaria, are trying to propagate the rocky shoals spider lily and reintroduce it into shallows of the Broad River in Columbia.

Maybe rah-rah-for-rarity ecotourism and scientific research (plus endangered species status, please!) can save this beauty of the southern Fall Line.

Friday, May 26, 2006

The Vitex Queen

Gardener and herbalist Ellen Zimmermann shares the glories of the “chaste tree.”

Vitex agnus-castus (with Turk’s cap)
Photo: Human Flower Project

Does the chaste tree enhance or suppress libido?

Now coming into bloom here in Austin, Vitex agnus-castus is also known as “chaste tree” and “monk’s pepper.” We’ve heard it was once planted around monasteries and “touted as an herb capable of helping Monks maintain their vows of chastity.” But if that’s true, wouldn’t it be called “monk’s balm” not “monk’s pepper”?

Herbalist Ellen Zimmermann discreetly recommends, “You be the judge.”

Ellen is known around these parts as “The Vitex Queen.” Through classes, demonstrations, her beautiful garden and her own glowing good health, she’s been spreading the news about this plant’s benefits for “women of all ages.” She names the chaste tree among her Top Ten Herbs: “The medicinal berries are used to treat PMS and menopausal symptoms, such as hot flashes and excessive bleeding.  As a hormonal balancer, Vitex regulates progesterone and estrogen, treats fibroids and re-establishes normal ovulation and menstruation.” Hear me roar!

Ellen Zimmermann teaches in her garden southwest of Austin, TX, July 2004
Photo: Human Flower Project

Ellen makes a simple tincture of vitex berries, usually harvested in July; they’re also a key ingredient in her “Menopause Made Easy” tincture. Find out lots more on Ellen’s website. Our favorite corner there is the monthly herbal newsletter, one of the very first dedicated, of course, to vitex. Ellen affirms that it “helps the body retain its natural balance after using the birth control pill.  Vitex can also treat fibroids, inflammation of the womb lining and will enhance the flow of mother’s milk.”

If you’d like a second opinion, how about Hippocrates? He set down in the 4th Century B.C., “If blood flows from the womb, let the woman drink dark red wine in which the leaves of the chaste tree have been steeped. A draft of chaste leaves in wine also serves to expel a chorion (afterbirth) held fast in the womb.”

Interiors aside, we most appreciate lilac chaste tree for its beauty and hardiness here in the scorching South. Ellen suggests, “plant a small tree, in the sun, nurture it at first and then just about let it be.  Vitex loves our summer heat and will thrive for years.” Bill Hopkins, a North Texas gardener and terrific blogger at prairie point, likewise paid tribute to vitex.

Its effects on libido? When Bill writes, “I can’�t imagine living without (a chaste tree) now,” and Ellen calls vitex “my husband’s favorite herb,” we get the picture, a mighty pretty one.

Thursday, May 25, 2006

Looking over a Concrete Clover

Lewis Mumford sets off a search for the flowers of highway interchange.

Highway interchange in North Carolina
Photo: NCDOT

“Our national flower is the concrete cloverleaf.”

So Lewis Mumford (1895-1990) summed up America’s erotic love of technology, speed and engineering-for-engineering’s sake.

Are there truly flowers in asphalt, discernible from the sky? We found a few symmetrical freeway interchanges, like this one in St. Louis, a loop-de-loop in Maryland, and the Kathleen Road interchange in Florida (oh, Kathleen, I’m thinking you would have preferred some lovelier floral tribute than this!).

But primarily what we found was land scarred up, hideously. Check out the Museum of Ridiculous Freeway Design for some especially koo-koo junctions. What’s more sinister, though, (and inspired Mumford’s “national flower” thought) is our deep infatuation with roads. This site lovingly compiles highway shapes and here’s a study of knotted objects including concrete clovers.

Up for a bit of DIY? Well, by all means, make your own cloverleaf highway.

Architect and sociologist, Mumford developed a fairly grim outlook on American culture, and after checking out these transportation “flowers” one respects his darkness. He wrote about how advertising had fabricated “needs” for ever more and newer stuff, and that stuff was deliberately shoddy—so we’d always be out there buying replacements, on credit. But he argued that the organic world obeyed very different laws: of “qualitative richness, amplitude, spaciousness, and freedom from quantitative pressures and crowding. Self-regulation, self-correction, and self-propulsion are as much an integral property of organisms as nutrition, reproduction, growth, and repair.”

Brooke and endangered cranes fly
over Kankakee County, Illinois
Oct. 27, 2005
Photo: Operation Migration

It seems to us that the worlds of technologies and organisms, of highways and wildflowers, have become knotted. How many clomid babies and, by now, clomid young-adults do we know?  The hope of returning to an existence free of “qualitative pressures” may be an impossible one. Inside the knot, though, there are some fascinating efforts and successes. Consider Operation Migration, a mix of human technical prowess and bird instinct. This group has been working to reroute endangered whooping cranes along their ancient migratory path.

“Whooping cranes learn their migration route by following their parents. But this knowledge is lost when the species is reduced and there are no longer any wild birds using the flyway. Until Operation Migration was asked by the US Fish and Wildlife Service to spearhead a reintroduction of the world’s most endangered cranes, there was no method of teaching migration to captive reared Whooping cranes released into the wild. In the first five years of the program, approximately 60 birds have been taught a migration route between Wisconsin and Florida. This is 4 times the number that existed in the early 1940’s.”

We wish Lewis Mumford were here to comment on such an odd endeavor and this photo, of “Brooke” and six birds flying over a concrete cloverleaf last fall in Illinois.

Wednesday, May 24, 2006

All I Know About Chemistry I Learned from Hydrangeas

A Japanese native teaches pH 101.

Hydrangeas in bloom
Columbia, South Carolina, July 2005
Photo: Human Flower Project

Through the southeastern U.S., hydrangeas are plentiful. We were fortunate once to inherit a garden in Lexington, KY, with so many white oakleaf hydrangea bushes that local florists would come “shopping” in wedding season. Starting about now.

Much as we love white flowers, when it comes to hydrangeas we prefer the colorful and more bosomy varieties—like H. macrophylla, also known as “mophead.” These pedagogues of spring taught us all we know about soil chemistry. The flowers announce how alkaline (high pH) or acidic (low pH) the soil is, tingeing toward blue in acid conditions and pink where it’s limier. Growing up in Louisville, we were enchanted to see how gardeners had steered their hydrangeas toward violet or rose, or sometimes managed to mottle blossoms by more complicated tinkering (or was it chance?). Neither being well versed nor terribly interested in science, this sort of gardening intervention seemed quite aggressive and exciting—a yard experiment conceived by Granny Frankenstein.

If you are fortunate to live where these beautiful plants do well, you might try playing around with soil chemistry to achieve a Utopian shade somewhere between pink and blue. This site contains excellent information on hydrangea selection, coloration and pruning.

“A wide range of depth of color exists in the pink and blue cultivars ranging from blush pink and robin’s-egg blue to brick red and cobalt blue. The depth of color is entirely dependant on the cultivar. Otaksa, for example, will never reach a rich deep color, no matter how much you may pile on the chemicals. And some hydrangeas refuse to be changed to clear blue, like Geoffrey Chadbund, making a royal purple flower at best, when treated.” Many of the white varieties won’t take on color at all.

Once you have a mutable species in the ground, you may turn them bluer “by adding sphagnum peat moss, sulfur or aluminum sulfate to the soil. A pH range of 5.5 to 6.0 is needed, and a soil test is a good first step.” Aluminum is the key and usually present in the ground already, but “if the soil is alkaline, plants are unable to absorb the existing aluminum and the flowers will not blue.” It’s possible to burn the roots of your hydrangea with too much aluminum, though. Water before you add chemicals. Allen Boger recommends, “Start with 2-4 applications of two tablespoons of aluminum sulfate per plant, at two-week intervals in the spring. Don’t overdo it.” Achieving Utopian Blue may take a couple of seasons.

Why does it seem effort always is extended in blue’s direction? Because “it is more difficult to acidify soils than to make them more alkaline.” You’re not kidding! Here in Austin we struggle along on a shelf of chalk. Azaleas and camellias have been known to perish as they near the curb—so we’re not going to attempt hydrangeas. We leave that to our gardening friends back in Kentucky and South Carolina.

Folks, we’d love to see how your pinks, blues and whites are faring this spring. Have your mopheads reached Utopia?

Tuesday, May 23, 2006

Fleur-de-Lis at Chelsea

A French iris breeder succeeds with a patriotic new bloom.

French king
in battle uniform
Image: B. Timms, Heraldry

The event may be utterly English but the hit of this year’s Chelsea Flower Show seems to be French: Ecoutez, regardez.

Jinny Blom’s Laurent Perrier Garden, “Inspired by the chalky landscape of the Champagne region of France,” features “a delicate muted palette of colors-- cream, blush, copper, watery blue and claret with particular focus on irises.” Oh-la-la, rococo. As well as being exquisitely pretty, this garden is drawing attention at Chelsea because it’s so timely. While over the past few days the flower show grounds caught gushing rains, England as a whole has been dry. Most of the U.K. has been under a “hosepipe ban” since last summer, injecting a certain tremulousness into gardeners’ ordinarily stiff-upper-lips. So iris is the flower of the hour; though the blooms are delicious and delicate as Fragonard, the plants are drought tolerant.

It may smart a little that iris, a.k.a. flag and fleur-de-lis is having such a banner year under these inhospitable conditions at Chelsea. For the fleur-de-lis, of course, is the emblem of France.

There’s quite a bit of controversy over when and how the fleur-de-lis became the insignia of French royalty. The name most often mentioned is King Clovis (@466-511):  “Legend has it that an angel presented Clovis, the Merovingian king of the Franks, with a golden lily as a symbol of his purification upon his conversion to Christianity.” Very nice, except as even the heraldry experts will agree, the fleur-de-lis doesn’t so much resemble a lily as an iris, specifically iris pseudacorus, golden yellow with sharp arching petals.

Yellow flag (Iris pseudacorus)
Photo: G. Bradley, for UK Safari

This is the color and shape we see wherever the French traded, fought or breathed. (Check out, for example, the official seal of St. Lucia and this iris-spangled window from Bourges Cathedral.)

And it’s a French hybridizer Cayeux Iris whose flowers are stealing the Chelsea show. Rubbing it in, Cayeux has introduced Reussite, a tricolor—bleu, blanc et rouge, like the French flag. (Okay, so the Union Jack is blue, white and red, too, as are Old Glory and any number of other national banners. We still get the message.) London Times writer Julian Desborough gives credit where it’s due.

Reussite
Photo: Cayeux Iris

Admitting his own weakness for irises, he writes, “The one that caught my eye is a doyen among growers, Cayeux Iris, which is showing 41 different bearded irises, of which 24 have been bred by the French horticulturists themselves. The latest cultivar, “Reussite” or “Success”, is the culmination of 30 years of hybridisation work by Richard Cayeux and his father Jean. They have achieved an iris that represents the French tricolour - red, white and blue. The petals are white, the sepals white with a blue edge (without a trace of purple) and the barbs are red.”

“Barbs” is about right.

For lots more on Chelsea (May 23-27), check out the BBC’s huge site. Here you can design your own virtual garden and get up to the minute video downloads for your mobile phone.  Maybe next year, they’ll be able to communicate that grapey fragrance of bearded iris too.

Monday, May 22, 2006

Sweet Crab

Students rallied to save the crabapple tree at Sweet Briar College, and an alumna planted her own.

The flowering crabs at Sweet Briar College
Photo: Kim Leach

We grew up believing that the gorgeous crabapple tree that stood outside our window in Louisville, Kentucky, was planted when we were born, to grow up alongside us. As a high school senior, we crawled out the bedroom window onto the roof and sat beside its topmost blossoms.

Now we learn that our arrival was likely just part of what inspired planting a flowering crab. Crabapple trees have for 80-some years been living fixtures of Sweet Briar College in Virginia. Three of these trees had grown up tall before the Benedict building, part of the original “Ralph Cram” campus; when a brick wall there was to be restored, the college groundskeepers thought the crabs would have to be pulled out. This was 1999, in April, when a flowering crab can best plead for its life.

According to this account students and faculty petitioned the college president to save the trees, and prevailed. The smallest was removed, but the others survived. “College tree trimmer Richard Canode, in consultation with apple expert Tom Burford, carefully and caringly pruned the two crab apple trees. While he was removing all of the suckers, dead wood, and ivy, he said that he considers these trees among the most valuable on campus.”

Sweet Briar is one of those now very rare institutions—an all women’s college. (We’re guessing there aren’t many colleges where students still dance the May Pole.) Our mother attended the school for one year, back in 1939-1940. She must have enjoyed those crabapple trees next to Benedict and after marrying and settling in Kentucky, chose to plant a flowering crab of her own in Louisville, to celebrate May Day every year.

Topiaried crabapple
with Wendy’s
Liberty, NY
Photo: Human Flower Project

Much to the credit of all involved, Sweet Briar’s faculty turn to the crabapples not only for an education in direct action but for nature study, as in this careful observation of bee activity.

Would you like to plant one of these trees? Here’s a good Q&A that may address some of your crabapple thoughts. And a photo of the tree that kicked our own imagination into high gear—a topiaried crabapple we found floating like a pink satellite outside the Days Inn in Liberty, New York. 

Finally, we greet our new friends at the beautiful and informative Dias com Arvores, a loving study of trees in Portugal’s landscape and culture. Por favor, show us your crabapples!

Sunday, May 21, 2006

What’s on Cher’s Backside?

...several editorial floral tattoos, that’s what.

Cher’s floral “forgetter” tattoos
Photo: Vistoenpantalla

Having attended a summery outdoor party in Austin last night, we have, of course, tattoos on the brain. As you know, this form of body decoration, once restricted to South Sea Islanders, sailors, prisoners, and motorcyclists, has been adopted, however painfully, by mainstreamians. To wit, we saw last evening a highly cultivated young urbanist in a sundress, the back of her shoulder splashed with a purple rose.

We can only prick the surface of this complex subject, for tattooing has a long and distinctive if not completely distinguished history dating back to Egypt’s 5th Century BC. It’s been practiced over most of the globe and proven itself an enormously versatile signifier, at some time or place, conveying every conceivable message - except, perhaps, innocence. The Ainu of Western Asia believed body markings invested the bearer with magic power; for Polynesians, designs on the skin spelled social status. “In ancient Greece, the tattoo was used to mark spies while the Romans used the tattoo to mark slaves and criminals.” In 16th century Japan tattoos “progressed from a method to mark criminals to an aesthetic form,” similar to what’s happened in the U.S. and U.K. over the past 30 years or so.

In their capacity to call attention and jump symbolic boundaries, tattoos are much like flowers—and it’s no surprise that, among men and women both, flowers are a favorite choice for body decoration. Orchid expert Greg Allikas learned that an admirer named “Kirstie” had paid to have one of his flower photographs reproduced on her flank. We call this “the sincerest form of flattery," Greg.

Whether the prisoner’s permanent tear or Kirstie’s orchid, all tattoos seem to be somehow protective. According to Manchester tattoo artist Louis Molloy, “Sailors used to get an image of Jesus done on their backs, and if they were caught and flogged for some misdemeanour, the person flogging them wouldn’t want to whip the image of Christ.” Same goes for the skull tattooed on a biker’s bicep—may it keep a daredevil from harm.

So what about flower tattoos? We found this amazing story from Seattle, about a cancer survivor who chose a field of tattooed morning glories rather than breast implants. This article reports that lotus flowers are especially popular as tattoos now. The lotus rises out of rank water, a pure and perfect bloom, so lotus tattoos “can represent a hard time in life that has been overcome.”

Every tattoo is a mark of experience, proving ”I’ve been there,” but flower tattoos add something: “I’m making a new start. Wish me well.” We learned this from an unlikely source—Cher’s fanny. “Cher is said to have the names of several boyfriends tattooed on her bottom, each one covered with a flower emblem when the romance died. She jokes she now has ‘something of a rose garden.’”