Human Flower Project

Saturday, December 30, 2006

Rose of Jericho—For Openers

The Resurrection Plant breathes life into the dead of winter.

Before: Odontospermum pygmaeum after years in a brown bag
Photos: Julie Ardery

Several winters ago at the turn of the year, we visited the shrine of Don Pedrito, famed folk healer of the Texas-Mexican border, down near Falfurrias. At the tiny gift shop next to the curandero’s shrine, we spotted what looked like a ball of dry, dead moss. What’s this?

”Rose of Jericho,” we were told, a plant that comes back to life, bringing good health and fortune.  Sold to the gringa from Austin.

We brought this weird knot of vegetation home in a paper bag, and it sat on a shelf up high, untouched, until last week. This Christmas we would be traveling and couldn’t stand the thought of getting a tree and decorating it only to abandon it for the holidays. Then we spotted the old brown bag, took it down, and pulled out the Rose of Jericho. Maybe it could provide a miracle of Christmas greenery.

After: Two days in warm water-- Ta-da!

Submerged in a bowl of lukewarm water, over the next few hours and days it “bloomed.” The dry fist opened wide, turning a dark olive. Amazing. We changed the bowl-water each day to keep our “rose” fresh, and on the morning we left town splashed some of the healing water all four wheels of the car we’d be driving 2500 miles. We left the splayed out Rose of Jericho on a couple of paper towels to dry out as we’d been told to do, and returned—safely and happily—a week later, finding it brown and balled up again.

The name Rose of Jericho is used for several plants with these same magical behaviors: “Anastatica hierochuntica of the family Cruciferae (mustard)” and Odontospermum pygmaeum, “a member of the family Asteraceae (aster).” Ours appears to be Odontospermum pygmaeum or Selaginella lepidophylla.

An article from Garden and Forest (1892) says Resurrection Plants were brought to Europe from Asia Minor in the Middle Ages. “Many specimens were brought home by the Crusaders, and so highly were they prized, for semi-religious reasons, that they were often represented in the paintings on old shields which still exist in France.” (We quite like the idea of “semi-religious” and would describe the Human Flower Project as such.)

A semi-philosophical account of Rose of Jericho is of interest, too:

“For long periods, these ‘roses’ live in desert regions, growing and reproducing as any other plant until the environment no longer supports an adequate existence. When this time comes, they lose moisture, retract their roots from the soil and allow the desert winds to carry them across the desert, until one day they arrive in a place where they can continue to grow and spread. You could say they feel their way through this process, as they don’t necessarily remain in the first place they stop, but feel into the nature of the place to see if it is adequate to enhance growth. There they may stay, and grow, or indeed they may move again many times. But at all times, they feel, and trust to the movement that surrounds them.” Balled up, rolling, or in the flow.

A sales site from the UK considers the plant Mexican, claiming that Rose of Jericho has been “known since antiquity by its Nahuatl name Texochitl yamanqui and also as Flor de piedra or Doradilla. In Yucatan it is called Muchkok.” And this source refers to Selaginella lepidophylla as the Resurrection Plant, with a tale of the baby Jesus and Mother Mary.  (Here’s a botanical look at it.)

Clearly, there are a number of wild things with this capacity for rebirth, a quality that has inspired knights and looters, voodoo priests and botanists alike. German-speakers seem especially keen on Anastatica hierochuntica. If our stills don’t thrill, check out this wonderfully choppy video of the Rose Anastacia opening.

After-after: Redried and ready for the next miracle-assignment

We weren’t the first to make Resurrection Plant part of a Christmas celebration and/but we intend to perpetuate the custom after this year’s “semi-religious” trial. A writer from Holland contends the plant “is said never to die, and thus being kept in families for over generations.”

To all of you, may the New Year bring generations of faith, experimentation, wonder.

Thursday, December 28, 2006

The President and the Godfather

Floral tributes honoring James Brown and Gerald Ford both say “big shot.”

Rev. Al Sharpton remembered The Godfather of Soul, James Brown, during a memorial and viewing Thursday at New York’s Apollo Theatre.
Photo: Kathy Willens, for AP

Saying R.I.P. to a V.I.P. demands flowers to the max. But the looks of “maximizing” rightly depend on culture, ethnicity, and social role.

Today’s news photos tell the story, with images of floral tributes to performer and musical pioneer James Brown, who died Christmas Day, and to former U.S. president Gerald Ford, who died December 26.

Gerald Ford’s official presidential portrait received a white rose tribute and was draped with black at the White House.
Photo: Gerald Herbert, for AP

In Washington, D.C., a black sash was hung across the top of Ford’s portrait in the Cross Hall of the White House; “In memorium” below, a silver vase filled with four dozen white roses and a few airy ferns stood on a marble-topped table. One source said white roses are “Mrs. Ford’s favorite flower,” but we doubt that explanation. Rather, this is how high-church Episcopalians mourn in public.

For James Brown, thousands of fans gathered at the Apollo Theatre in Harlem to pay their respects. At either end of Brown’s open casket (Ford’s will be closed) were two large arrangements, also of white flowers, but they were drowned out by a stunning floral placard nearby. GOD FATHER had been spelled out in what appear to be red carnations against a wall of white Gerberas, the whole arrangement edged with palms and red ribbons. This is the floral equivalent of a marquee—huge, explicit—the perfect memorial for the author of “Say It Loud.”

Tuesday, December 26, 2006

flau-e(r) or flaue(r)?

A pronunciation conundrum made more confusing by Mick and Maybelle.

The Carter Family:
Convincing one syllablers

Does flower have one syllable or two?

This burning issue has been raised once again, this time in the Malaysia Star by May Nozawa.

“I was taught to pronounce the word ‘flour” as ‘flar.’ Almost everyone around me in Malaysia pronounces it as ‘flar’ too. But when I checked my Oxford Dictionary, it says it should be pronounced the same way as we pronounce ‘flower.’ It doesn’t mention ‘flar’ at all. Is ‘flar’ a correct pronunciation?”

The paper’s expert, Fadzilah Amin, offers an extended non-answer (including a brief discussion of schwa), and wisely confuses the matter further by noting “There is also an alternative pronunciation of ‘flower,’ indicated by the 20-volume OED, which is exactly like the second pronunciation of ‘flour’!”

Right-o, May. Here in the American South, we also pronounce flower as “flar,” especially when picking guitar. The most renowned “flar’ was recorded by the Carter Family in 1928. Make sure you listen to “The Wildwood Flower” all the way to the end.

Oh, he taught me to love him and called me his flower
That was blooming to cheer him through life’s dreary hour
Oh, I long to see him and regret the dark hour
He’s gone and neglected this pale wildwood flower.

Maybelle’s guitar between the verses cues us for a one syllable word: flar (well, maybe one and a half syllables.)

We find that “flowers” plural, as in Pete Seeger’s “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?,” usually comes out as two syllables, “flau-urs” not “flars” (Pete, a Yankee, definitely takes two beats). But with the plural, also, there’s a lot of inconsistency, even within the same song,

Take me down, little Susie, take me down.
I know you think you’re the queen of the underground.
And you can send me dead flowers (2 syllables) every morning,
Send me dead flowers (1 syllable) by the US mail,
Say it with dead flowers (2 syllables) at my wedding
And I wont forget to put roses on your grave....

(Dead Flowers: Mick Jagger/Keith Richards)

For further, quite earnest discussion of the matter, see this online forum and this one, where non-native English speakers, Aussies, and royal-watchers all chime in. As ever, your regionalisms—twang-twang—are welcome here.

Surely, you DID listen to “The Wildwood Flower.”

Saturday, December 23, 2006

A Gift Bouquet of Flour

Peace on earth, and good bread to all people.

Bill Bishop with his first loaf of No Knead Bread
Photo: Julie Ardery

Wish we could send all our beloved readers flowers this Christmas. Here’s the next best thing: a bread recipe that will restore your faith in human culture.

Mark Bittman of the New York Times broke the story last month, an ecstatic article that had us cranking up the oven to 450 degrees. Bittman passed along an amazing recipe for No Knead Bread from Jim Lahey of Sullivan Street Bakery in New York City. We haven’t bought a loaf of bread since. Actually, this is the most valuable thing we learned all year. Not saying much? Well, just try it before you say so.

Our first loaf didn’t rise too much but it was chewy and delicious, with shatteringly crunchy crust. There’s only one trick to the recipe:  willingness to let things hang for a long, long time, since the dough needs just to sit there for about 18 hours on the first rise, three more for the second. In other words, this is the ideal undertaking for a couple of writers. It’s more fun than waiting to hear back from an editor and smells a whole lot better than watching paint dry.

So here you go. In lieu of flowers: flour. Happy holidays to all, and bon appetit. As we aspire to be in 2007, this recipe is very forgiving.

Jim Lahey’s No Knead Bread

Adapted from Jim Lahey, Sullivan Street Bakery
Time: About 1½ hours plus 14 to 20 hours’ rising

3 cups all-purpose or bread flour, more for dusting
(Human Flower Project recommends King Arthur bread flour)
¼ teaspoon instant yeast
1 1/2 teaspoons salt (we have upped to 2 tsp.)
Cornmeal or wheat bran as needed.

1.  In a large bowl combine flour, yeast and salt. Add 1 1/2 cups water, and stir until blended; dough will be shaggy and sticky. Cover bowl with plastic wrap. Let dough rest at least 12 hours, preferably about 18, (we’ve been going 18) at warm room temperature, about 70 degrees.

2.  Dough is ready when its surface is dotted with bubbles. Lightly flour a work surface and place dough on it; sprinkle it with a little more flour and fold it over on itself once or twice. Cover loosely with plastic wrap and let rest about 15 minutes.

3.  Using just enough flour to keep dough from sticking to work surface or to your fingers, gently and quickly shape dough into a ball. Generously coat a cotton towel (not terry cloth) with flour, wheat bran or cornmeal; put dough seam side down on towel and dust with more flour, bran or cornmeal. Cover with another cotton towel and let rise for 2-3 hours (we’ve been going 3 hours). When it is ready, dough will be more than double in size and will not readily spring back when poked with a finger.

4.  At least a half-hour before dough is ready, heat oven to 450 degrees. Put a 6- to 8-quart heavy covered pot (cast iron, enamel, Pyrex or ceramic) in oven as it heats. When dough is ready, carefully remove pot from oven. Slide your hand under towel and turn dough over into pot, seam side up; it may look like a mess, but that is O.K. Shake pan once or twice if dough is unevenly distributed; it will straighten out as it bakes. Cover with lid and bake 30 minutes, then remove lid and bake another 15 to 30 minutes, until loaf is beautifully browned. Cool on a rack.

Yield: One 1½-pound loaf.

Tuesday, December 19, 2006

Evergreen Surrealist—Pearl Fryar

A topiary artist bends the lush Carolina landscape to his will.

Pearl Fryar presides over his yard in Bishopville, SC
All photos: Julie Ardery

Lee County, South Carolina, calls itself “the land of cotton,” failing to mention kudzu and pigweed. Staying even here means constant pushing back against green: mow, chop or you drown in vegetation. On the outskirts of Bishopville, pop. 3650, only Pearl Fryar has pushed with the fervor to make yard work an oration and turn plants into surrealist art.

“When I moved here Christmas of ’81, this was a cornfield,” Fryar, age 67, explains. “I had to wait until they harvested the corn to build the house.” The three acres around his ranch-style home are now a bristling dreamland: some five hundred plants sculpted one by one into totems, Mobius coils, letters, plugs. It’s a landscape to make Monet’s beard stand on end, more than beautiful: startling and eerie.

“When I hear people describe my garden as something pretty, then I missed the point. Or they missed the point,” Fryar says. “Because you don’t describe art by ‘pretty.’ It has to have some other effect. And that’s what I try to do.”

Fryar’s “Cyclops’

In one cluster of trees there’s a winking face Fryar refers to as “my Cyclops.” Behind the house, a huge live oak has been clipped into a block of solid foliage, flat as a dance floor on top. Across a sward of grass in the side yard, mowed short as a putting green (but four times the size), begonias ride like red boats down sinuous incisions in the turf, two halves of a giant heart.

“When you walk through, you almost forget it’s a garden,” he says. And that’s true. It’s more like wandering through a coral-forest, the kind that Max Ernst painted, or one of those expanses by Yves Tanguy, scattered about with mysterious dollops. In Fryar’s topiary garden, nature has been riddled with human force almost beyond recognition. Four foot letters cut in the yard shout: PEACE LOVE + GOODWILL. Even the grass has a booming voice.

Growing up on a sharecropping farm 150 miles away, in Clinton, North Carolina, Fryar never imagined he would be laboring with plants in the South Carolina sun by choice. His family worked fields of corn, soybeans, cotton. “We grew a lot of truck crops: pepper, cucumber, squash, beans. I was trying to get away from it,” he says.

Smart and sociable, Fryar was also locked in overdrive. He graduated from high school in 1958 and went on to North Carolina College in Durham (now NC Central), majoring in mathematics and chemistry. In those years, ’58-’61, Fryar and other North Carolina college students weren’t just taking courses but making history. He calls that time “the social revolution.” Sit-ins had begun in Greensboro, and Durham was the next town down the road. Students on Fryar’s campus joined kids from Duke, North Carolina State and University of North Carolina to hold demonstrations over Woolworth’s segregated lunch counter in Durham. Fryar says, “When we’d get out of class, we’d come down there and picket.”

“If my parents had come up to my college and found me out there doing some of the stuff I was doing, they would have hit the ceiling. I used to write home, ‘Mama. I got nothing to do with this.’” Fryar remembers, laughing. But he was emboldened to risk all. “I had no choice,” he says now.

In 1961 he was drafted into the Army and sent to Korea as a chemical weapons specialist. A Korean friend took him to a stunning place off limits to American GIs, filled with flowers and waterfalls. Fryar can’t recall the name of the place, just the vision of it: he says, “That was the first time I ever saw a magnificent paradise garden.”

He returned to the U.S. in ‘64, and caught up with Metra Raynor, his high school sweetheart, who had moved from North Carolina to New York and was working at a sunglasses factory. They married in 1966. Fryar had taken a job with a can manufacturing company, and they settled in Queens, where their son, Patrick, was born in 1968.

National Can (now Rexam) transferred Fryar and his family to Atlanta in 1975, and to a new plant in Bishopville the following year. Working in northern factories, Fryar had enjoyed union benefits and wages. He advocated a union in Bishopville, too, and once the United Steelworkers of America was voted in, he became president of Local #8634.

No mistaking the Fryar home, with its topiary address

Through all these years the Fryars lived in apartments, always “on the second floor.” Who’d be thinking of a garden? Only after he and Metra bought property just outside Bishopville’s city limits, in 1981, did Fryar’s genius for landscape explode. “I’d always wanted a horseshoe drive,” he says. And so he built one over 10 months, mixing the cement in a wheelbarrow and adding decorative flourishes of inlaid brick.

Fryar’s decision to chop up hundreds of plants is mysterious, maybe even to him. He always tells people: “I wanted to win Yard of the Month,” but that’s like saying Bill Clinton wanted to be Homecoming King. Looking around Fryar’s three-acre masterpiece, the question of motivation is overshadowed by the question of achievement. How in the hell did one man do all this? On a July evening the vapor light at the top of a pole swathed in 30 feet of creeping juniper comes on. Surrounded by two decades of creation, he explains, “I decided to put my energy into something I could control.”

Setting out to turn his first-ever yard into a showplace, he visited Spitzer Nursery in nearby Camden and spotted a quirky two-tiered pompom plant, not for sale. The nurseryman gave him “a three minute lesson,” in pruning; “I didn’t even know what topiary was,” Fryar says. The garden took off. After working 12-hour shifts troubleshooting at the can factory, Fryar would come home, set up his ladders and “cut bushes” under spotlights, sometimes until 1 a.m.

It took five years, but 165 Broad Acres Road did win Yard of the Month from Bishopville’s Iris Garden Club. Fryar’s property was disqualified at first, being outside the city limits, but for someone whose holly bushes spelled “L-O-V-E,” the rules would have to bend.

The garden includes Fryar’s own sculptures and store-bought plaster pieces

“You either love it or hate it,” garden writer Ethne Clarke concedes about all topiary. The decorative clipping of shrubs and trees has been going on for at least 2000 years (for just as long as people have wondered why).  Pliny the Younger (AD 62-110) left us details of one garden in Tuscany with boxwood shaped as ”diver animals” and “cut into a thousand different forms: sometimes into letters expressing the name of the master: sometimes that of the artificer: whilst here and there little obelisks rise….”

The 17th century was topiary’s heyday, when Andre Le Notre designed the gardens at Versailles for Louis XIV, the Sun King. The French had special predilection for hedges clipped into arabesques, a kind of green brocade, while the English favored bell shapes, pyramids and knots. Later, the Romantic movement in English gardening would try to stamp out all this silliness, its proponents preferring to fill their estates with willows, lakes and ersatz ruins rather than mazes of clipped box.

Since Pearl Fryar began, he’s learned all this history and more, and then unlearned it. Bishopville native and garden writer Tom Woodham, now a senior editor of Veranda magazine, was dazzled by a visit to Fryar’s yard and afterward mailed him several books on topiary. “I came this close of doing what they were doing in England,” Fryar says. He began experimenting with the forms he saw in pictures but suddenly changed course. “Why should I change my style for what someone else is doing, because I’m not going to get credit for it,” Fryar says. “I just dropped the books.”

He’s been to Cypress Gardens, Florida, and admired the topiary peacocks there, plants so huge, he reports, “You walk inside and look at the sprinkler system.” He holds in lower regard Disneyworld’s topiaries. Most of the figures there were grown through armatures or molded in sphagnum moss and then plugged with fast-growing vines like ficus and ivy. “They use wire cages,” Fryar sniffs, “so there’s absolutely no skill in that.”

His own garden includes some forty species of evergreens, many, like Norway spruce, considered outright impossibilities for growing this far South. Fryar avoids the standard topiary motifs – geometric forms and animal shapes. His goal was always something else: “real creative topiary, that’s like out of this world.” He declares, “I’m the only one that you really will see take a plant and really create a living sculpture.”

‘Fishbone,’ made from a Leyland cypress

Whether it’s formal or whimsical, conventional topiary is an art of volume. A hedge plant like privet, boxwood, yew, or (a species Fryar prefers) compacted holly is trimmed back again and again until its foliage forms a tight surface, plush and almost velvety to the eye. Fryar can make topiary this smooth and plump, but he also disrupts the effect, radically, cutting deep notches, even holes through his plants.  For one of his most spectacular pieces, the 20 foot “Fishbone, “ – a labor of seven years – he clipped the inner foliage from low branches of a Leyland cypress and bound them up with wire; as the tree grew, the bare, twisted trunk and limbs fattened and are now exposed, framed by dense brows of greenery.

This combination of lush volume and bare, contorted line in a single plant is bizarre. Fryar calls it the “abstract skeleton look,” his unique creation. Neither the tourists who happen by nor the gardening pros who make pilgrimages to Bishopville have seen anything like it.  It’s this bold, singular style that has won Fryar the accolades of gardeners and artists, too.

One of the first was Jean Grosser, a sculptor and professor at Coker College in nearby Hartsville. “I have never thought of Pearl as a plant person,” Grosser says. but “as a sculptor,” They met eighteen years ago, when a horticulturist at the college’s Kalmia Gardens insisted that Grosser make the seventeen-mile trip to Bishopville. “I’ve seen other topiary and I’ve thought, ‘That’s decorative, that’s beautiful,’” she says. “I’ve never seen any other plant and said ‘Oh that’s art.’”

Grosser brought her basic design class to Fryar’s garden that year to draw, and has done so each year since. The assignment, she says, isn’t to sketch pictures of topiary but to discover Fryar’s interplay of lines and curves through the garden, and to see “how he is sculpting the space that’s in between the plants as well.” Two years ago Grosser arranged to have Pearl Fryar made an artist-in-residence at Coker. He’s paid as an adjunct professor to team-teach her introductory design class in the fall and upper-level sculpture students in the spring.

Now, the student-artists are working with Fryar on an installation at the college: a garden path combining masonry, ceramics, and topiary. Ten years ago Fryar tried a topiary club with high schoolers in Bishopville. Last year he worked with more than 400 students in Sumter, SC, designing, building, planting and trimming an installation for the town’s art celebration. 

Down the street beyond Fryar’s property, you can spot a line of sci-fi cedars; Sammie Lee Sherod dug them out of the woods and has trained them into pom-pom towers. On the next lot, Robert Benjamin has clipped arborvitae trees into massive scrolls of electric green. When a visitor implies Fryar’s neighbors are mere imitators, he corrects her. “I don’t think you could say ‘imitating.’ They come up with their own style and technique. They want to be creative themselves.” It’s that Fryar’s topiary is contagious—Tolstoy’s litmus test for art.

Fryar’s topiaries adorn the Bishopville Waffle House

The garden is private, no billboards to point you there, no admission fees to pay, just a mailbox for donations. Still, all over town there are clues. The John Deere franchise now has a coiling tree in front of its office. The local managers gave Fryar the extended gas-powered hedge-clipper that’s saving him many ladder-hours with each trim of the garden. Other living sculptures around Bishopville signal trades or thanks: Smith Concrete Supply (“I get anything I want from here,” Fryar says) and St. John A.M.E. (the church of a neighbor in whose yard Fryar’s public often parks). The most incongruous example stands surrounded by pavement at the Waffle House, just across Interstate 20. Corkscrews of Torulosa juniper and smaller junipers trimmed into floating cubes of tufted green turn a scene you could find in 10,000 towns into an eye-popper, straight out of The Jetsons.  For Fryar’s trouble and his art, he and Metra enjoy “Eat the rest of your life free” privileges.

In 1998, curators Tom Stanley and Polly Laffitte commissioned Pearl Fryar to install two beds of topiaries at the entrance to the State Museum in Columbia for the exhibition “Still Worth Keeping: Communities, Preservation, and Self-Taught Artists.” In the meantime, Fryar had a curatorial idea of his own: to move a sculpted tree from his garden to the museum grounds, as part of the permanent collection. “The State Museum certainly wasn’t expecting to have an accessioned piece of plant sculpture,” Laffitte, the museum’s former art curator, says now. “We took the risk and it worked out very well.”

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Monday, December 18, 2006

Autochrome—And Gone to Heaven

In early color photographs of flowers, the ephemeral lives on.

Hausangestellte der Familie,
Roedenbeck Sehlde, 1928-1930
By Käthe Buchler
Image:  MUSEUM FÜR PHOTOGRAPHIE

Flowers are not in rhythm with the tempo of these times—ever since we threw out the seasons and replaced them with switches. If something’s not instantaneous as a phone call or fixed as a monument, who knows what you do with it? This on/off, virtual-or-granite mentality, in our view, partly explains why flowers are being displaced as gifts. Bouquets are neither as permanent as knickknacks nor as consumable as wine or a massage. Like all living and dying things, flowers are in between.

Still Life with Dahlias by Käthe Buchler
Image:  MUSEUM FÜR PHOTOGRAPHIE

In old photographs of flowers, you can see this quality, of being on the way. Take a look at the pictures of Käthe Buchler on view through January 14 at the Museum of Photography in Braunschweig, Germany. Buchler, working between 1913 and 1930, was an early color photographer. Her vases of dahlias and blossoming trees, so different from contemporary color pictures, look, truly, like flowers that have died and gone to heaven. The colors are muted but palpable. What they may lack in factuality, they regain in effect—blooms in the mind.

Buchler’s talent found a marvelous vehicle in the technique called Autochrome, one of the earliest methods of color photography. The Lumiere Brothers, who patented the process, used a mosaic of potato starch grains dyed yellow, red and blue, the gaps among them filled in with lampblack (a kind of root vegetable pixel). The image was projected through these grains onto glass, making dark but translucent positives best viewed like tiny stained-glass windows, with backlighting.

Crazy Legs dahlias
Photo: L.R. Fortney

Compare Buchler’s picture of dahlias (above) with this very fine contemporary photograph, at left. Both are beautiful. (And these later flowers have doubtless gone on to heaven, too.) Why is the older one so much more elegiac and suggestive? The sensibilities behind them are different. One has the gift of accuracy; it has stopped an instant like a specimen, to keep for all time.  In Kathe Buchler’s picture there’s a different kind of lasting —not a record of dahlias but a memory.

Friday, December 15, 2006

Capers: Everybody Having Some?

An unopened flower bud grows out of ancient walls and can kick modern-day ones down.

Tapenade
Photo: About Home Cooking

They are kind of evil looking, or so we thought until learning that capers are actually the green buds of Capparis spinosa, a flowering plant of the Mediterranean. Our cousin Ben, who used to live in Positano, Italy, remembers caper bushes growing right out of the retaining walls of nearby almond orchards. Who scrambled up there, we wonder, to pick the buds before they bloomed?

According to one authority, the flower buds are sun-dried first, then pickled in brine. “The taste is slightly astringent and pungent, and they can lend piquancy to many sauces and condiments.” That’s putting it mildly. Their flavor is so powerful and lasting that social occasions where they’re served require a pact: we’re all eating this, and whoever backs out will turn green.

Capparis spinosa
Image: Jan Meemelink

Cooking expert Lydia Walshin reports that capers “pair well with artichokes, fish, fatty meats like lamb, olives, potatoes, and tomatoes, and are an essential component of tapenade. The taste is fresh, salty, pungent, and slightly flowery-lemony.” When you put it that way, we’re on board.

Since capers are harvested and bitten in the bud, who’s ever seen the flowers? Here they are. It turns out they’re quite beautiful: pink, with cat-like whiskers. The flowers seem to be as short-lived as the buds are long-tasting. This link from Purdue describes medicinal uses of capers, some of which should not be mentioned in polite conversation. Let’s just say they’re beneficial, high and low.

We’re planning to try some tapenade on guests tomorrow night—right after everyone agrees to the pact. This recipe comes from The Meat and Potatoes Cookbook, as adapted by Robin Robertson:

Look for good-quality, brine-cured olives, not the canned supermarket variety.
If using a food processor instead of the traditional mortar and pestle, be careful not to overprocess – the tapenade should retain some texture. Both large, meaty Kalamata olives and the smaller, sweet Gaeta variety are great in this recipe.

Capparis spinosa growing from a wall in Palma de Mallorca, Spain
Photo: Jardin Mundani

INGREDIENTS
1 1/2 cups Kalamata or Gaeta olives, pitted
3 tablespoons capers, drained
2 garlic cloves, finely minced
1/4 cup minced fresh parsley leaves
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/8 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil

In a food processor or mortar, combine the olives, capers, garlic, parsley, salt, and pepper. Slowly add the oil and pulse or work with the pestle into a coarse paste, retaining some bits of olive and caper for texture. Taste to adjust the seasonings. Stored tightly covered in the refrigerator, this will keep well for a week or two.

Makes about 2 cups

Thursday, December 14, 2006

Top Knots of Tajikistan

In the land where four mountain ranges meet, the giant fritillaria is at home.

Carrying water in Tajikistan
Photo: P. Taylor for European Commission, ECHO

To live at the intersection of mountain ranges takes, what? Exceptional fortitude, for one thing.

We welcome our most recent visitor from Tajikistan, west of China, north of Afghanistan, way up high. We’ve been reading about your country and its stunning scenery, also gazing at some of the gorgeous flowers native to your part of Central Asia.

Fritillaria eduardii
1998 stamp from Tajikistan
Photo: Plant Stamps

One of the most impressive is the giant fritillary. The Missouri Botanical Gardens botanists single out Petilium eduardii [=Fritillaria eduardii]:  “the plants sometimes are as tall as 1 m (3 ft) in height with as many as 20 large flowers.” Exceptional all right. The Imperial Crown Fritillaria is also a Tajikistan native, we believe.  Its huge, heavy blossoms splayed out from the tops of canelike stems seem less like kings’ crowns to us than clowns’ collars (perhaps an American short-sightedness).

This site provides some information on growing fritillaries, with good precautionary detail: “Plant the bulbs 4 to 5 inches deep and angle them slightly sideways to keep water from collecting in the depression at the top of the bulb.” We also have enjoyed the more and less delicate ways fritillary fragrance has been described: “An unpleasant odor,” says one source. Another: “stinks to high heaven.” And a writer worthy of this plant: “The flowers smell of wet fur and garlic.”

Fitillaires couronne imperiale dans un vase de cuivre
Vincent van Gogh (1886)
Musee d’Orsay
Photo: Julie Ardery

Our first encounter with Fritillaria imperialis was completely odorless, a painting of them in a copper vase by Vincent van Gogh, in the collection of the Musee d’Orsay, Paris. Not every painter would be up to this subject, just one with no fear of orange (i.e. exceptional fortitude).

Here’s an analysis of the biodiversity in Tajikistan, a blogger vouching for regional hospitality, and a report on foreign aid (with good photographs) by the European Commission.

Wiki says the Pamir Mountains of Tajikistan are called “the knot,” where the Tian Shan, Karakoram, Kunlun, and Hindu Kush ranges converge. Where else but in these valleys would a three-foot fritillary deign to grow?

Wednesday, December 13, 2006

Rubber Flowers

Smallholders in Sri Lanka turn to handicrafts.

Milroy Fernando, Sri Lanka’s Minister of Plantations, announced a program to train small farmers to make flowers out of rubber leaf
Photo: Asian Tribune

You can be sure a region’s economy is in trouble when the economic development idea is handicrafts. Along with tourism, with which such a strategy is often paired, it means little or no investment and low-paid employment—a last resort of poor places.

With an average per capita monthly income of 3056 rupees (a little over $28 USD) it’s not too surprising that Sri Lanka would be considering handicrafts. Earlier this month the Rubber Research Institute in Colombo announced a pilot program to train farmers with small plots of rubber trees to turn the leaf into ornaments, including flowers. We don’t know the state of the latex and timber markets, but this doesn’t sound good.

“The RRI is pleased introduce individual flowers made out of skeletonised rubber leaves for souvenir collectors.” Minister of Plantations Milroy Fernando advocated producing these ornamental flowers “at a commercial scale.” The first rubber bouquet was to be presented to Sri Lankan president Mahindha Rajapaksha.

Tuesday, December 12, 2006

Nuestra Señora

By the end of the day, December 12, 2006
Our Lady of Guadalupe Church, Austin, TX
Photo: Bill Bishop

In Mexico City, more than 5 million pilgrims came to her Basilica. Thousands danced to honor her in the streets of Los Angeles. Her image was dedicated for the first time inside a Virginia church.

Here in Austin, Texas, Our Lady of Guadalupe was filled with holy celebration from sunup until long after dark on this, her feast day. By 9 pm, the church and a grotto outside both overflowed with roses.

“In 1531, during the conquest of Mexico by Spain, an apparition appeared to Juan Diego, a lowly Indian walking to Mass near Mexico City. The apparition requested him to deliver to the bishop a request to build a church at that spot in her honor. After rebuffing Juan Diego several times, the bishop asked for a sign.

The main altar Our Lady of Guadalupe Catholic Church
December 12, 2006
Photo: Bill Bishop

“When the apparition appeared to Juan Diego again, he told her of the bishop’s request. The Virgin instructed Juan Diego to gather roses that were growing nearby, unusual for that time of year, as the sign of her existence. When Juan Diego went to the bishop, he opened his tilma to show him the roses, revealing instead an image imprinted on the cloak of a cinnamon-skinned virgin who came to be known as Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe.

“A few years later, the first church was built on that spot in Tepeyac, a few miles north of Mexico City.”

The oldest sources we could find for this story don’t specify the flowers were roses, but over time they have come to be the flowers most associated with “The Mother of the Americas.”

David Sedeño wrote a fine article for the Ft. Worth newspaper about current controversies surrounding the Virgin of Guadalupe. Her presence, powerful and growing, disquiets some non-Hispanic Catholics. Others complain that Protestant denominations have adopted the Mexican Mary to recruit new members.

“She is an image of a mestiza which gives us a kind of picture of what the future of the Church, with a capital C, is going to look like,” Maxwell Johnson, a Lutheran and a theology professor at Notre Dame University, told Sedeño.  “Ultimately, in the future, we all are going to resemble her.”

Rev. Virgilio Elizondo of San Antonio isn’t worried that Protestants have been drawn to Our Lady of Guadalupe: “It’s expanding something that is very true and very beautiful.”