Human Flower Project

Wednesday, February 28, 2007

“A Flowering Tree”—Operatic

The Indian folktale of a girl who turns into a blossoming tree is transformed into music by John C. Adams.

Amaltas in bloom, Chandigarh, India
Photo: Chandigarh Tribune

“There lived an old woman with her two daughters. She did menial jobs to feed and clothe and bring up her children. When the girls reached puberty, the younger sister said one day, ‘Sister, I’ve been thinking of something. It’s hard on mother to work all day for our sakes. I want to help her. I will turn myself into a flowering tree. You can take the flowers and sell them for good money.’

“Amazed, the older sister asked, ‘How will you turn into a flowering tree?’"…

Scene from “A Flowering Tree”
by John C. Adams/Peter Sellars
Photo: SF Examiner

Good question. To learn the answer, you may want to buy a ticket for composer John C. Adams’s “A Flowering Tree.” The opera, which premiered in Vienna in November, makes its U.S. debut tomorrow night in San Francisco.

The story comes from an old tale of Southern India, one lush with low-hanging dramatic fruit. There are jealous sisters-in-law, a handsome prince, dismemberment (it’s true) and many strategic pitchers of water. Of course, there are the human-flowers, too, produced by self-sacrificing heroine Kumudha.

If you can’t attend the opera, make your own music, and read A.K. Ramanujan’s version of the tale right here.  John Adams said that, weary of his own dark themes, he decided to compose an opera in the tender spirit of Mozart’s The Magic Flute, and found the psychic-seed in Ramanujan’s story.

Here you may listen to a sound clip, sparkling as a pink cassia tree. For the libretto, Adams joined forces with longtime collaborator Peter Sellars.

Red Silk Cotton tree (Bombax malabarica)
Image: D.V. Cowan

The heroine of Richard Strauss’ opera “Daphne” also mixes ardor with arbor. But Adams notes, “Unlike Strauss, who got only one transformation to compose,” in his own opera, there are four human-to-flower changes.  “And the transformations are much more disturbing than Kumudha anticipates. It’s as though she had casually dropped acid, and now it’s not going to be just a regular Saturday night.” How fitting for its first U.S. performance to be in San Francisco.

Adams himself will conduct the San Francisco Symphony in “A Flowering Tree” March 1-3. This summer, the opera will be performed in London and Amsterdam. (Here’s a schedule.)

Of course, we wonder which flowering tree Kumudhah becomes. There are soooo many possibilities. Just take a look at this very-slow-loading but sumptuous and illustrated catalogue of India’s flowering trees and shrubs. Drumstick tree, Trumpet Flower, Banyan, Peepul....Then clear your throat. There’s a lot to sing about.

Tuesday, February 27, 2007

Who’s Counting? We and Victoria

The City of Victoria tallies its flowers this week, a continental gloat over the rest of snowbound Canada.

Logo: via Victoria

As of 1:30 pm Central Standard Time (U.S.), it stood at 39,542,160.

We refer to Victoria’s annual Flower Count, which began yesterday and will run through March 3. While much of Canada faces two more months of snowplows, spring has arrived in Victoria and its residents enjoy rubbing it in. This crowing count is the community’s spring festival, heavy on the math.

Like Pasadena’s Tournament of Roses each January 1 (a floral in-your-face to the wintry U.S.), Victoria’s custom seems to have been drummed up by busness leaders to inspire visitors.  In the late 1960s, members of the local Chamber of Commerce, wearing Victorian-era garb, “descended on shivering Canadian cities such as Edmonton and Winnipeg during February, dispersing fresh, Victoria-grown daffodils to the public, radio stations and news organizations to promote snow-free winter tourism.” Local residents were urged to join in the count by 1976 to stir the promotional pollen, and since then, it’s become a citywide rite of spring.

Rhonda Rose at the University of Victoria’s Finnerty Gardens
checking out (or perhaps counting) a rhododendron
Photo: University of Victoria

Helen Chesnut, columnist for the local paper, gives a sense of late February here: “Beside the driveway, near the front of my house, a hugely spreading Springwood Pink heather taken from my father’s garden over two decades ago never fails to clothe itself in colour at this time of the year. Nearby, beside the front lawn, a Chinese witch hazel’s spidery yellow flowers linger in partnership with a Pink Dawn viburnum’s rosy bloom clusters. Next to the carport, a winter daphne (Daphne odora) is set to open its blossom clusters and release one of nature’s most exquisite floral perfumes.”

But wouldn’t it take all week to count the flowers on just one cherry tree? Possibly, so officials have simplified things. For a medium tree full of blossoms count 500,000, for a large heather bush, 2,000, etc. Check here for details. Tabulators are urged to call in their numbers by phone. A “Banana Belt” goes to the happy, cross-eyed winner.

2002’s record-setting count was 8,521,514,876 flowers—last year’s total, a mere 1,766,698,868. For Victorians who may lack pencil and paper, we offer this aid: How to count to 1023 on your fingers.

And it so happens that this post is the 1000th entry on the Human Flower Project, a milestone for which no banana belts will be awarded. We would like, however, to send thanks to all our contributing writers, members, visitors, and friends. And we send special greeting to those who have tripped over the e-threshold unawares. A quick look back at “search terms” shows a very few of the many interests that brought you here.

Photo: Tulsa World

“fibroids cut open with teeth”
“cher as giantess”
“vatican tumbling angels”
“muslims ‘no stringed’ instruments”
“bride flip flops”
“removing splinter from toddler foot”
“inexpensive Betty Boop statue in Ohio”
“bagpipe fingering chart”
“spoiled shrimp pictures”
“Brain teaser: why is the letter t like an amphibian?”

Beats us!

Monday, February 26, 2007

Outdoor Kitchens—WWWD

Garden rooms swing open the doors of perception and the gates of consumption.

Serving it up
in an outdoor kitchen
Photo: Masonry Systems

As plant and hose and wicker companies know, the restive Northern gardener is gnawing on the curtains about now. Let the garden shows begin! At big city exhibit halls landscape designers and turf sellers work mightily to bring the outside in. There will be booths of flagstone appointed with wrought iron furniture, flowering plants, of course, and plashing fountains that sound strangely urinal within these echo chambers.

It’s not really possible to duplicate a cottage garden inside a convention center, but an “outdoor kitchen” with Viking Range and sink? Can do, along with just about any other sort of outdoor room you can dream up.

Jane Martin, Ohio horticulturist, writes, “Outdoor rooms are the spaces created among various landscape objects, whether fences, patios, plants or ponds. They have floors, walls and ceilings (overhead branches or structures).” (We haven’t yet achieved such architecture but do have a plein air Fibber McGee closetright out the back door.)

Joe Lamp asserts, “Just as we demand 12-month, 24-hour enjoyment from our indoor rooms, we now expect the same outside as well. Portable propane-fueled heaters tower over our heads like small trees, while all-weather lamps set the ambiance and illuminate the pages of our late-night reading.” Imagine the moths!

Valerie Easton sees in the shift from ordinary yards to outdoor rooms a generational difference: “The research says that Gen X and Y aren’t looking to study the Latin names of plants or spend every weekend weeding. They favor easy maintenance and instant effect. I worry younger gardeners will miss great joys and satisfactions,” she laments, “yet I admire their perception of gardens as outdoor living rooms rather than science projects.”

We’re less admiring than amazed, but we don’t think “younger gardeners” have anything to do with it. It’s marketers, whose “joys and satisfactions” come from filling our every inch and instant with more stuff.  Lamp reports that sales of ordinary lawn and garden products “remain flat,” meanwhile “homeowners are pouring money into expanding their living space outdoors.” He writes, “The trends of 2007 for gardening and outdoor living continue to reinforce our need for instant gratification.”

That “trend” began with Adam or, certainly, Eve. It’s had a good streak since at least 1950, but okay. The question then becomes: What is it that gratifies you? Is it walking from the kitchen out of doors into another kitchen, with a sun-drenched stovetop and a second stack of dirty dishes?

Untitled
Photo: Gregory Crewdson

The press for outdoor kitchens sent us to this photo by Gregory Crewdson, from his collection TWILIGHT. A housewife, suffering from Epstein-Barr or perhaps an especially bad bout of indoor oven-cleaning, kneels in the kitchen. A garish plot of yarrow and gerbera daisies has clogged the breakfast nook, and David-Lynch lighting pours through the window. If an outdoor kitchen can provide “instant gratification,” why is it that this indoor flowerbed’s such a bummer? (We don’t believe Crewdson will be getting any commissions from Scott’s Miracle-Gro, but in this age of marketing-de-Sade, we’re probably very, very wrong.)

“Mr. Wolf
eating by the chuckwagon”
Photo: Prairie Rose

All very perplexing—which leads us to ask WWWD? What Would Wishbone Do? He being, of course, the chuckwagon cook on Rawhide. Cowboys are well versed in plein air cooking and dining, after all—as well as bathing, defecating, and sleeping. In fact, they and other nomads may be said to have pioneered the outdoor room.

“Easy maintenance” is one way to look at this lifestyle. Furthermore, it may be within reach for those of us who’re not up to sink #2 and a patio refrigerator of brushed stainless steel.

Saturday, February 24, 2007

Cleavers: Can’t Shake It

Galium aparine takes two-fisted gardening and still won’t let go.

Cleavers (Galium aparine) in bloom
Photo: Jim Lindsey

What’s your pick for “Most Loveable Weed”? (No fair voting for smokables.)

After tangling in the yard with a number of candidates this morning, we choose cleavers (Galium aparine). Here in Central Texas, we’ve pulled out many heaping bucketsful of this little devil. When you reach for it, it reaches back. Letting go is a trick - the stems and leaves clutch your gloves and have to be scraped off somehow (shaking them free would take the torque of a plane propeller).

Arthur Lee Jackson puts it perfectly: “Unmistakable, unforgettable, it is a fascinating little pest.” So what makes it endearing?  We believe this attitude first came to us through kindly neighbor Beverley Bajema. We met her about this time of year, one day as she was weeding her own yard. “I kind of like cleavers,“ she said, tossing a sprig onto her sleeve.  ”You can wear it.” But this weed’s not mean to wear, like those burrs one must painfully dig off socks. It’s just clingy, rather like Wally, June, Ward and the Beav.

Making the acquaintance
of cleavers
in Alley Pond Park, Queens, NY
Photo: Don Wiss

Dr. Adrian Goodman clearly has a thing for cleavers and has published quite a bit of research about the plant’s virtues. “Historically it has been boiled as spinach before the two-seeded fruits appear and in Sweden the seeds are roasted, ground and used as a substitute for coffee. The green seeds were also once used to adorn the tops of lacemakers’ pins to provide a padded head.”

Dr. Goodman is enchanted with the stems’ elasticity. too. In his experiments, “the lower stem stretched by up to 24 % of its original length before breaking. This is rather unusual for a terrestrial plant.” He writes that only aquatic buttercups and “some seaweeds” are this stretchy.

And yes, cleavers do (or is that “does”?) have white flowers—nothing you’ll mistake for a hibiscus, but fair enough.

There is some possibility that cleavers was the inspiration for Velcro, the sticky brainchild of Swiss inventor and dog-walker George de Mestral. Other sources say a pricklier plant inspired Mestral to develop the fast-latch fabric.

Galium aparine
Drawing: via Web Jardiner

Galium aparine is surely a native of Europe (check these botanical fansites from France and from Italy, where cleavers are known as attacammani). To get an idea of how widespread the weed is in the US, here’s a map of its territory.

We did find one Canadian source with grudges against Galium aparine. “The clinging bristles make crop handling and harvesting difficult,” it says. “The seeds are similar in size and shape to canola, making them a serious contaminant of canola and rapeseed, resulting in the downgrading of these crops.”

We’re awfully sorry to hear that. But we still are fond of cleavers.  Hope you can try lightening up on this clingy weed. We have just the thing to help: ZZ Top’s 1986 hit, shown here with a Egyptian overlay—Velcro Fly.

Friday, February 23, 2007

Tulips in Harness

How do you handle a blossom worth 12 sheep? Singly, elegantly, in a porcelain corset.

Pyramid vase
c. 1690-1720
Artist unknown
Photo: Rijksmuseum

At the height of tulipomania (1634-1637) one tulip bulb cost as much as 4 oxen or 1000 pounds of cheese. Once those bulbs bloomed, Dutch flower arrangers couldn’t just flop such high-stakes blossoms inside any old milk bottle. Holland’s tulip fiends collaborated with the ceramicists of Delft to produce the tulipiere—an uber-vase designed to show off a bunch of precious flowers to their best individual advantage.

With tulip season nigh in the Southern U.S., Mariana Greene of Dallas features tulipieres today. You may have seen these puzzling things in antique shops. They sometimes look like upward udders or carburetors—vessels with not one opening but several protuberances, each meant to hold a single bloom.

The most magnificent one we know of is this smashing Pyramid vase in the collection of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.  Curators date it from 1690-1720, after the speculative trade in tulips crashed. (Whoever owned this piece must have sold at the right time.) More than three feet high, it’s actually a construction of 6 separate vases and can hold forty flowers—tulips or roses or what you will. “Mr. van Os, I’m ready for my close up.”

Tulipiere
Photo: Photos by Evans Caglage
for Dallas Morning News

What sophisticates these flowers are. The bulbs, native to the Near East, were brought by a diplomat to Vienna and then to the Netherlands in the late 16th century. The tulipiere shape seems to have been born in Europe but typically was decorated with designs from Chinese porcelain. Subsequently, Chinese ceramicists began producing tulip vases of their own.

It wasn’t floral price alone that that inspired these peculiar vessels. If you’ve ever had tulips you know that once they’re cut and set in water, they keep growing, and have a way of dipping and straining toward the light. The tulipiere serves as a kind of harness, reining their wanderlust in.

Tulipiere, 2005
by Janet E. Kastner
Photo: University of Texas Fine Arts

Here’s a pretty pair from the 18th century, a pink lady, and Deidre Daw’s five foot Diphthong Vase, ready for some of Ecuador’s stilt-stemmed roses.

Should you not have a tulipiere, you can search out an antique, buy a reproduction in the Delft style, or even find a contemporary piece, like this one with Las Vegas dancers. And if harnessed flowers don’t appeal to you, here are other ideas for arranging the globetrotters of spring.

Thursday, February 22, 2007

Flower Confidential

Amy Stewart tracks the savvy, shady flower business, a refrigerated industry on parade.

Lily hybridizer Leslie Woodriff with Star Gazer and others
Photo: via North Coast Journal

“The commerce in blossoming flowers is one of the most uncertain and dangerous speculations in which the small street-traders of London can engage,” wrote Englishman Charles Manby Smith, in 1853.

Amy Stewart, whom we can thank for finding this pearl, describes how much has changed since Mr. Smith voiced his misgivings. Her book Flower Confidential (Algonquin) witnesses the combined effects of science, high-speed transportation, free trade and mass marketing as they transformed an “uncertain” livelihood into a global industry. Botanical guess-work and much of the commercial risk have been squeezed out of the flower trade; now mechanized greenhouses protect plants from the vagaries of weather, refrigerated trucks, planes and warehouses provide transcontinental “cold chains,” and individual “condones” prevent rose buds from opening ahead of schedule. And of course, we consumers are caught up in the system, too, trained to want certain flowers on a predictable schedule and even to prefer blooms that sellers have found simplest to ship.

Amy is an accomplished California garden writer. As well as maintaining her own website, she holds forth with three blogging buddies from back East on the mischievous Garden Rant.

Her new book shows flower breeding, growing and sales as interlocking worlds, all three ruled by Dutch expertise. Horticulturists and traders from Holland have managed to rationalize the wonders and “dangerous speculation” of flowers and, despite the natural advantages of lands along the Equator, maintain their domination of the business.

One of the book’s finest chapters, excerpted in North Coast Journal, offers a stateside vignette of this process in the story of Leslie Woodriff, an eccentric lily breeder, and Ted Kirsch, the business partner who turned Woodriff’s hybrid Star Gazer lily into a commercial dynamo. This huge and fragrant white flower with the pink throat, Stewart writes, “stands at the crossroads between old fashioned plant breeders and modern hybridizers.” As the partnership between the two men sours, then dribbles into court, the once creative tension between haphazard experimentation and commercial genius unravels. Guess who comes out on top? (a Dutch company.)

Shuttling flowers at Aalsmeer
Photo: Millikin University

With crisp style —and seemingly boundless interest in cargo docks and conveyor belts—Amy has a special gift for explanation. Whether describing how ethylene wilts a delphinium or the auction clocks wind down at Aalsmeer, she writes with verve.

Flower Confidential, in our view, is less engaging when Stewart shifts from description to persuasion. For example, Amy takes considerable pains to present the case for VeriFlora, a proposed certification system for flowers sold in the U.S. (Such systems, each with its own set of standards, are already used in parts of Europe, Africa, and South America). The goals of improving agricultural ecology and especially working conditions and rights for laborers in the flower industry are important. Too important, we believe, to entrust to growers, however well meaning they may be.

Stewart quotes Nora Ferm of the International Labor Rights Fund along these lines. “Ecuador needs the flower industry,” says Ferm. “It’s brought in a lot of jobs. And workers at a given plantation are better off than they were before the certification arrived. But some of these certifications come in and basically give a prize for complying with local laws. Well, they should all be complying with local laws…” It seems to us that strong legal requirements, and sanctions for companies that fail to meet them, stand the best chance of improving working conditions and protecting the environment.

We will continue to enjoy and track down many of the fascinating details in Flower Confidential – that the first, influential Japanese flowers growers in California couldn’t own their own land, that most of Ecuador’s premium roses sell in Russia, that HMOs have put a dent in flower deliveries to hospitals, that gerberas like only one inch of water, that there’s a flower superstore in Miami where you can stroll along color-sorted aisles of blossoms and make your own arrangement on the spot. Unfortunately, retrieving these particulars may be hard. There’s no index. With all this information – plus truckloads of figures and statistics— how could the publisher have failed to provide one?

Nearly a year ago, Amy began trickling out information about her book into the blogsphere, and with its release in January, Flower Confidential has received a shower of good coverage from media eager to fill the Valentine’s holiday news hole with something juicy. Amy, you’ve done it. Congratulations. And thank you for the light you’ve shone on the human wiles, will and labor behind our flowers.

(Check here for details of Amy’s upcoming readings and book signings -– to include our own Land of the Lotus Eaters, Austin, TX, on Friday, February 23.)

Wednesday, February 21, 2007

SF Flower Vendors: Stand, Stand, Stand

San Francisco’s city supervisor wants to dismantle a floral tradition: the folk economics of sidewalk sales.

Linda Hoogasian waters wares at the Market Street flowerstand she and her family have run in San Francisco for 55 years
Photo: Kurt Rogers, for SF Chronicle

With more kinks than a Rastafarian convention, San Francisco culture is beloved by eccentriphiles all over the world. The smell inside Lyle Tuttle’s tattoo parlor (several decades of nervous sweat) would call down the health inspectors in Baltimore or Salt Lake City. But here, it’s a municipal treasure, all part of the ambiance.

So it is with surprise as well as chagrin we read that San Francisco City Supervisor Jake McGoldrick is trying to overturn a century-old—and beautiful—city fixture: family owned flowerstands. Carl Nolte, reporter for the SF Chronicle, interviewed several of the local vendors. “Basically they are trying to get rid of us,’’ said Harold Hoogasian, who owns one of the stands as well as a number of storefront flower shops in the city. “They are trying to get rid of an institution like the cable cars.’’

San Francisco Flower Stand, n.d.
Image: All Posters

The central issue seems to be whether the flower vendors can maintain control of their rights to preside and do business on the public streets. Nolte writes that as it is now, “permits for the stands, which cost about $750 a year, stay with the same operators, who can sell them or pass them on to their descendants.” And they do. Several of the families, like the Hoogasians, are second and third generation Armenians who fled political oppression in Europe and established a foothold in the U.S. by selling flowers on the street. Mark Murdock inherited his flowerstand from his parents, “Sephardic Jews from Greece,” who had survived the Holocaust.

Want to get technical? Here is the city code on how the permits are to operate. And here is a recent review of the ordinances. The city issued its first permit to a street flower vendor in 1904. There are currently 18 flowerstands throughout San Francisco, many of them, local landmarks.

Supervisor McGoldrick had said he wants a lottery system for assigning permits, to open the flowerstand business up to new vendors. “I don’t know anybody who has inheritance rights to public property,’’ McGoldrick told Nolte. A San Francisco TV station reported yesterday that, under pressure from the vendors and their allies, McGoldrick backed up a bit and is willing to grandfather in existing vendors rather than forcing them to enter the lottery. But it appears he is holding firm that they will be able neither to sell nor to pass on their permits to family.

We were alerted about the city dispute by Rebecca Quilici last fall. “I have worked at a sidewalk flowerstand in San Francisco for 20 years,” she wrote.  “The San Francisco Board of Supervisors have taken it upon themselves to implement legislation that will essentially destroy the flowerstands and the 100 years of tradition that have created these wonders.  We are fighting.” Quilici stressed, “I don’t think any other city in the U.S. has what we do.”

Kearny St. Flower Stand, 1912
Photo: Mark Reuben Gallery

And isn’t that the point? In this city of exceptionalism, shouldn’t the custom and wonder of the city flowerstands and the merchant families who began and maintained them be preserved? Like the Marxist murals at the Coit Tower, this cultural kink is a marvel of public life in the capital of Eccentricity. In the midst of high technology, loose ties, and all-business relations, here is a vestige of folk economics.  If you’d like to lend your support and/or pick up a bouquet, here’s a map that can guide you to ten of the city’s flower stands. Please pass on high fives (or a more Armenian gesture of solidarity) from us.

Tuesday, February 20, 2007

Carnaval: Every Body Flower

From Rio to Dunkerque, we’re taking off clothes and putting on petals for Fat Tuesday.

Carnaval parade in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Photo: BBC

Last call!

You know what that means. Time to bloom and jam. It’s Fat Tuesday, the climax of carnaval season in much of Europe and nearly all the Americas.

Roba la Gallina, one of the stock characters in Dominica’s festival
Photo: Carnaval Dominica

Lupercalia and Mardi Gras may be imports from the Old World, but really it’s on this side of the Atlantic that folks know how to grind their ya-yas out. Rio de Janeiro has the wildest, brightest Carnaval around, featuring lots of bare skin and nipple glitter. New Orleans draws party pilgrims from around the world, too.

But after surfing for Dionysus today, we’ve come across some spectacular revelry in Dominica, in Dunkerque, France, also Chipona, Spain, and Haiti. Even Quebec City, Canada, (celebrate or bust) holds ice canoe races.

Dancing and shining, in Rio
Photo: Grand Poobah

Quebec actually celebrates carnaval before Fat Tuesday (Being February, bien sur, what difference does a week make weatherwise in Eastern Canada?). For jollies, the Quebecois this year enjoyed horse-drawn sleigh rides, snow sculpting, and “snow baths.” Take that, and shiver your glitter, Rio!

Tomorrow, the beginning of Lent, flowers will come off the altar until Easter Sunday. So today get your bloom on.

Monday, February 19, 2007

Vicious Animals in the Garden

When gardening neighbors tangle, out come bleach, teeth, gauze, and police.

Just checking your geraniums…
Photo: via Creative Screenwriting

For those who think gardening’s just sunny, a harmless diversion for the mild of manner, consider two neighbors from Berkshire in the U.K. They wound up in court on Valentine’s Day over a sizzling floral dispute and a bloody stump.

It all began, like the War in Iraq, over “my space”—who was entitled to park where. The psychic elbowing then shifted, ah yes, to gardens. One woman didn’t like how the other was planting her flower beds and called her a “bitch” through a gap in the fence. Pushing the civility envelope?

After returning from a trip out of town, Marija Andric of Maidenhead, saw her plants were dead. “I held a flower and it looked as if it was burned but it didn’t look as if it had been burned by the sun. I went to the kitchen to get some water and when I poured it onto the flowers some kind of foam seemed to come out of the ground like there had been some kind of poison or shampoo poured on it.” Andric suspects that her neighbor, Pamela Fox, threw bleach on the plants.

After this incident, Fox allegedly appeared at Andric’s door. “"She had a bottle of spray which she pointed in my face and she said, ‘You killed my flowers’.” Andric told the Reading Crown Court that Fox (real name) then lunged forward and bit off the end of Andric’s pinky. “The jury could plainly see the stump of her little finger on her right hand.” At which point Ms. Fox swooned and the judge called it a day.

Sure, gardening has its sinister side, along with a handy shed-full of rakes, rope, clippers, and snail bait.  Look underneath that big brimmed hat and you’ll find a monster. Property and Pride are grinning, the shiny white uppers and lowers in the great jaw of Gardening. Keep your gloves on, neighbors, and fix that fence!

Sunday, February 18, 2007

Year of the Golden Pig

Greet the most popular holiday on the globe, Lunar New Year, with peach blossoms, incense, fire, and a snout.

A parade marking Year of the Boar in London, 2/18/07
Photo: Sang Tan, for AP

Are your peach branches in bloom?

If so, 2007 (actually 4705) should bring prosperity and happiness. Today is the lunar new year—a moveable feast, celebrated on the second new moon after the winter solstice. Throughout Southeast Asia and for Southeast Asians wherever they now live, this is the biggest holiday of the year, and flowers are part of the festivity. In Malaysia, China, and the northern provinces of Vietnam, the five petals of pink peach blossoms are harbingers of a lucky year. In Southern Vietnam bong mai trees have been carefully pruned, climate controlled, and otherwise babied so they’ll blossom in a golden shower today. Unseasonably warm winter set the blooms off too early in much of Vietnam; so growers in the mountainous region of Lao Cai are gloating. Their chillier temperatures held off the bong mai blooms (sometimes mistranslated into English as “apricot") until prime time, and sales across Vietnam have been strong.

Peach blossoms and flower songs
of Hanoi’s citywide celebration
Photo: Vietnam net

“‘Our flowers are just as beautiful and fresher than flowers from Da Lat,’ said a farm owner in Sa Pa Town. He said flower gardeners in Sa Pa have been receiving orders for Tet flowers from dealers in big cities like Ha Noi and Hai Phong for the past three months. Indeed, bringing Lao Cai apricots and flowers home on Tet” (as the New Year is called in Vietnam) “is becoming popular among young people in urban areas.”

As has happened elsewhere in the world, with modernization bulldozing the folk traditions of China and Vietnam, these customs are undergoing revival; the bigger the city, the more deliberate the observances. These interesting articles describe how calligraphy, drinking games, and flower rituals have been staged in Ha Noi and Ho Chi Minh City “to honour and review tradition habits during Vietnamese New Year, which is losing among busy development.”

Poster for New York’s Chinese New Year festivities
Photo: MOCA

From Guangzhou, China to Hong Kong to New York, New York, special flower markets mark the arrival of “Chinese New Year,” a glorious way for urbanites to reach for spring, whiff “the olden days,” decorate the flat, and keep cash registers churning.

In China, health officials expect a baby boom in the months ahead. This is Year of the Golden Pig, “which falls once every 60 years and is held to be especially auspicious....The Chinese horoscope predicts fortune, health and happiness for those born under this sign.”

(Check your sign here.)

The pig (or boar) is a bon vivant: happy, fertile, honest, loyal and (grunt-grunt) a bit hedonistic. Notable boars include Arnold Schwarzenegger, Mozart, Lucille Ball, Alfred Hitchcock, and Hillary Rodham Clinton. Hillary, turning 60 this year, was born in the previous year of the golden boar. If there’s anything to Chinese astrology, she should really bring home the bacon in 2007.