Human Flower Project

Saturday, March 31, 2007

Butara for Palm Sunday

In Slovenia, evergreens are bundled with ribbon for Palm Sunday, a radiant beginning for Holy Week.

Butara for sale
Pogacarjev Square
Ljubljana, Slovenia
March 2005
Photo: Boštjan Burger

You won’t find many palm trees growing in Ljubljana or anywhere nearby. So much the better. Palm Sunday, remembering Jesus’ final entry into Jerusalem, is observed in Slovenia with a glorious custom, the yearly making and purchasing of butara (literally “bundles"). In these traditional ornaments, sprigs and branches of local greenery are bound up with colored ribbons. Some look to be the size of maracas, others tall as totem poles.

An enduring decorating tradition in Slovenia, the butara are turned out both by schoolchildren and by the pros, who sell their Holy Week wares in souvenir shops, groceries and open-air markets.  According to this source, the butara “will often be blessed on Palm Sunday and then placed in the home for the holiday.” We understand that each butara stays displayed in the home all year long; the next spring, it’s discarded and a new one takes its place.

If you check out only one Human Flower Project link all year, be patient as it loads, and let it be this one! Boštjan Burger has composed a series of “Virtual Reality Panoramas” of Slovenia, complete with sound. Three of them show the flower market in Ljubljana’s Pogacarjev Square outside St. Nicolas Cathedral before Palm Sunday 2005. Here, with shuffling feet and clanging church bells, you can see people shopping for butara. There are also beautiful sweeping shots of the flower sellers, with their bouquets of roses and chrysanthemums and fine array of wreaths.

The Flower Market of Pogacarjev Square
March 21, 2005
Ljubljana, Slovenia
Photo: Boštjan Burger

Boštjan writes that some butara are tied together not with ribbon but “shavings of wood ...painted various colors.” He calls this custom a “peculiarity of Ljubljana ethnology. Colorific bundles made by handy craftswomen or men are small works of art and the most (re)quested goods on a marketplace in a week before the Palm Sunday. Bundles made from shavings of wood were meant for the townspeople, who had no fields and no cattle.”

Thank you, Boštjan, for permitting us to “snap” a few stills of your magnificent moving pictures. Oh, to be in Ljubljana today!

Friday, March 30, 2007

Color Blind? Go for the Yellow

Take a color blindness test and help us strike gold.

Crocus in McHenry Co., IL
Photo: Cal Skinner

At last, across much of the U.S., the forsythia is blooming and daffodils are opening. Good news for all, especially the color-challenged.

Illinois blogger Cal Skinner turned on the lights for us with his photo of early golden crocus in bloom and a recent post (3/28):

Message of the Day – A Color

And the color is yellow.
That’s the color of my flowers of choice.
The reason is simple.
I have a hard time seeing pastels.
Even red gives me a problem.
That’s probably because I am red-green colorblind.

Hint: be wary of me at any intersection where the traffic lights are not vertical.

In any event, I like yellow flowers because I can see them vividly.

If the other colors are as vivid to other people as yellow is to me, we live in a beautiful world.

Thanks for this bit of consciousness-raising, Cal.

Texas Gold columbine (with iris)
March 25, 2007
Photo: Human Flower Project

May we recommend to you some of our own favorite yellows that should do well there in Northern Illinois?: celandine poppy, coreopsis, and (the gold standard) sunflowers. Right now in Central Texas, primrose jessamine is giving way to two other yellows: Lady Banks rose, and Texas columbine. (We’re not sure whether Texas Gold and Hinckley’s columbine are one and the same or not, but both are yellow rocket ships, soaring now through April.)

In Vietnam yellow flowers, especially bong mai and chrysanthemum, are beloved, their color signifying both happiness and prosperity. On the contrary, in parts of the Near East, yellow flowers are avoided, as they suggest sickliness and death.

What number do you see?
Image: Toledo Bend

Have you ever wondered about your own color receptivity? According to one source, color blindness affects “12 - 20 percent… of the white, male population and a tiny fraction of the female population.” Take this online test if you like, or several more tests. Or, for a quickie diagnosis, take a look at the circle at left. What number (if any) do you see inside? Check your results right here.

Thanks again, Cal, for waking us up to this very quiet deficiency, one that, to be sure, has a big impact on the human-flower relationship. It may explain in part why women seem generally to be more sensitive to flowers than men.

And readers, for Cal and the rest of us yellow flower fanciers, please tell us about your favorite golden blooms.

Thursday, March 29, 2007

Where Your ‘Geraniums’ Come From

The world leader in pelargoniums, Fischer, has sold to a Swiss agri-chemical company.

Pelargoniums/Geraniums, looking homey
Photo: Umea Universitet

What we non-botanist types call “geraniums,” those potted plants of summer with the red and white and pink moppy heads, are actually pelargoniums. But whatever you’ve been calling them, there’s a good chance some of yours can be traced back to the Fischer company in Germany.

Gerhard Fischer
Photo: Fischer

Gerhard Fischer began it all in 1959, with a nursery operation near Koblenz. “Les géraniums lui ont procuré une telle passion qu’il spécialisa l’entreprise dès le début sur cette culture.” (Geraniums inspired such a passion in him that he specialized in them from the outset of his business.) He moved the operation to Hillscheid in 1962. From laboratories there he and his horticulture team concentrated on developing disease resistant strains and by the mid 1970s, the company’s creations—GRAND PRIX, TANGO, SCHÖNE HELENA, and RIO—to name a few, were shipping across the world.

Each year the company begins a work-up on 30,000 new pelargoniums. The horticulturists narrow down to a mere 2000, based on 70 criteria. These are then field tested to see how they’ll fare in three very different climate conditions, and finally five or so new varieties will head to market.

Fischer’s pelargonium field trials
Photo: Syngenta

Growing petunias, poinsettias, vinca, and impatiens, as well as their renowned pelargoniums, Fischer has been a private company. Until now. It’s been bought by Syngenta, a Swiss company, for $67 milion (USD) “on a cash and debt free basis.” Fischer reported sales for 2005-2006 of $86 million and employs about 1700 people. It “sells flower crops in over 20 countries under well-known brands including Fischer® and pelfi®; these brands will be maintained,” Syngenta announced. The U.S. offices of Fischer are in Boulder, Colorado.

But what about Syngenta? It’s own flower division had 2006 sales nearly three times the size of Fischer’s—$228 million. And flowers are a small patch in the Swiss company’s estate.  Its total sales (2006) were roughtly $8.1 billion. Syngenta employs 19,5000 people in more than 90 countries.

Announcement of the Fischer sale crackled through the financial wire services today. But Syngenta also made news for quite another reason. South Africa has rejected the Swiss company’s request to grown genetically modified corn for biofuel.

Melanie Gosling writes, “The government turned down the application from seed company Syngenta because it said it had not convincingly shown that the maize was safe for food or animal feed. Although the GM maize was intended to feed cars, not people, the government said it was possible that the GM maize would become mixed with ordinary maize grown for food. The department of agriculture’s executive council, which regulates the GM industry, also said the GM maize could harm South Africa’s maize export industry.”

Josef Fischer, CEO of the German pelargonium specialists, announced his company’s sale in the lantern-jawed language of corporate happiness: “Combining our varieties, cultivation knowledge and supply processes will enhance our service and support to all our customers, with whom we can now access exciting growth potential in flowers.”

Would that be floral or financial “growth potential”?  In any case, this news fails to enhance our “passion” for pelargoniums.

Wednesday, March 28, 2007

Pittosporum: Here to Stay

Fragrant, shiny, shieldy, dog-proof, what’s not to like about this beauty?

Pittosporum tobira
March 28, 2007
Photos: Human Flower Project

Our first—and, to date, only—advice from a garden designer several years back was not a disaster, only because we paid this person for his time and then ignored everything he’d said. Our place definitely needs design triage but we’re shy, bordering on design-phobic, after such a brush with inanity.

We had a nice preliminary chat with the fellow who’d been recommended to us and about a month later received several scrolled up blueprints (?). Unfurling them, we saw lots of circles, that weird calligraphy they must teach in architecture school, a list of botanical names and numbers, and a drawing that looked like something you’d see at the entrance of a golf course in Palm Springs. This could be ours for roughly $10,000.

Now certainly we were at fault. Or/and we must have been body snatched by the spirit of Nancy Reagan during that conversation with the designer, for how else could our rattling on about the wildflowers of Peloponnesia have been converted into this?

Being greatly the coward before authority figures of all kinds, we ordinarily would have tried compromise: “Could we possibly have the $1000 version of Swastika Estates?” except for one thing. This fellow wanted to chop out the pittosporum tree. In fact, he really insisted. “It will clean up all the lines and enhance the view of your oaks,” he told us.

‘Fraid not.

With ranunculus

The old gnarly pittosporum must have been planted 30 or more years ago. It’s grown up around and underneath a mott of older live oaks and makes a wonderful screen on the street side of our little bumpy patio. And it’s beautiful, especially this time of year. The tree is in full bloom, covered with clusters of white blossoms that smell sweet and citrusy. E.B. Castro, a renowned florist in San Antonio, told us that pittosporum has long been a signature of his arrangements. Not only are the blossoms delicate and fragrant, the leaves spray apart in shiny green starbursts. As a cut flower, it possesses many of the virtues of magnolia but without the plantation-scale.

We’ve learned there are 200 species of flowering plants in this family and, as usual, aren’t sure what’s growing here. Our best guess is Pittosporum tobira, a native of Japan. It’s long been popular throughout Florida and the Gulf Coast. For lots more about this plant, including how to grow one, please check this thoroughgoing entry.

This author too makes note of pittosporum as a “filler” flower.  “In 1983, the last year for which a published estimate is available, Japanese pittosporum accounted for about 5% of the U.S. cut foliage market.”

Gaston, an 11-year old Catahoula,
companion animal for pittosporum

Anyone who enjoys arranging flowers will like this article about using woody ornamentals. There’s quite a list of shrubs, trees and other plants you may not have considered cutting and bringing indoors—and of course, pittosporum makes the cut.

Finally, we should note that, unlike many delicate garden flowers, this hardy plant goes well with dogs, a significant feature for many of us. You may note in this photo, taken today with a new friend in the neighborhood, that pittosporum branches, like some magnolias, have the graceful habit of reaching down, as well as up, to bloom.

Last year, we saw that a volunteer pittosporum had sprouted in a shady bed beside the house. Seems today’s the day to dig that youngster up and plant it where it may thrive—no thanks to the experts.

Tuesday, March 27, 2007

Short-Cut Economics: Uganda’s Flowers

Flower firms in Uganda are close to gaining big tax-incentives for their industry, but who’ll really benefit?

Roses grown for export on a Uganda farm
Photo: M. Herricks/Chemonics

Flower exports from Uganda have been gaining strength over the last dozen years.  “The climate conditions around Lake Victoria suit the production of sweetheart and intermediate roses,” writes FlowerTech. Farther west, at higher altitudes, the larger, pricier roses grow well, too. Exports grew at an annual average of 25% for seven years.  In 2005, there were 22 flower firms here with combined foreign exchange earnings of $35 million U.S dollars.

But recently, Uganda’s flower fortunes have been backsliding. Blame the weather. Blame the high cost of freight. Or, as the nation’s flower firm leaders are wont to do, blame the Ugandan government for failing to meet or exceed the financial breaks that other African nations have given their own flower companies.

Back in 2005, Uganda’s growers voiced alarm as they saw Ethiopia’s government stepping up efforts to attract flower businesses—sponsoring guided tours for Dutch investors, promising easy contracts and ready utilities, as well as generous “tax-holidays.” With harder times for Uganda’s growers, pleas for federal help have increased, and it now looks as if the government will comply.

“This week, President Yoweri Museveni told the growers during a meeting at State House in Nakasero that the issue was resolved and the government would grant them full incentives by July.”

The Uganda Flower Exporters Association has asked for ”a 10-year tax holiday, a duty-free tax holiday for capital equipment, raw materials and other resources, and exemptions from withholding tax, value added tax and stamp duty.” Quite a hefty subsidy, and one that about matches neighboring Kenya’s arrangement.

Predictions? “The new package is expected to boost the industry’s annual earnings by 80 million dollars in two years. The sector will expand to 600 hectares from 210 by encouraging new investments and more people to invest in high-altitude rose- growing. It will also employ 20,000 people from the current 6,000.”

(Some other promising news, under an agreement reached last July between the National Union of Plantation and Agricultural Workers and the Uganda Flower Exporters Association, flower workers have been able legally to organize. And last month, they did so. Workers at Rosebud, one of Uganda’s biggest flower farms, formed a union.)

Workers at Uganda’s Fresh Handling Ltd.
hustle flowers through cold storage
Photo: DGL Felo, via USAID

The new boost for Uganda’s flower industry all sounds so lucrative, so legislated-for-success, one wonders why it didn’t happen sooner. But that’s because no one ever prices out the opportunities lost under such schemes. What if Uganda had decided to put investments of the same scale into health care, into education? Would more people realize a greater benefit? Who owns these Ugandan farms and export firms? Will the big winners in this arrangement be the people of Uganda or investors from abroad?

Government incentives that support low-wage, low-tech industries should always get BS-detectors clicking. Take the example, writer Bill Bishop suggests, of Mississippi in the 1930s. Its state government decided to invest in low wage industries like lumber. And look at the result. Rural Mississippi is now one of the poorest and worst educated regions of the U.S.

“We need to match the incentives that Kenya and Ethiopia have put in place if we are to compete,” stressed Juliet Musoke, of the Uganda Flower Exporters Association. But, Ms. Musoke, you may have entered the Great International Mississippi Look-Alike Contest.

Monday, March 26, 2007

Bread and Tulips

Suicide? Adultery? The Italians manage to keep it all light, by ducking into a Venetian flower shop.

Bruno Ganz bereft in Venice
in Pane e Tulipani

Its blooms still look fresh, even though Pane e Tulipani (Bread and Tulips) came out in 2000.

Directed by Silvio Soldini, this film was a huge hit and prize-winner in Italy, but in the U.S. we missed it. About that time, everyone here was engrossed with another film of flowers and a sick marriage: American Beauty.

What a difference between them! In the Italian movie Bruno Ganz gives a wonderfully soulful performance as Fernando Girasole (get it?), a desperate and sad restaurant owner whom love brings back to life. We won’t ruin the plot for you; let’s just say that the steed our hero rides off on/in is a florist’s delivery van.

As for American Beauty, we’ve never understood why audiences found Lester Burnham, Kevin Spacey’s self-pitying creep, at all sympathetic. We were rooting the whole time for his bitchy real-estate-saleslady wife, Annette Bening, only to discover when the lights came up she was the villain. Oops!

Fermo, florist and anarchist
played by Felice Andreasi
in Pane e Tulipani

Bread and Tulips also accords the pleasure of several scenes in a Venetian flower shop. Our leading lady, Licia Maglietta (Rosalba), takes a job there, working for irascible Fermo, played with fine crust by Felice Andreasi. Just our sort of florist, Fermo is scandalized by someone who chooses iris for an anniversary. “What! Are you a monarchist!” he shrieks. Like all true florists, Fermo has firm views about which flowers suit each occasion. (Narcissus for a new mother....)

Working for this generous anarchist, Rosalba also returns to her dingy apartment every night with something beautiful—birds of paradise, roses, chrysanthemums. Fussy flower marketers would do well to note the transformative effect of tulips under a bare light bulb.

One stateside critic called of Bread and Tulips, “sweet, dopey, predictable, and still charming” ...all of that. And, unless you live in Italy, likely not checked out at the video store.

Sunday, March 25, 2007

Damas de Blanco: With Pink Swords

The families of jailed dissidents in Cuba raise high the gladiolus.

Ladies in White, 3/18/07, Havana, Cuba
in their 4th year of Sunday demonstrations
Photo: Carlos Serpa Maciera, via Free Thoughts

”We are all prisoners on this island,” said Katia Martin.

Martin is one of Havana’s Damas de Blanco (Ladies in White), the mothers, sisters, and wives of Cuban dissidents who were jailed four years ago in a notorious crackdown by Castro’s government.

Last Sunday marked four years since the arrests of the 27 journalists, librarians, and democracy advocates, some of whom were sentenced to 28 years in prison following peaceful protests.

It also marked the fourth year that the Damas de Blanco have gathered at the Santa Rita de Casia Church for mass, prayed the rosary, and then marched ten blocks to a nearby park. As is their tradition, the women all wore white and each carried a pink gladiolus bloom. This weekly floral act of defiance is “one of the few regular anti-government demonstrations on the island.”

Journalist Carlos Serpa Maciera took these photographs of the Ladies on March 18, 2007, passing out their flowers en route.

Damas de Blanco
Photo: Voz Catolica

Why gladiolus? We aren’t sure. This site chronicling many activities of pro-democracy groups across Cuba, notes that March 21, 2004, one year after the arrests, The Ladies in White “attended a special mass held for Cuban political prisoners at 5:00 p.m. at the Santa Rita church. Following the mass, they held a roll call in the churchyard and then made an offering of 75 gladioluses to Santa Rita. Upon mentioning the name of each political prisoner, a gladiolus was planted in moistened earth.”

We’ve found many photographs of Damas de Blanco marching with this striking flower, usually pinks blooms. Here are the Ladies in late March 2005, also the year pro-Castro forces tried to disrupt the floral vigil.

Laura Pollan described the confrontation and asserted, “We remained firm and did not back down in the face of an enraged mob which shouted slogans and obscenities at us. We remained there, and the only weapons in our hands were flowers and palms, because it was Palm Sunday.”

The gladiolus – gladiolo, in Spanish – comes from the Latin word for “sword” (think gladiator). Thus, it adds to the Ladies’ peaceful demonstrations an edge of symbolic ferocity. By carrying pink gladiolus, like exclamation points, they alert us not to miss the message.

In contemporary Cuba, standing up and speaking out require courage. Organizing and demonstrating every week for four years under these conditions is true power. Mary Anastasia O’Grady wrote of Damas de Blanco, “Their show of resistance impressed a people who were conditioned to cower.”

By choosing the pink gladiolus, the Ladies in White further feminize their appeal. Miriam Leiva, a founding member of the group, explains, “This movement of the Cuban civil society does not have a political nature, ideological preferences or confessional exclusions. We do not challenge and we’re not a party. We have neither a spokeswoman nor a hierarchy. We are the voices of the 75 innocent prisoners of conscience, imprisoned during the Black Spring of 2003, and our families. We have suffered much, but we harbor neither hatred nor resentment.” What but a flower can convey all that?

Cheering with their signature flower
Photo: La Nueva Cuba

Here’s an account of the March 19 protest in 2006. And here’s a short video about the group.

In October 2005 the Ladies in White were awarded The Sakharov Price for Freedom of Thought by the European Parliament.

After hearing of the award, group member Gisela Delgado, whose husband was among the 75 dissidents arrested in 2003, said, ‘"This afternoon we will attend mass in the Santa Rita church to give thanks to the Virgin Mary, who has been a support for us in these difficult years.” Another activist pointed to a vase nearby, “This bouquet of white gladiolus is for her (the Virgin Mary).”

The Ladies in White shared the $60,000 EU award with Nigerian lawyer Hauwa Ibrahim and Reporters Without Borders, based in France.

Castro barred the women from leaving Cuba to accept their prize.

Friday, March 23, 2007

The Aggie Bluebonnet

Only a Texas Aggie would dream of changing the color of the state flower, and only an Aggie could pull it off.

Texas A&M’s Dominique Kirk (22) sailed for
the basket against Memphis last night. The
Aggies lost 64-65 but return home to a floral
consolation prize
Photo: David J. Phillip, for AP

Texas A&M is out of the NCAA basketball tournament, losing by one point to Memphis in the final three seconds of play last night.  But really, most people never figured they’d ever get even this far. That’s because Texas A&M = FOOTBALL, and all that comes with it—bonfires, monster mums, and the 12th Man (the Aggie fans’ tradition of standing up for the duration of every game just in case they’re needed on the field).

Anyone who’s been within 10 miles of a Texas A&M alumnus knows that Aggie spirit will not, cannot be contained. To wit: the grit of A&M men’s basketball coach Billy Gillispie, who with several legions of red-ass support has turned the university’s lackluster program into one of national respectability. New York Times sportswriter Pete Thamel must have just fallen off the commuter train to insinuate, as the headline of his Gillispie profile puts it, “Coach’s ‘Unhealthy’ Obsession Has Led to Success at Texas A&M.”

Whether or not it’s healthy, whether or not they succeed, Pete, EVERYONE who is, was or hopes to be associated with Texas A&M is obsessed!!!

Lupinus texensis
daring to bloom maroon in Austin
Photo: Human Flower Project

Let a Human Flower Project prove it to you. About 25 years ago, horticulturists at College Station got a bead on developing new colors of the Texas bluebonnet. Is nothing sacred? Actually, at A&M everything is sacred, from the boots of the marching band members to the backflip kisses required after each touchdown. So yes, if undertaken with Aggie Spirit, the prospect of adulterating the state flower is not only proper, it’s potentially righteous.

Jerry Parsons recounts some of the tale:

“In 1982, a dying con artist and Texas naturalist named Carroll Abbott, Mr. Texas Bluebonnet, implanted in the mind of a naive horticulturist, me, a dream of planting the design of a state flag entirely composed of the state flower, bluebonnets, to celebrate the 1986 Texas’ Sesquicentennial.”

That charming idea came to involve thousands of researchers all focused on larger aims. “Financially stressed farmers needed another crop with which to diversify production,” Parsons explains. And the bluebonnet was a good choice since its input costs are low and the plants return nutrients to the soil. Also, a state flag made with bluebonnets would promote A&M’s whopper horticulture program with Texas flash.

The Lone Star flag is, of course, red, white and blue, so where was the team going to come up with white and red bluebonnets? White flowers didn’t take too long to develop, but the red bluebonnet was a real challenge. “Caroll Abbot himself had roamed the fields of Texas for years and had only seen three pink-blooming bluebonnet plants.”

Being “obsessed,” however, the A&M horticulturists eventually did find a patch of pink bluebonnets just outside San Antonio. By continuing to sow and select for the pink color, they figured a red bluebonnet was on the near horizon. But here’s where Aggie spirit overtook them.

Jeff Abt, telling all in his piece for The Daily Sentinel of Nacogdoches, names names…

Horticulturist “Greg Grant, being an Aggie, thought to himself, ‘These pink bluebonnets with the blue tinge in them look a bit like the color maroon. Let’s select out, not for the color red, but for the color maroon. Who cares about the Texas flag. It’s Aggies that matter.’”

Horticulturist Greg Grant
one of the Aggies
behind the maroon bluebonnet
(pictured here at Mercer Arboretum)
Photo: Human Flower Project

We should have known. Greg is a dynamo, brilliant, funny, with a streak of mischief. For years he was the Bexar County Extension Agent, leading imaginative community projects like a citywide search for the true “San Antonio Rose.” It would be just like him to divert this somewhat namby pamby research effort into a big horticultural bray for A&M.

By the mid-1990s, Grant and Parsons and other Aggie co-conspirators had succeeded.  In the fall of 1998 seed of the Texas Maroon Bluebonnet (Lupinus texensis) hit the market.  Jerry Parsons earlier that year had predicted that the new flower would be dubbed ‘Greg’s Maroon,’ for the impish revolutionary of Texas horticulture, but of course it didn’t happen that-a-way. Even though for some legal reasons we can’t understand, the flower can’t be officially named for the university, far and wide it’s known as “The Aggie Bluebonnet.”

Last fall our neighbor Katie tossed out some wildflower seed here in Austin; she was horrified when two weeks ago her bluebonnets bloomed maroon. “I may have to get out here with some orange spray paint!” she declared.

Aggie (with telltale ring)
and maroon bluebonnets
Photo: Texas A&M University

Would Greg Grant consider developing an orange version of the state flower for UT fans? Uh, no. “Grant says years ago he noticed brownish flowers in a white bluebonnet field, but he promptly pulled them up, stomped on them and threw them away. He says University of Texas folks will just have to do without.”

UT has recently taken over the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center and, it would seem, now has in harness the expertise to develop a burnt orange lupine. But do they have anything comparable to the crazed Aggie Spirit that such a task requires? We’ll see.

(Texas, by the way, lost in the second round to Southern Cal.)

Thursday, March 22, 2007

Would You Like to Sit on a Lotus?

The throne of Lakshmi and Buddha is now available for your tush, too.

Dream Bag
Photo: HDK

Could this be the ultimate in parental pandering?

First we thought so, after seeing the Dream Bag, a multi-pillowed bloom. “Close it into a bud and let it blossom when or wherever you want, either inside or outdoors. Made from foam filled polyester, beaver nylon and is easy to bring with you.” Designers Ulrika E. Engberg and Kasper Medin note they are, “Looking for (a) producer!” (Preferably one just downstream from large quantities of “beaver nylon.")

Ganesh and his consort on a lotus
Image: Exotic India

The Dream Bag is today’s bean bag chair, simple and schleppable, yet—as the 21st century demands—spiritual. It’s modeled on the lotus, seat of divinities. In Hinduism, Vishnu and Ganesh, Lakshmi and Saraswati are all depicted on lotus blossoms.  Brahma sits on a super-lotus, its stem growing from Vishnu’s navel. (As for Dream Bag, umbilicus not included.)

We were surprised to find the Egyptian god Horus also seated on a lotus, as in this ivory plaque from the 8th Century B.C.

But it was The Buddha who made floral furniture famous. Why?

This interesting essay explains: “Whatever symbolic thrust Buddhism attached to lotus, its real glorification began with Puranas," religious texts from the first century A.D. In these writings the lotus seat, with its many petals, “multiplied a god’s magnificence and divine aura,” made manifest in “fertility, prosperity, fruition, and riches.” We would add beauty!

“Lotus had the divine birth - as an element of Lord Vishnu’s body; integral part of his consort Lakshmi; multiplication of Shiva’s seed; or inhabitant of heaven sent to the earth to incarnate as a flower.” To be seated on the lotus throne, an emblem both of “manliness” and “tenderness,” was to be sittin’ spiritually pretty.

Brahma
Image: Nexus

All these religious associations made the Dream Bag seem an affront at first—like a playscape of Calvary or facsimile Muslim prayer rug for your powder room. But as he so often does, Joseph Campbell changed our thinking. This terrific essay looks at the underlying meaning of yoga’s lotus position (no furniture required). Campbell reminds us that chakra #1, which makes contact with your Dream Bag, Bean Bag, sectional sofa or whatever, is the humble place we all start from. Everybody’s butt “is known as muladhara ("root base") and identified as the motivating center of that simple, primal holding to life which is of infancy and early childhood.”

So what could make more sense than a toddler seated on a sack shaped like a lotus flower? These little tykes can’t be expected to assume the lotus position all on their own.  They’re too busy getting a handle on eating and excreting, those basic “precondition(s) of all animal life, which can exist only by consuming lives” (and perhaps designer furniture at a later date).

Good luck to Ulrika Engberg and Kasper Medin in finding a backer for this ingenious backside accessory.

Wednesday, March 21, 2007

Uneasy Hyacinth - Year 1386

Today’s Persian New Year sprouts festivity and anxiety.

A Tehran flower shop stocked for the Norooz, March 2005
Photo: Mr. Behi, Impatient Pixels

With the equinox, 3:37 a.m. Tehran time, all who claim a Persian heritage mark the New Year with old customs. Youngsters jump ritual fires and elders set the haft seen table, its seven ceremonial objects including sombol – hyacinth flower—the olfactory equivalent of a high-pitched siren.  It’s spring!

Across Iran, the homeland of Norooz, this particular New Year arrives with anxieties: the threat of an international economic crackdown. Golnaz Esfandiari writes for Payvand’s Iran News, “many are concerned that the UN will adopt economic sanctions against Iran over its refusal to halt uranium enrichment.”

One source told the reporter, “People are worried about sanctions and the very bad economic situation in Iran because everything has become expensive. I think the price of fuel will also increase and then the [prices of other things] are going to increase even more. If there will be sanctions and factories will shut down, then it would be horrible.”

Esfandiari adds, ominously, “Some in Iran also say they fear a U.S. attack despite Washington’s denials of any such plans.”

Seems to us that the Norooz, with its many expressions of hope and life, could melt these diplomatic clouds. Even now, representatives of ten countries where the Persian New Year is observed (among them, Afghanistan, Georgia, and Uzbekistan) are working to petition the U.N.’s World Intangible Cultures division for the Norooz to be recognized as part of our shared global heritage. They will gather in Tehran next month to finish their dossier. May this effort flower!

From Flower (2004)
By Shahram Entekhabi

There is a clear sense that Iranians feel misunderstood, even embattled this spring. See this odd video entitled Flower (2004) by Shahram Entekhabi, commentary from an Iranian expatriate living in Germany.

We also pass along a strong essay from Ali Mostofi standing up for the people of Iran. ”Iranians are not to be ‘feared,’” he writes in response to an editorial by William Cox. “You seem to be totally oblivious of the Iranian Spirit that has motivated a peaceful union amongst the Iranian people, and the various ethnic groups for thousand years. It was the very essence of the Iranian Spirit as enshrined in our Holy Book The Zend Avesta, that has keep Iran for so long. Iranian Peace was Cosmological. We were the first to unite the world along Cosmological Principles, and our Empires are a testimony to that. Pax Iranica was based on Nowrooz.”

Haft Seen
Noruz 2007
Oakland, CA, USA
Photo: Cyrus Farivar

Mostofi also stresses “We have close to four million very rich, very well educated Iranians outside Iran, who love Iran, and will not allow their country be plundered by aliens from within or without, because we have not forgotten the Spirit of Nowrooz.”

Indeed, the Persian New Year is being celebrated in many parts of the U.S. today. We attended a glorious occasion in 2003 right here in Austin.

Here are several more fascinating pieces on Norouz

and

No Ruz

and

Nowruz

-- many spellings for springtime, a manifold creation.