Human Flower Project

Monday, April 30, 2007

Spring Happens, or Phenology

Last frost dates look too late to believe? After a mean final nip, “it” arrives right on schedule.

Last frost dates in the continental U.S.
(the line between light and dark greens is May 1)
Map: The Garden Helper

Phenology must be the oldest of the sciences, lots older even than its Greek name. It’s the study of natural phenomena, especially plant flowerings, bird migrations and mating.

Where we grew up, Louisville, KY, a widely accepted piece of folk phenology was the last frost date. No matter how balmy April might be, longtime gardeners warned you not to plant before Derby Day—the first Saturday in May. We’re not sure where Mystic Mom lives, but she writes, “ My Granddaddy used to say, ‘Never plant your ‘maters before Kentucky Derby Day.’ The Derby is Saturday so my ‘maters’ are going in the ground Sunday.”

Taking a look at more scientific measures of frost dates, we see that the old gardeners were right. The last frost in Shelbyville, Kentucky (a mite south of Louisville) is recorded as May 5, and this year that’s Derby Day on the dot.

Here’s a site where folks in the U.S. and in Canada can check on the last frost date for their locales. Sorry we haven’t succeeded in finding similar sources for other continents and countries. If you know of such, please send them along.

With global warming, there’s heightened awareness of phenology. Biological scientists are teaming up with amateurs around the world to witness and document the effects of climate change.

“It Happens Every Spring”
painting by Stephen Dinsmore
Image: Anderson O’Brien Fine Art, Omaha, Nebraska

A chronological smattering of last frost dates:

Berkeley, California * January 29

Ft. Lauderdale, Florida * February 1

Mobile, Alabama * March 19

Austin, Texas * March 21

Vancouver, British Columbia * March 28

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania * April 14
(Wouldn’t they say “Tax Day”?)

Quebec City, Quebec * May 13

Eau Claire, Wisconsin * May 26

Lake Placid, New York * June 19

Jackson, Wyoming * July 28 (!!)

The Greengirls of the Twin Cities had an interesting discussion of last frost recently. It seems in that part of Minnesota, the commonly accepted safe “mater” date is Memorial Day. Let us know of your own timetables, whether your phenology is scientific or vernacular, the Granddaddy kind.

(Congratulations to Stephen Dinsmore for his recent show at Anderson O’Brien gallery and for capturing the spirit of the season in this painting. The last frost where Stephen lives, Omaha, Nebraska, is May 12.)

Sunday, April 29, 2007

Ginza’s Pricey Streets

To begin Golden Week, tulip petals carpet a main thoroughfare in Tokyo’s costly shopping district.

Tulip carpets in
the Ginza district
Tokyo, April 2006
Photo: Trina Chow

Today begins a peppering of holidays in Japan, four in a row, that the Japanese wisely round off as Golden Week. This is Showa Day, in homage to former Emperor Hirohito, born April 29, 1901. May 3 will be Constitution Day, and May 5, Children’s Day. The fourth occasion? We’ve discovered that under Japanese law “a day that falls between two national holidays (is declared) a national holiday” also. Now here’s a forward-thinking piece of legislation. May 4th, thus, will be “Greenery Day.”

In the Ginza district of Tokyo, widely referred to as “the most exclusive and expensive shopping area in Japan,” they really get down on Showa Day, covering Miyuki-dori Street with carpets of tulip petals.  The flowers “appear on the 300-meter long avenue from Nishi-ginza dori (Sotobori-dori) to Ginza-dori. 200,000 tulips will arrive from Toyama prefecture early in the morning.” Seems to us that the colors look all the more saturated within the city’s architectural canyons. You can read more about the Ginza district, some of its landmarks and swankiness here.

Sightseers take in flower covered Miyuk-dori St., 2007
Photo: Shizuo Kambayashi, for AP

“Showa” is the official name for Emperor Hirohito’s reign—1926-1989. Since he presided over Japan during World War II, Hirohito’s legacy is fraught with international tensions. Maybe that’s why, after his death, ”Showa Day” was downplayed and the more politically neutral ”Greenery Day” played up. Ah yes—where directness poses a threat, plants and flowers often are stuffed into the breach.

The tulip petal carpets along Miyuk-dori Street of course serve a balder purpose also: It’s a holiday, people. Bring your wallet and come on down!

Saturday, April 28, 2007

As Rain Is Our Gardener

With twice the average rainfall, even lazy Texas gardeners are looking good.

“Dorothy” poppies and bachelor buttons, April 28, 2007
Photo: Human Flower Project

We learned that another neighbor has gone over to the dark side: i.e. installed an irrigation system.  Well?  With Austin’s yearly average rainfall of only 32 inches, why haven’t we done so, too? On sanctimonious days we call our stance “water conservation.” There’s also the matter of being too cheap to have a system put in and too lazy to do it ourselves.

Hillary Clinton declared recently, “Hope is not a strategy.” Perhaps not in the Iraq War, Senator, but in gardening, yes it is. In fact, it’s our strategy. And this spring it’s succeeded. Our usually moribund yard has poured out daisies, larkspur, roses, phlox, ranunculus, cornflowers, and poppies. All we did was toss out seed, thin a few sprouts, weed some, and listen to the rain come down.

April 2007, thanks to nearly twice normal rainfall in Austin, TX

Since New Year’s Day, we’ve gotten over 17 inches of rain, that’s more than 8 inches above normal. And May is usually the wettest month here (averaging 5.03 inches). So South Austin blogger Susan may be right: the good times could last awhile. Our most assiduous garden weather tracker locally is hands down M. Sinclair Stevens. MSS’s amazing “Week by Week in the Garden” feature puts the booms or busts of the present into perspective. Every locale should be so lucky as to have a detailed record of weather and growth patterns, beautifully illlustrated.

When does your rainy season arrive? If you haven’t actually noticed and live in the U.S., you can check out the National Weather Service site and enter your ZIP code to find out. Thinking more broadly, here’s a quickie movie of global rainfall from January ‘97 to May ‘98. No wonder people on the Pacific islands can hand out leis!

For information a lot more current, here you can find rainfall amounts in the past three hours anywhere in the world, a dandy service provided by the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission. TRMM is a joint effort of NASA and the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency.

We’d like to hear about your gardening strategy, even if it does include PVC pipe.  Hope for rain worked for us these past few months; June may call for drumming.

Friday, April 27, 2007

Legeron: A Flower at the Waist

The Paris fashion world has plenty of designers but not enough “little hands.”

Junko Shimada dress with Legeron flower
Photo: Legeron

“Who knows how to do this anymore?” asked cousin Ben, leafing through a gorgeous book about the optics, engineering, botanical and design wizardry that built the gardens of Versailles.

The same question applies to many smaller human flower projects, much smaller ones – like the ersatz peony on your grandmother’s hat. Jenny Barchfield’s excellent story for AP profiles Bruno Legeron, owner of France’s last remaining independent flower-making company.

His great-grandfather started the business in 1880, when every hem, waist, and lapel begged for a blossom. By the end of World War II “Paris had hundreds of independent flower-makers,” writes Barchfield. But no longer. Legeron’s “last two competitors, Guillet and Lemarie, were bought by Chanel.”

Custom-made beaded flower
Photo: Legeron

Barchfield describes how haute couture has always depended on the “petites mains” (“little hands") of such artisans. Concern among the fashion houses is building into alarm, as the craftspeople who made hat blocks and buttons, beaded embroidery, and turned out silk and feather flowers retire. No one’s replacing them.

“Few young people are drawn by the low-paying and fiddly work,” Barchfield observes. Though 50-year-old Legeron is a fourth generation flower maker, he looks to be the end of the line. “It’s a vicious circle,” he said. “Because I spend my life in the workshop, I never got out to find a wife, which means I don’t have a kid and won’t have anyone to leave this place to when the time comes.”

Feather flower by Legeron
Photo: Legeron

Consider that as you enjoy the company’s beautiful website, with both single flower portraits and embellished fashions by Dior, Ungaro, and others. These don’t look at all like the artificial flowers one finds at the hobby shops; they were never meant to be replicas. Hand-crafted or machine-made flowers, to our eyes, are only gross insofar as they try to fake it. But who’s ever seen blooms quite like these? They aren’t fake flowers but imagined flowers. Many of the loveliest ones are grey.

Barchfield writes, “Each Legeron made-to-order blossom takes up to an hour to assemble and retails for the equivalent of $39 to $133.” We would be very interested to know more about the company – How many people does it employ? Where were they trained? How does someone stop imitating violets and start intimating them?

In the liberties Legeron’s artisans have taken, we see again what Jim Wandersee and Renee Clary described in their most recent post: here are flower makers who “value essence over fidelity.”

Wednesday, April 25, 2007

Wordless Processor

Old computers live again. Just add soil.

Tatung Einstein, pushing up daisies
Photo: Zyra’s Website

Where have all the typewriters gone? And where have all the old computers gone? We remember hauling an early so-called portable computer on the plane to Washington, D.C. for a research trip years ago. It was of course summer in the city, and though the machine and its carrying case weren’t so large, they could nearly separate your shoulder.  How “convenient”! We limped around the capitol for three days with a grip on what could have been Davy Jones’s locker, with Davy’s corpse inside.

The ghost of Davy lives on.... Taking up half the precious closet space in our house are old computers, an old printer or two, and even one Royal typewriter, with a pocked black and red ribbon. We might nobly offer them to a public elementary school except of course the schools’ equipment is several generations better than what we’re tapping on right now.

So, many thanks to Zyra and her astounding website. Here we have found the answer to our conundrum about how to handle old word processing equipment: She writes:

“In the early days of home computers there was a computer known as the Tatung Einstein. It was like a Z80 version of the BBC Micro. This particular Tatung Einstein had seen better days and was cunningly converted into a FLOWER POT. Placed strategically in the sunshine it already looked quite surrealist with plants growing out of it, but then the scene was improved even more when this CAT decided it would be a nice soft warm place to sleep. Cats have a knowledge of computers to the extent that they recognise them as worth sleeping on, a computer giving off plenty of heat even when indoors...”

Dave and Jenny’s Mac-Planter
Photo: via Apartment Therapy

Excited to have come upon Zyra’s computer-to-planter, we found another, this one a Mac (catless). We commend this excellent bit of retrofitting to anyone, but it seems especially well suited for the legions of garden bloggers who, we imagine, share both our fondness for interesting containers (most computers even have a hole or two in the bottom, for good drainage) and our lack of closet space.

We also commend to all Zyra’s amazing website. A polymath, she raises interesting questions: “What would tea taste like if it were brewed in a hot water bottle?” for example. There is a wealth of information on folding bicycles, the elimination of child poverty, and five star hotels in Dublin. We especially like her essay on location discrimination. Zyra argues that websites can never truly be local.

“Even sites that are about a particular place are of interest to people from far afield,” she writes. “The site http://www.zyra.org.uk is an example of a site that ‘tries to encompass the entire world.’” Zyra, thank you for your solution to the old computer problem. Consider us encompassed.

Tuesday, April 24, 2007

Palm Ash: Sacred Recycling

James Wandersee and Renee Clary follow an Ash Wednesday rite back to its greenery and living root. Here are fascinating details and a strong new pair of concepts for understanding culture: “essence” and “fidelity.”

Wandersee’s and Clary’s decade of work on ”plant blindness” was recently featured in the New York Times, though bafflingly they were never mentioned (much like introducing the public to this neat idea called “gravity” without a nod to Isaac Newton). Blindness takes many forms.

As always, thanks for opening our eyes, Jim and Renee.

By James H. Wandersee and Renee M. Clary
EarthScholars™ Research Group

For many Christian denominations, the ashes used in ceremonies on Ash Wednesday (the first day of Lent) are traditionally made by burning the remains of living palm fronds blessed on Palm Sunday of the previous year—a spiritual foreshadowing and ecological recycling that most church members may never have recognized.

Making palm ashes
Saint Luke Catholic Church, Virginia Beach, VA
Photo: Hampton Roads

Palms are one of the best-known and longest-cultivated flowering plant families. Palms’ tiny white flowers, appearing in clusters called inflorescences, often go unnoticed; it is their leaves (a.k.a., fronds) and palm food products (coconut, dates) that attract and fascinate people.  The plants in the Bible story are likely date palms. They are associated with Palm Sunday because of the biblical account of Jesus’ triumphant entry into Jerusalem five days before his crucifixion. The living green fronds strewn in Jesus’ path to honor his entrance as the Messiah were also a prelude to his death—hence the later ceremonial use of palm ashes.

The ashes are used to mark a cross on the foreheads of the faithful in Ash Wednesday church services, an outward sign of intended spiritual reflection, mourning, and repentance during the season of Lent. Because palm ash alone does not adhere well to the human forehead, olive oil or anointing oil is often mixed with the ashes to allow the pastor or priest’s thumb to make the mark.

It takes only 4 ounces of palm ash to imprint 1,000 foreheads with the sign of the cross (Commercial ash comes from ovens that incinerate the fronds).

Historically, males had the palm ashes sprinkled on their heads, while women had the mark of the cross drawn with ashes on their foreheads by the thumb of the clergy.  Over, time, the ritual first used with women came to be used with men as well.

Ash Wednesday Service in Queensland, Australia
Photo: Seasite

In many churches today, attendance at Ash Wednesday services equals or exceeds that on Christmas and Easter—showing that church-goers value this tradition highly. Since Ash Wednesday falls on a weekday, many people go to work or school that day with ashes on their foreheads. It’s commonplace for those unfamiliar with this plant-based tradition to make the well-intended remark: “Excuse me, but there’s dirt on your face.”

This 12th-century tradition’s cyclic visual metaphor is rich and profound, yet few churches make their own palm ashes anymore. Although some claim this tradition was abandoned due to today’s more stringent fire safety and air quality rules, most church leaders will admit that the convenience of purchasing uniformly fine palm ash is the underlying reason. Many churches buy ashes from church supply houses, which in turn buy from palm ash makers in Texas and Florida. Nearly all the palm ashes used in U.S. churches on Ash Wednesday come from palms other than the biblical date palm.

Approximately 308 million palm fronds are used each year on Palm Sunday in the U.S. For churches that observe this custom, a congregation of 1,500 members will order about 700 fronds for Palm Sunday services. In countries where palm fronds cannot be easily obtained, branches of olive, box elder, spruce and willow trees are used on Palm Sunday in place of palm plants or leaves. In Slovenia, butara (bundles of evergreen sprigs/branches and colorful ribbons are arranged vertically on a central pole or sticks) are used in place of palms. Some churches in the U.S. and abroad use individual, woven crosses of dried palm; others hold that strips of palm, or sprigs and branches of natural woody foliage are equally if not more suitable.  Still others are unaware that the palm-like plants they use on Palm Sunday are not true palms at all—such as the Sago Palm, which is not a flowering plant, but a cycad!

Harvesting Eco-Palms in Mexico
Photo: CEC

Today, an increasing number of U.S. churches celebrate a sustainable Palm Sunday by only using “eco-palms”— fronds that are judiciously harvested by indigenous communities in Mexico and Central America so as to promote palm forest sustainability and maintain critical habitats — rebating 5 cents per palm frond back to the villages for vital social services.

In 2007, churches in every state bought a total of more than 300,000 eco-palm fronds to celebrate Palm Sunday. Although these palms, too, are not the biblical date palms, but native palms, they do meet the criteria of access, convenience, and sustainability.  Plant-based traditions DO change. It’s just that, often, we either don’t know the original tradition well enough to notice its changing, or we value essence more than fidelity.

Monday, April 23, 2007

Sant Jordi: Double Whammy

Catalonia’s patron saint, honored April 23, adds a literary layer to Valentine’s romance.

Roses packaged for sale, April 23, 2004
with Catalonia’s patron Sant Jordi, Barcelona, Spain
Photo: Jenny Edwards

Consumption is the new piety. Would-be saints won’t be caught dead drinking the wrong kind of coffee, wearing a pelt, or driving a full-size automobile. While the era of indulgences may be over, sanctimonious indulgence has filled the void.

In Barcelona today, and in other parts of Catalonia, local patron Sant Jordi (known elsewhere as St. George) receives his due primarily through a tit-for-tat tradition of gifts. Men shop for roses, giving them to their ladies a la Valentine’s Day, and women reciprocate by buying their fellows books. Las Ramblas, one of the liveliest promenades in the world on just an ordinary day, becomes a puzzle of bookracks and flower pails. Wait till U.S. marketers realize that, had they only settled on a different holiday for lovers, they’d be doubling their sales.

We think of St. George astride a horse, plunging his lance down the throat of a dragon (How dull of us not to have seen this as foreplay!). Though the original St. George was likely born in current day Turkey, the Catalans transposed his story to the local town of Montblanc. According to legend a stinky lizard threatened the city and could only be kept at bay with daily human sacrifices. Eventually, the local princess was to take her turn at martyrdom, but before she was eaten, chivalrous George appeared and slew the beast.

A book for you, a rose for me (Kev and Nate)
Diada de Sant Jordi
in Barcelona
Photo: Borderline/Cruzando Fronteras

What does all this have to do with shopping and exchanging gifts? Well, a rosebush was said to have ”sprouted from the dragon’s blood,” and not missing a beat, Sant Jordi “plucked the prettiest blossom for the princess.” One source claims the giving of roses on April 23 has been going on “since the Middle Ages to honor chivalry and romantic love,” though we’ve not been able to find any early reference to the custom.  Nor have we seen art historical renderings of Saint George with a rose, or a princess, for that matter. We had, honestly, considered him more a super-exterminator than a lover. And books? “In 1923, the lovers’ fest merged with International Book Day to mark the anniversary of the all-but-simultaneous April 23, 1616 deaths of Miguel de Cervantes and William Shakespeare.”

We welcome further insight into the history of this intriguing biblio-floral tradition. What could be more delightful than a gift-swap of roses and books? It’s our guess that new life flowed into Diada de Sant Jordi thanks to the combined forces of Catalan nationalism and savvy marketing. Either one is a good match for a dragon.

Saturday, April 21, 2007

30 Pounds of Paradise

Los Angeles blows its cool for a night—and a Bonne Vivante wins the Headdress Ball.

“Birds of Paradise,” designed by Gerry Gregg
2nd Runner Up, Las Floristas Headdress Ball
Beverly Hills, CA (April 20, 2007)
Photo: Scott Acevedo

Back! back! all you purveyors of minimalism! Simple-lifers, get a life!…

And witness 2007’s Las Floristas Headdress Ball. Thanks to Richard Seekins and Scott Acevedo of The Flower Place in Fountain Valley, CA, here’s a runway-side seat from last night’s exuberant charity fund-raiser in Beverly Hills. Scott was the evening’s emcee, and with 20+ years’ involvement in the event brightened the night with anecdotal glitter.

The theme for this year’s ball—“Ticket to Paradise”—inspired elephant heads, angels, and crested blackbirds. But wouldn’t you know it, the Sweepstakes Winner, entitled “Bonne Vivante Living the Good Life” featured a pretty girl shaking up cocktails.

Linda Nies as ‘Cinderella’
design by Richard Seekins and Scott Acevedo
winner of Las Floristas Headdress Ball, 1996
Photo: Scott Acevedo

Each year, members of Las Floristas, an all-volunteer organization that raises money for children’s charities, contact the hottest florists in Southern California and plot their costumes. Richard explains, “From the design of the headdress, the colors are picked and the dress is decided on and the music selected. We do a complete package of the colors of the headdress, the ball gown and the music so it all coordinates.” He and Scott have learned what does best under the glare of stage lighting: “Dark colors like lavenders turn gray, dark reds are flat, greens turn black, and pale yellows and peach wash out.” But look what becomes of silvery blue, their design-choice for a “Cinderella” that won the Sweepstakes and People’s Choice prizes several years ago.

Richard kindly sent along some photographs of Linda Nies wearing the winning headdress he and Scott created in 1996 ("The Magic of Walt Disney") as well as shots of this tour de force in the making. Using a fiberglass helmet, aluminum tubing and window screen, they made the armature. Richard explains, “It took the petals of 400 white carnations and 12 bunches of glads to do the flower petaling to cover the frame.” In the 24 hours before the ball itself, they added “100 white cattleyea orchids, 400 stephanotis blossoms, the flowers from 100 stems of white dendrobium orchids and 100 white phalenopsis orchids.” Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo!

Linda Nies gets in practice
with the frame for her 1996 headdress
Photo: Scott Acevedo

Las Floristas Headdress Ball was clearly born in an earlier L.A., one with studio moguls, hunger for glamour and “high society.” This is the party where you could have seen Marilyn Hilton or settled in for a black-tie tribute to Bob Hope. It used to be, says Richard, that designers who hoped to take part would have to earn their way in through a “centerpiece competition,” but no more.  The florists who pour weeks into these feats of costuming are gradually backing away, and the area’s float-decorators (think Tournament of Roses) comprise more and more of the designers. As recently as the 1990s, Seekins says, there would be some 700 guests at the ball, but that’s dwindled to about half.

The group supports Rancho Los Amigos Children’s Rehabilitation Center in Downey, CA. Las Floristas’ fundraising, through the ball and other efforts, has created clinics there for children with birth defects, for burn victims and for paraplegic children. For more on Las Floristas, plus some photos of past headdress balls, please check out our post from April 15.

“Today, people don’t have the same desire to participate,” Seekins says. Wealthy L.A. ladies of decades past had both time and “money to burn.” They volunteered in greater numbers for charities like Las Floristas. As women put in 40 hour workweeks now, there’s less time to be fitted for a 30 pound headdress and beaded evening gown or to practice being “a mannequin.”

The Parade, “Ticket to Paradise”
Las Floristas Headdress Ball
Beverly Hills, CA (April 20, 2007)
Photo: Scott Acevedo

And practice is a good idea. It takes two people just to hoist these headpieces into place and then rig them into a corset so the weight won’t fall on the model’s lovely neck. “When you get 30 pounds on your hips, things do not move like they used to,” Richard says. It’s “like giving birth to quadruplets!”

We suppose that stylish L.A. is resuming its cool, putting back on its dark glasses, its slimming black attire. But for a few hours, Hollywood’s old glitz Genie was out of the bottle last night. Congratulations to all who entered, all who petaled, and all who attended this outrageous event.

Thursday, April 19, 2007

Girl Trees of Beijing

With spring “snows” of tree catkins, is China once more biased against females?

A police officer stands in a shower of tree catkins
outside a foreign embassy in Beijing, April 18, 2007
Photo: Greg Baker, for AP

Greg Baker of the Associated Press snapped some fine pictures of April snow flurries in Beijing – not precipitation, actually, but pollen from the city’s tens of thousands of willow and poplar trees.

Uniformed guards look stoical as flecks of white fall outside an embassy. A man on the sidewalk winces, and our sinuses ache in sympathy. AP’s cutline says: “Blossoms of female poplar and willow trees invade the city each spring, causing discomfort to people with allergies and even disrupting traffic due to reduced visibility. After issuing regulations in 2001 allowing only male poplars and willows to be planted, city authorities now plan to inject many of the remaining female trees with growth inhibitors to stop them reproducing and producing the blossoms.”

Writer Ron Fox also makes reference to the anti-female tree program. “I believe the culprit is a variety of cottonwood poplar…. Catkins are everywhere. They rain on you if there is a breeze. The female tree is responsible, and there is a program to replace 200,000 female trees with males over the next few years.”

Wait-a-hold-it! From what we’ve read it’s the male not the female trees that cause pollen problems. This very interesting article by Wendy Priesnitz, reporting on Thomas Ogren’s work, proposes that allergies have become worse for people in many parts of the world because of landscaping trends. “A half century ago, an estimated 50 percent of the trees in our cities and towns were female. Since that time there has been a shift to mostly male, pollen producing trees.” Male trees have been preferred, she writes, because people considered them “litter free,” no seedpods or squishy fruits to rake away.

She quotes Ogren, a nurseryman and ag scientist: “Because no one bothered to consider the effect of the pollen from these male trees, we now have many elementary schools, ringed with male shade trees, and full of asthmatic children.”

So why would Beijing authorities be targeting female poplars and willows to reduce the “snows” of spring? Weirdly, the effort echoes China’s larger anti-female bias which, since the nation’s “one child per family” policy was instated in 1978, has led to a dramatic gender imbalance. At the 2000 census, there were 117 boys for every 100 girls in China (104 boys to 100 girls is closer to the world average). Some demographers are forecasting that in China a “bachelor nation” is around the corner.

We hope all you tree scholars will disabuse us of this suspicion. And please explain. We’re pretty much at square one about catkins (with tools like this guide to sexing aspen poplars).

There clearly has been a concerted tree planting program in Beijing established about the same time as the one-child policy. Peking willow (Salix matsudana) is plentiful in the city, and many thousands of weeping willows (Salix babylonica) have been planted, too, since the early 1980s.

Imari ginger jar, 18th C.
with willow tree and flowering prunus
Photo: antikwest

Classical Chinese poetry confirms, though, that the sneezy snows of spring are nothing new. They date back at least 1000 years. Su Tung P’o looked and wondered:

The pear blossoms are pure
White against the blue green willows.
Willow cotton blows in the wind.
The city is full of flying pear flowers.
Petals fallen on the balcony look like snow.
How many spring festivals are we born to see?

In poetry, tree pollen dusts mirrors and coats wine in the cup. The world is awakening. Get with it or get out of the way!

This from an anonymous 4th Century writer, translated by Kenneth Rexroth:

We break off a branch of poplar catkins.
A hundred birds sing in the tree.
Lying beneath it in the garden,
We talk to each other,
tongues in each other’s mouths.

Tuesday, April 17, 2007

For the Hokies

Condolences to all in Blacksburg, Virginia.

Image: Virginia Tech, Dept. of Floriculture

Ut Prosim