Human Flower Project

Thursday, August 30, 2007

St. Lucia’s Rivals: Rose and Marguerite

For work, solidarity and pleasure, the people of St. Lucia island pledge their allegiance to one of two historic blooms.

Map of St. Lucia
Via: Dive St. Lucia

Floating in the Caribbean Sea between French Martinique and English-speaking St. Vincent, people of St. Lucia know something about cultural competition and the vagaries of political power. Their island changed possession 14 times in the French-Anglo wars of the 17th and 18th centuries. (St. Lucia became an independent state within Britain’s Commonwealth of Nations in 1979.)

So how does a society reckon with two centuries of checkered domination by colonialists across the ocean? The St. Lucians turned this legacy of divisiveness into two flower societies – one dedicated to the rose, the other to the marguerite (St. Lucians’ name for globe amaranth, Gomphrena globosa). Each year, they re-enact the old monarchical rule and strife with gentler conflicts: Which flower “la woz’ or “la magrite” is more beautiful? And – more important—which flower society can throw a better party?

As Human Flower Projects go, this one appears to be a world-class effort – combining secular and sacred traditions. The Rose society holds its grand fete today, the feast day of St. Rose of Lima. The Marguerites will have their chance the 17th of October, honoring St. Margaret Mary Alacocque.

In the weeks preceding their grand celebrations, the clubs conduct “séances” – ceremonial rehearsals of singing and dancing. Their symbolic King, Queen, and other royals preside over these occasions. “Strict protocol is observed at those nightly Séances, with every visitor or participating member, upon entering, bowing to the King and Queen who are present with their court. Police and soldiers in uniform enforce regulations against any disorder, breaches of protocol, or what are considered misdemeanors. Offenders are taken before a magistrate for a mock trial and then fined.” But a few pennies will bail you out, part of the delight, and the money all goes toward the flower societies’ next bash.

Seance, Rose Society, St. Lucia
Via: Tameron Eaton

On the saint’s feast day itself, there is a church service, followed by a banquet, music and a long night of dancing. One flower society at a time plays host, but it appears the whole island is invited. You can find some of the dance music on this old recording. And here’s a more recent youtube. “When the singing gets going, led by the shatwel (lead singer), drums start beating, guitars start playing and the shak-shaks (similar to maracas) start shaking, the party becomes so exuberant that it continues well into the next day.”

Further, as Florence Reese would say, “There are no neutrals here.” Everyone on St. Lucia island is a member of one flower society or the other. You’re either a Rose or a Marguerite.

“In 1884, Henry H. Breen reported that ‘although few persons, besides the labouring classes and domestic servants, take any active part in their proceedings, there is scarcely an individual in the island, from the Governor downwards, who is not enrolled amongst the partisans of one coterie or the other.’ Today over a hundred years later, nearly every St. Lucian, whether white planter, colored civil servant, landed peasant, or Negro or East Indian cane laborer, is at least nominally affiliated with one of the societies.” So wrote folklorist Daniel Crowley in 1958.

We’re not sure how one is admitted to one society or the other. Perhaps some of our Caribbean visitors can inform us about this and many other mysterious aspects of St. Lucia’s flower clubs.

Parade at the Fete La Rose, St. Lucia
Photo: HTS St. Lucia

According to ethnomusicologist David Campbell, “The Societies demonstrate and celebrate their difference in contrasting behaviour and accomplishments.  La Rose, in spite of its English association, values noise, movement, rhythm, participation and showing-off in general. La Marguerite favours restraint, decorum and melody.”

Could there be a more genteel expression of rivalry, a more forgiving and playful re-enactment of oppression and strife? We’ll make sure to revisit this custom in mid-October when the Marguerites stage their fete. For today, bring on the noise. Vive La Woz!

Tuesday, August 28, 2007

Catching & Naming the Floral Spectrum

Guess who starred in the first color TV broadcast? James Wandersee and Renee Clary explore several human efforts to capture the array of floral colors: television sets to crayons to number systems. 

Artist’s rendering an early color TV set
Image: Plan 59

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

On January 1, 1954, our visual world changed. This was the date of the first coast-to-coast telecast in living color. Do you know what the subject was? The living flowers of the famous Rose Bowl parade (the theme of the parade that year was “Famous Books in Flowers”). At last it was possible to view the kaleidoscopic Tournament of Roses Parade taking place in sunny Pasadena, California at home across the U.S. --while much of the nation was still trapped winter’s monochrome.

With first color television sets costing $1,000, it took nearly a full decade for most US homes to switch over to color TV—as the price gradually landed within middle class budgets. When people did switch, the visual impact was quite dramatic, and television watching became even more addictive.

Even the new high definition televisions of today do not seem as impressive a technological advance to those who experienced the thrill of first watching color television at home after years of twilight-like visual deprivation via black-and-white sets. To most people, colorcasts were the first “reality TV.” It was not just a happy accident that the first network colorcast began with a floral flourish either. At such a wintry time of the year, network executives knew people craved color, and nothing else offered more vivid colors than flowers. Plants were the first choice.  Even the NBC Color Peacock did not appear until two years later.

An icon of American childhood
Photo: Smug

In addition to the color television set, another source of domestic color, available in almost every American home with children since 1903, has been the familiar green-and-yellow box of Crayola® crayons, invented and manufactured by two Pennsylvania cousins, Edwin Binney and C. Harold Smith. The first boxes held just eight crayons, with 25% of the colors named after plants (violet, orange).  In 1949, there were 48 crayons in the biggest box, with 50% named after plants (e.g., apricot, carnation pink, cornflower, mahogany, maize, melon, pine green, thistle).

By 1998, the size of the biggest box had grown to 120 crayons—with lots of plant-derived colors: almond, asparagus, banana mania, bluebell, cerise (cherry), chestnut, cranberry, dandelion, eggplant, electric lime, fern, fuchsia, goldenrod, Granny Smith apple, laser lemon, lavender, mango tango, mulberry, neon carrot, peach, plum, razzle dazzle rose, shamrock, tropical rainforest, tumbleweed, vivid tangerine, wild strawberry, wild watermelon, and wisteria. We hypothesize that this preponderance of plant names may help US children associate colors with various plants—provided they are taught about the plants that are their crayons’ namesakes.

Raw Sienna
Photo: wiki

As the EarthScholars, we would be remiss if we didn’t mention the adage: “if you don’t grow it, you mine it.” This maxim seems as true for crayon colors as it is for other materials humans use. The Crayola company has chosen many color names from Earth materials (e.g., antique brass, aquamarine, brick red, copper, desert sand, gold, silver, turquoise blue).  Perhaps the most fascinating of the Earth crayons are the colors burnt sienna, raw sienna, burnt umber, and raw umber. Did you ever use those crayon colors as a child? All four are, of course, shades of brown. Chemically, burnt sienna is formed by heating raw sienna to 800-1000 degrees Celsius and dehydrating it; the same holds for burnt umber and raw umber.

Burnt Sienna
Photo: wiki

So, what are sienna and umber? Both are Precambrian clays found in Italy and named after the city of Siena and the region of Umbria. These were some of the first pigments used for painting by humans in caves. Both take on more intense colors after being heated . Crayola removed the raw umber crayon from its assortment in 1990, thinking that the color and its name were both too dull to appeal to today’s children.

Edward R. Tufte (1989), a well-known American information architect, pointed out that “Nature’s colors are familiar and have a widely accepted harmony.” He recommended that graphic artists look to nature for their color palettes when designing information documents and websites.

The main reason most people grow and give flowers is for their colors. The colors that we see in flowers are caused by light reflected from various plant pigments. Sets of chemical compounds called anthocyanidins comprise the basic reflective components. Temperature affects flower color too; thus more vivid colors are seen in cooler stands of flowers growing in places like Alaska. The intensely bright fuchsia of fireweed flowers makes driving Alaskan highways “a journey into the Land of Oz.”

Professor Albert H. Munsell (1858-1918)
Photo: Munsell Color Science Laboratory

How can one best describe a flower’s color? In our laboratory we sometimes use a costly electronic tristimulus colormeter, but the simplest way to describe “reflective “colors is the system developed by Albert H. Munsell (1858-1918). The US Geological Survey’s soil scientists use it to match soil colors--as with those Italian clays. Plant scientists use it to match flower colors and other plant organs. (Different sets of charts are used for those two functions.) Munsell’s system, which originated in 1905, is based on a standardized set of painted, color chips.  For any color it assigns three values. Hue is the major color, like red or blue. Value is the brightness of the main color. And chroma is the degree of saturation of the color (deep red, for example).

Munsell’s system was adapted for plants by the UK’s Royal Horticultural Society (RHS, 2001); a set of color patches arrayed on four fans is now the standard for describing flower colors— just like matching paint to fabric, one holds color chips near the specimen to determine the best match. As the chips have numerical descriptors, the Munsell system provides a low-tech method for quantifying a flower’s color. (Professor Munsell considered naming colors with words foolish and misleading!)

Royal Horticultural Society Colour Chart
(Available from the RHS)
Photo: Royal Horticultural Society

If you would like to see a simulated, approximate version of the RHS chart and its four fans of color, visit the Azalea Society of America’s website.

A recent study by Griesbach and Austin (2005) indicated that the Munsell Book of Color ($675) is even better than the RHS Colour Chart ($210) if you want to describe the differences among the floral colors of cultivars. With it, an experienced observer, using interpolation, can identify and specify any flower’s color from 100,000 possibilities. (The Munsell Color Charts for Plant Tissues—other than flowers—and the Munsell Soil Color Charts are available for purchase from many vendors, including Forestry Suppliers, Inc. in Jackson, Mississippi: approximately $175 (plants) or $105 (soil)).

In the end, the color of flowers is a matter of indescribable beauty.  Color television displays, enticing sets of children’s crayons, expensive colormeters, and numerically descriptive color-chip systems may claim to have captured the chromatic essence of the living flower, but we must acknowledge that’s impossible. Rather than our assigning a color name or value to a flower, is it not the flower that is adding inexpressible and incalculable aesthetic value to our lives?

People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.
– Iris Murdoch, A Fairly Honourable Defeat

Sunday, August 26, 2007

‘We Want to Sell a Flower’

The flower sellers of Bucharest are protesting Romania’s new regulations of street stalls.

Along with 300 other flower sellers, 68 year old Lucia
marched in Romania’s capital Aug 20.
Photo: Vadim Ghirda, for AP

In tandem with the globalization of the cut flower trade, we see a global clamping down on street vendors of flowers. Is there a connection? ...

From San Francisco, California, to Harare, Zimbabwe, to Vancouver, Canada, municipalities seem to be doing all they can to tax, corral, or outright ban selling flowers on city thoroughfares. The latest “containment” effort is in Bucharest, Romania, where Roma vendors have made a marginal living for generations from selling blooms to passersby. What possible harm could there be in that?

“A Bucharest district mayor, Liviu Negoita, said he wants to limit flower selling to six months a year, and says that flower sellers will be obliged to sell their wares from special kiosks, available in three models.” There are an estimated 700 flower sellers and florists in the capital city (pop. 2 million).

“This is a nightmare,” said Mariana Ionita, 36 who has been selling flowers since she was eight. “I have three children and my father is ill. There are 10 people in my family, and from today we are illegal.” She said her stall was shut down by authorities early Monday (Aug. 20), in sector three, one of the city’s six districts.

Some 300 vendors marched last week in protest. “Since Romania joined the European Union on Jan. 1, there have been moves to regulate street trade. Newspapers are no longer sold from stalls on the street, but from special kiosks and the same rules are randomly being applied to florists.

“Waving blue, green, mauve and yellow chrysanthemums outside the city hall, florists yelled: ‘We want to sell a flower, not discrimination!’ A group of Roma from the Association of Florists went into the city hall to register a formal complaint calling on authorities to reverse a decision to close stalls down.”

In Romania, as elsewhere, the limitations on street flower sellers bring old ethnic tensions churning to the surface. Yet we think the problem is wider and even more intractable than racism.  The drive to sweep vendors from the public spaces of cities seems to us part of the overriding trend to control, monitor, and regulate the urban environment. Get thee to a kiosk… this is a non-flower zone.

Gentle citizen, look out. The ink may be drying on another “regulation,” one of your very own.  Do you have a permit to stand on this corner? Where are your documents?

Friday, August 24, 2007

Global Trade and Flower Jingoism

A Netherlands trade board has allowed the merger of two huge flower firms, pushing back against newcomers in the industry.

Two-headed giant
Image: Gandolf

It came as no big surprise that the Netherlands Competition Authority ruled to allow the two giant Dutch flower auctions—Aalsmeer and Floraholland—to join forces. The two auction houses have been combining their businesses for years now, and since each passing season brings yet another determined player to the table in this increasingly competitive market, the pressure has been on to shore up Holland’s domination.

What did strike us as peculiar was the reasoning Nederlandse Mededingingsautoriteit (NMa) provided, that a merger between Floraholland and Aalsmeer “would still leave ’sufficient alternative channels‘ on the domestic and foreign markets.” On the foreign markets, they may have a point, as Dubai, India and other countries are building up stronger auctions. But on the domestic side, PLEEZ! One source reports that a combined Aalsmeer and Floraholland will control 30% of the European market and 90% of the Dutch market.

If control over 90% of the market doesn’t constitute a monopoly, what does? 95%? 99.9%?  Anti-trust laws are being ignored in many parts of the world (this is rampant in the U.S.) but to pretend that the combination of these two behemoths is not “anti-competitive” within the Netherlands is a joke.

It seems to us that in a global economy, nations will be looking out for their traditional industries and bending national regulations in order to strengthen those industries abroad. Better, some in the Netherlands might say, to put up with a monopoly at home than risk losing our longstanding pre-eminence in the flower trade to China or some other comer. Isn’t this what’s happening, a kind of economic jingoism?  We’d be interested to hear what our esteemed friends in the business world think, and of course we’ll be keeping an eye on the two-headed giant in Europe.

Wednesday, August 22, 2007

Dancing at La Madeleine

Is love guaranteed? If you’re in a streetside flower market in Paris with Gene Kelly, sans doute.

Gene Kelly makes a discovery at the flower market
“An American in Paris” (1951)

Gene Kelly was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, August 23, 1912. By his teens he was working in a dance studio, then escaped to New York and later Hollywood, where he would make—with Vincent Minnelli—one of the strangest and finest musicals of all time: An American in Paris (1951). Okay, so it did thieve from Michael Powell’s wildly innovative The Red Shoes, made three years earlier. But Powell’s movie, revolutionary as it was, didn’t have George Gershwin’s music. And it didn’t have Gene Kelly.

Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron dance next to La Madeleine
in An American in Paris (1951)
Photo: Film and Fashion for the Oscars

We pay tribute especially for the role a flower (carnation?) plays throughout the film. For the young American painter it signifies the love that he can’t shake, that keeps turning up across the city. In one of many memorable scenes, our confused hero comes upon his heart’s desire on a mound of white flowers as he wanders through the old market next to La Madeleine church. (The market is still there today, though the flower sellers don’t wear broad brimmed bonnets and they seem dour and irritable, even for Paris, where irritation can be form of foreplay). Of course, in Gene Kelly’s Paris, the Madeleine is on a set in California. Finding again the bright red flower with the long stem, he touches it and it becomes his gamin ballerina, Leslie Caron.

From Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron’s long finale
An American in Paris

Speaking of red, we were intrigued to learn of Kelly’s leftist politics, a commitment that brought him to side with the Carpenters’ Union in its strike against the Hollywood studios and later to appear, along with John Huston and others, before the House Un-American Activities Committee. And we thought he was just a delicious, virile dancer!

Kelly died February 2, 1996. A biopic that aired on US public television said that after his achievements in the 1950s, he endured 40 years of disappointment as an actor and artist. But who ever would have known?  The “spring” Gene Kelly created on film—An American in Paris—has outlasted him and his disappointment, too.

Monday, August 20, 2007

Star of the Cevennes ~ Cardabelle

Picnicking in rocky Southern France, Roger Sanderson comes upon a barometer in bloom.

Cardabelle (Carlina acanthifolia), in the Herault, France
Photo (detail): Roger Sanderson

Nearly one year ago, we did some hunting around Olargues in the Herault region of Southern France, searching for the wild cardabelle plant. We’d read about how country people of the region had used this native thistle both for carding wool and predicting the weather. The cut flowers, so we’re told, open in the sun and begin closing up when rain is on the way. (A word to tourists: museums, even European ones, keep more reliable hours and locations than do wildflowers.)

But now we hear from Roger Sanderson, a photographer in Lincolnshire, England. “I was lucky enough to find a few plants growing high in the Cevennes above Anniane this summer,” he writes. And we are lucky enough to present a few of his gorgeous pictures (for more, see Roger’s portfolio on Flickr.

Cardabelle
(Carlina acanthifolia)
w. of Lodeve, France
Photo: Roger Sanderson

“The flowers I found were near the peak of Saint Baudille which is east of Saint Guilhelm le-Desert and west of Lodeve. We drove up a rocky track to find a site for a picnic, before the sun got too hot. While we where trying to photograph butterflies we came across a patch of the flowers on very poor stony ground.” See what chasing butterflies can accomplish?

“I recognised them from tiles and paintings that were in the Gite we stayed in. They were in full bloom and being pollinated by at least two types of bumble bees.”

Our reading suggests that Carlina acanthifolia blooms in spring and early fall, so we’re a bit surprised to hear Roger found this patch flowering in summertime. Again, wildflowers don’t necessarily go by the book. And with reference to our post from yesterday, about mythological Clytie who turned into a “sunflower,” we now wonder if she perhaps didn’t become a cardabelle, as this plant is actually a Mediterranean native (some varieties of Carline thistle are even “violet”—a word that described Clytie’s bloom in some translations of Ovid).

Cardabelle barometer
Photo: Fritz Geller-Grimm, via wiki

Roger Sanderson adds, “In the ancient fortified Templar town of Couvertoirade, there were lots of dried Cardabelle tacked onto the doors of the houses and (touristy) shops, in spite of the prohibition on cutting them. The French have a more relaxed attitude to edicts from government than other countries.” (We’d be eager to hear what our French visitors have to say.)

Roger noted that he’d spotted the same plaster cardabelle we photographed in Pezenas. But to the butterfly chaser, by all rights, goes the reward. Thank you, Roger!

Saturday, August 18, 2007

Clytie: Obsessive Heliotropic

Jealousy can turn your head around, and around.  Just ask the mermaid.

La Metamorphose de Clytie (detail)
By Jean-Francois de Troy, Meaux, Musee Bossuet
Photo: Bill Bishop

For Roman poet Ovid, the natural world was the outcome of feeling. Plants, trees, rivers, and stars grew out of the old gods’ emotional entanglements. At death, a human hero beloved by some goddess, might be installed in the heavens: a new constellation. A virgin who fled one lusty deity could be transformed by another into a laurel tree just in time to preserve her honor.

The Metamorphoses, Ovid’s masterpiece, is really about how the inner life is inevitably exteriorized. Feelings bring change (often tragic) into the world. For the sea nymph Clytie the transforming emotion was obsessive love which, as it tends to, turned to jealousy. Clytie was fixated on Apollo (Helios) the god of the sun, following his every mile across the sky. When Apollo began a love affair with Leucothoe, Clytie went to the other girl’s father, a Babylonian king, and informed on them. In a rage, the old king killed his own daughter, burying her underground, out of Apollo’s sight.

Far from currying affection with the Sun God, Clytie of course had inspired his fury, and he refused ever to come near her again. But she maintained her fixation, tracing his ride across the sky each day.

La Metamorphose de Clytie
By Jean-Francois de Troy, Meaux, Musee Bossuet
Photo: Bill Bishop

The story appears in Book Four of the Metamorphoses. Here’s one translation of the finale:

“Shunning the Nymphae, beneath the open sky, on the bare ground bare-headed day and night, she sat dishevelled, and for nine long days, with never taste of food or drink, she fed her hunger on her tears and on the dew. There on the ground she stayed; she only gazed upon her god’s bright face as he rode by, and turned her head to watch him cross the sky. Her limbs, they say, stuck fast there in the soil; a greenish pallor spread, as part of her changed to a bloodless plant, another part was ruby red, and where her face had been a flower like a violet was seen. Though rooted fast, towards the sun she turns; her shape is changed, but still her passion burns.”

Kircher’s Sunflower Clock
Via: Ursi’s Eso Gardens

The term heliotropic refers to plants that, like Clytie, rotate their floral “faces” in the direction of the light. Many commentators have concluded that the sea nymph turned into a sunflower (Helianthus). But we’re not so sure. Sunflowers are American plants, and not “like a violet.” Could Ovid have been referring to something more like heliotrope? It’s purple, and rotates with the movement of the sun, also. But it’s not native to the Mediterranean region either.  Readers, can you provide more information or, at least, give us your thoughts on this human-flower mystery?

Certainly, many European artists have associated Clytie with the sunflower: George Frederick Watts (note the yellow blossoms in the background) and Jean Francois de Troy, whose Clytie wears her tournesol like a third eye.

After all this wringing emotion, let’s retreat to a bit of science—Kircher’s sunflower clock (discovered on the wonderful site Ursi’s Eso Garden). “To illustrate his belief in the magnetic relationship between the sun and the vegetable kingdom, Kircher designed this heliotropic sunflower clock by attaching a sunflower to a cork and floating it in a reservoir of water. As the blossom rotated to face the sun, a pointer through its center indicated the time on the inner side of a suspended ring.” Talk about obsessive!

Tuesday, August 14, 2007

Toward the Smell of ‘Progress’

Catching us up with Utopia, John Levett revisits Letchworth Garden City, where the movement for ‘town planning’ began a century ago.  (Let us know if you laugh or cry.) John lives, writes and gardens in Cambridge, England.

Roundabout in Letchworth Garden City, England
All photos of Letchworth: John Levett

By

When Orwell lived in Wallington in the mid-1930s he passed through it on bus & bike (no doubt on the way to Woolworth’s in Hitchin for roses). He had it in mind in The Road to Wigan Pier when he was writing of socialism, how it drew “with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, Nature-Cure quack, pacifist and feminist in England.” In Coming Up For Air he wrote: “I knew the type. Vegetarianism, simple life, poetry, nature-worship, roll in the dew before breakfast...They’re all either health-food cranks or else they have something to do with the boy scouts—in either case they’re great ones for Nature and the open air.”

Letchworth Garden City. Full of “vegetarians with wilting beards” & those “who come flocking towards the smell of ‘progress’ like bluebottles to a dead cat.”

But first, some background.

In 1971 I went home, newly qualified to teach, to South London from Liverpool (shortly after Liverpool had lost the FA Cup to an extra-time Charlie George goal in an era when footballers were more interested in the winner of the 4.30 at Haydock Park than they were in suits & hair). In the spirit of the time & of social engineering, I intended to take my qualification to some back street pit of a school close by Surrey Docks or some site of similar cachet, raise the red flag & build Jerusalem. They deserved me. It wasn’t back-street Hanoi, a favela outside Sao Paulo, a project in Santiago but it was on the 47 bus route & had dockers who struck, frequently (I let it pass as unfortunate & indicated a state of false consciousness that these same dockers had come out in mass support of Enoch Powell’s racism three years earlier).

I never got that far. London recruited early & I was late. That summer, on a stiflingly-hot July morning, I arrived at Euston station with two invitations to interview—one in Liverpool & the other in Watford. Watford was thirty minutes away, Liverpool three hours. Watford won. I’d change England there instead. Fade to black.

Six months later I’d moved mum, two cats & a dog to Hitchin in north Hertfordshire. It was cheaper to live, easier to travel & had a garden. Summer of ‘72 Stan Smith won Wimbledon, George McGovern hesitated, the dockers struck & the government bent. I was back in south London on an education course, walking back to the Isle of Dogs to write poetry. It didn’t register that some of the wharves had closed. Soon to come, Surrey Docks to Surrey Quays in a generation; Isle of Dogs to Canary Wharf in another. I went home & bought roses from Jack Harkness up the road.

So what’s all this got to do with Letchworth Garden City? Well it’s this...there was a time in teaching (and I’m not making this up!) when you felt that your job involved social change; that education was, above all things, a source of liberation; a way of moving out from the prospect of working down the pit, on the assembly line, behind the shop counter, hedging & ditching; and, you the teacher, provided the armaments to move on out & move on up. Education & its prospects was part of the ‘New Jerusalemism’ (to use Corelli Barnett’s phrase) that permeated British social policy in the immediate post-war years. Being one of those post-war people I was going to do the changing & do it in the places that promised little. In some ways it was patronising & smacked of middle-class benevolence “flocking towards the smell of ‘progress’ like bluebottles to a dead cat.” And I’d finished up in Hertfordshire, home to New Towns (Stevenage, Hemel, Hatfield) & Garden Cities (Letchworth, Welwyn). In my frame of mind there was something ‘heroic’ in them fashioning lives away from slum, pollution, war devastation, over-crowding, resource poverty—starting again how we should have started had we thought.

In 1898 Ebenezer Howard wrote Tomorrow: a peaceful path to real reform & a year later founded the Town & Country Planning Association. In 1903 a plot was purchased outside Hitchin & in fast-as-reasonable time competitions for cheap housing run, architects appointed, zones of activity allocated, agricultural green belts protected, railway station built, excursions from London organized & vegetarian cycling clubs put in place. Industry was separated from housing, pubs frowned upon, manufactories for corsets, fire-engines & dustcarts attracted, traffic roundabouts emplaced. Land would be held in common & lease rents ploughed back for the public good. You can see the attraction. New century, new start. No war yet.

When I lived in Hitchin I often bussed over to Letchworth somehow expecting the stuff of history & progressive vision to seep upwards through the soles of my shoes & permeate me with utopian endeavour. I went back a week ago. Not to get the same but to kick off some dust from my soul.

Nothing had changed, so it seemed. Sure there were different shops, some new buildings; eateries reflected a different Britain & clothes a different convention. But...the model shop still with its ‘50s façade; the summer-bedded roundabouts; the high-street cottages backing-off behind privet; the villas in styles nodding towards Shaw, Webb & Voysey; the freshly-matted-and-glossed ‘20s & 30s social housing with neat hedges & hollyhocks. Always hollyhocks. Then the stolid library & town hall (1930s-built, sure that the ‘experiment’ now had its foundations & early maturity); Councillor Charles Francis Ball’s memorial garden (with the stone plinth of Sappho’s recently-nicked statue bizarrely in the background); the Methodist hall & its Polish luncheon club; the Broadway gardens once dedicated to Jack Kennedy but re-dedicated in 2003 in commemoration of its own centenary (presumably JFK didn’t measure up posthumously to his living promise); David’s Bookshop, who twenty years ago bought my book collection.

And the people. ‘A cut-price crowd’ Larkin might have thought (Betjeman wrote about Letchworth; Larkin wouldn’t have gone near it) & ‘urban yet simple’ seemed to fit. I began to notice what wasn’t there—no graffiti, no junk, no mess of rubbish, no drunks, no louts, no kids-on-bikes-on-pavements. No threat. Maybe it was the time of day but each person on the street seemed to be playing the role of person-in-a-garden-city; not much to do, no buzz, no edge. It has its tourist centre now; it has features. Nothing much happens. The words ‘bland’ & ‘smug’ came to mind but then again maybe the picture in Howard’s head had worked. It seemed to me to be a community that was getting on with itself; not as isolated on all sides as originally but sufficiently detached to feel different; maybe ‘dwelling where only salesmen and relations come’ (Larkin again) but none had that look of desperation and anywhere-but-here that I register in new towns of post-war vintage.

I walked away north past the old Spirella corset factory (corporate offices now) & across the wheatfields towards Hitchin. At the fag-end of a sad, spitting month the sky was cloudless. “Such a day it is when time piles up the hills like pumpkins, and the stream runs golden” wrote Laurie Lee sometime during a war. I walked past the fields that used to be Jack Harkness’s; all gone to corn now. Down on into Ickleford & sat under a tree in the churchyard thinking of Letchworth. Open-air Shakespeare in Howard Park this evening? Morris antics in Broadway Gardens? Fresh-pressed cider at the vegetarian stall served by a smocked Esperanto-spouter? Auras detected & primal dances at the Edward Carpenter commemorative barn?

I strolled on, stopped at my once-home & thence around the town where I lived the happiest & the darkest times of my life. As I walked I dwelt within the times & knew that I was done with them & doubted I’d come back. When I arrived in 1972 it was at the tail-end of being a small market-town grown slightly prosperous with the coming of the railway. Its shops were in the family & they still delivered to the door in their own vans; the book seller still published subscriber editions & teashops received their Indian & Ceylon in wood chests. Now Starbucks. I left for the station. Sorted.

Sunday, August 12, 2007

Kickin’, with Dahlias in the Tirol

The Austrians combine a flower parade with anticipation for next year’s European soccer championship.

The Football Wizard, winning float
at the Seefeld Flower Parade, 2007
Photo: Tourism Presse

Have you noticed that every cultural event or social occasion now seems to do double duty as an ad campaign? Twinning is the name of the game. So organizers of the 39th Seefeld Flower Parade in Austria’s beautiful Tirol chose to dedicate this year’s Blumencorso to next year’s UEFA (Union of European Football Associations) championship matches. The floats, with 120,000 dahlias, included “the Football Wizard,” what appears to be an English Bobby, and Austria’s delightful logo—a red and white snail. (You have to admire a culture that would represent itself as proudly slow.)

Trix and Flix
mascots for the UEFA games
representing co-host countries
Switzerland and Austria
Photo: Tourism Presse

Next year’s European “football” games will be co-hosted by Austria and Switzerland, so mascots for the event are hot-headed twins Trix and Flix. They looked radiant at the Alpine flower parade, done up in garnet-colored dahlias.

Most flower parades in the U.S. take place in the winter and spring and usually feature roses and springtime blossoms. In contrast, many European Bloemencorsos seem to be held in the summer and fall months and go heavy on the dahlias, with dazzling results.

Delightful as these floral sculptures in homage to soccer are, we still long for the days before twinning prevailed. Pretty soon, we expect to see Tyson’s Thanksgiving and the Ray-Ban Summer Solstice.

Friday, August 10, 2007

Zero-Gravity Gardening

With hundreds of thale cress seeds aboard the latest Endeavor spacecraft, astronauts will try growing a geeky garden over the next two months.

Clay Anderson gardens NASA-style
Photo: NASA via aftenposten

Don’t you know that space travelers get awfully tired of Tang!

Scientists, trying to put some fresh vegetables in orbit, have packed 1600 seeds of Arabidopsis thaliana (thale cress) aboard the Endeavor, which launched Wednesday, August 8. Over the next couple of months, the astronauts, with lots of guidance from the earthbound team of Norwegian botanists who supplied the seeds, will attempt to grow three generations of this flowering plant.

Arabidopsis thaliana
(thale cress on Earth)
Photo: NASA

One of the many purposes of the experiment is to determine the effects of antigravity (plus all that stale air, galactic turbulence, and artificial lighting) on growing plants. “This is vital knowledge for man’s trip to Mars,” a three year trip.  “The crew must be able to cultivate plants for eating while on the way to the red planet.” Vårskrinneblom (Thale cress in Norwegian) is “inedible” (which is saying quite a lot for in-flight food) but since Arabidopsis reproduces easily and its genetic structure is well known to scientists, its behavior on board Endeavor should help the international Dobbs House figure out which tastier plants could survive in a rocket plot. For much more on the experiment, check details here, via NASA.

There will be time lapse video taken as the thale cress sprouts and matures “to study circumnutation (the successive bowing or bending in different directions of the growing tip of the stems and roots).” With each generation, plants will be dehydrated, some seed saved for sprouting the next space crop, some set aside for planting back here on Earth. American astronaut Clay Anderson will be the lead gardener (though with a hairnet not a straw hat). Let’s hope the NASA outfitters thought to put galluses on his spacesuit.