Human Flower Project

Wednesday, October 31, 2007

‘Not for All the Tea in the USA!’

After 5,000 years of picking, processing, brewing, and tax-evading, the Human-Tea project extends across the world. Drink up this stimulating report by James Wandersee and Renee Clary.

Camellia sinensis (L.) Kuntze (a.k.a. Tea)
Photo: Shizhao, via wiki

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

People are, right now, enjoying tea all across the world. Tea, in fact, is second only to water as the globe’s most popular beverage! Although the way it is processed, the vessels used to brew and drink it, the substances added to enhance its flavor, and the rituals associated with its consumption all may vary, tea drinking is global. Even so, it can be traced back to a single country and a single species.

Tea drinking began in China more than 5,000 years ago. Many historians credit China’s second emperor, a scientist named Shen Nung, with the discovery of tea-brewing in 2737 BCE, using the dried leaves of the plant that today’s botanists call Camellia sinensis (L.) Kuntze. This evergreen bush or medium-sized tree ranges from 6 to 50 feet tall when mature.  A typical Tea* bush yields about 3,000 tea leaves a year. Although this may seem like a lot, it results in only 1 pound of processed tea. The highest quality tea is hand-plucked and only includes the tip bud and the two end-most leaves from each branch (“two flags and a spike”). Tea made from the first crop of tea leaves of the year is called “new tea.” It has the richest aroma and flavor, though the processing of tea also dramatically affects the final taste.

China’s Fujian Mountain Tea
Photo: Tea Dragon

Earth scientist Huang Shoubo (2007) has identified the environmental factors that account for the Tea plant’s yield and quality in high mountain areas of China. Shoubo concludes that many regional features are conducive to Tea growing here—“geology (topography, hydrology, soil), climate, and vegetation—but the climatological factors proved to be the most important.” Shoubo specifies the key ecological and climatic elements of China’s famous tea areas: “more amounts of clouds and fog, less percentage of sunshine, abundant rainfall and high relative humidity in the air, temperatures that rise and fall slowly, daily and annual temperature ranges that are smaller, more days that are suitable for tea growing and low wind speeds in the lee-sides and valleys of mountains. All of these factors are favorable for growth of Tea trees.”

Camellia sinensis (L.) Kuntze doesn’t sound like ancient Chinese. And it isn’t. The Tea plant was assigned this name in 1959 after several centuries of botanical debate, a decision based on the International Code of Nomenclature. The “L.” in the Tea plant’s scientific name tells us that it was originally classified by the famous Swedish taxonomist, Carolus Linnaeus (1707 – 1778). The word “Kuntze” that follows the “L.” indicates Linnaeus’ classification was revised by the German botanist-apothecary and world-traveler Otto Carl Ernst Kuntze (1843 - 1907).  Linnaeus named the Tea plant’s genus “Camellia” after the Jesuit missionary Georg Joseph Kamel (1661 – 1706), “the people’s botanist of the Philippines,” who established the first free pharmacy for poor people.

Camellia japonica (Tea relative)
Photo: Moosey’s Country Garden

All of the world’s tea (other than the so-called herbal teas) is made from the leaves of that one small-white-flowered species of Camellia—a genus of plants otherwise known for its beautiful flowers, not leaves!  Other Camellias are grown as ornamentals for their flowers.

Approximately 3,000 cultivars and hybrids have been selected by growers, many with double flowers. (A different species, Camellia japonica —often simply called Camellia by gardeners—is the most prominent floral species in cultivation, with over 2,000 named cultivated varieties in the colors of red, orange, pink, and white.)

“Not for all the tea in China!” is an expression many us have known since childhood.  First used in Australia in the 1890s, this exclamation refers to the obscene amount of money it would take to entice the speaker to do something he or she would never do.  The idiom demonstrates that China, being the birthplace of tea, maintains primacy of association with tea production. It also recalls that tea was initially a rich person’s drink in Europe. When the East India Tea Company first brought tea to Holland, it cost $100 per pound.  Similarly, in England, tea gardens—lavish outdoor events featuring fancy flowers, food, and tea, accompanied by fireworks and gambling—gave tea drinking its exotic cachet.  Tea and money were inextricably linked.

Admittedly, China does produce and export a lot of tea, but to the surprise of many India leads the world in tea output today. Interestingly, India and China also are the only double-digit consumers of the world’s annual tea production (India 23%; China 16%; USA 4%). America drinks more coffee than tea today, in part because John Hancock organized a boycott of Chinese tea that was sold to the colonies by the British East India Company. By 1773, that company was saddled with large debts and vast quantities of tea in its warehouses. The company had no prospect at all of selling it because smugglers, such as Hancock, were importing tea without paying the English their demanded import taxes.  This was the “taxation without representation” that bothered the colonists.

Boston Tea Party
(dunking 45 tons)
Image: Early America

The Boston Tea Party of December 17, 1773 was a protest by the Sons of Liberty (a secret patriot organization resisting new Crown taxes and laws) that resulted in 45 tons of tea not yet unloaded from British ships being dumped into Boston Harbor. Thereafter, colonial patriots were urged to drink “Balsamic hyperion” (raspberry-leaf tea) or coffee instead.  This social boycott of tea was not, however, long-lived. Tea-drinking resumed after the American Revolution. Indeed, USA’s China trade or tea trade began in 1784, when the new Empress of China, a merchant ship named for its destination, traveled to the Orient.  In the 1880s, the USA became the biggest importer of tea, because of faster clipper ships and the ability to pay its debts in gold.

Although many of us still use the expression, “Not for all the tea in China!,” did you know that the US also produces tea? The contiguous United States has its very own 127-acre, working Charleston Tea Plantation on Wadmalaw Island in South Carolina’s Lowcountry. In fact, some of the most beautiful days of the entire growing season will occur at the plantation during October, as the Tea plants begin to bloom. By the end of the month, there should be millions of white Tea blossoms in every corner of the plantation. Visitors are welcome year-round (Wednesday through Saturday: 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.; Sunday: Noon to 4 p.m.).  Tens of thousands have enjoyed the plantation’s bus ride through the “back-40” acres. The entire tour is free and ends at the Plantation Gift Shoppe. During the growing season, it is possible to experience the entire tea making process—from field to cup (or glass)—right before your own eyes.

Tea plantation, Wadmalaw, SC
Photo: Bigelow Tea

Being from the South, your authors prefer the Plantation’s American Classic Tea, a black tea packaged in tea bags and intended for making fresh quarts or gallons of iced tea that we drink year-round.  Why iced tea? “In 1904, Richard Blechynden, a tea vendor at the World’s Fair in St. Louis, weary of selling his cups of hot tea in the summer heat, dropped ice in the beverage in an attempt to boost sales. The result was the first iced tea, which has since become a hallmark of supper tables across the American South” (Bigelow Tea, 2007).

Tea growing in the continental USA has a checkered past. The US Government attempted it in South Carolina over a century ago on about 300 acres. Even though the plants grew well (from 1884 through 1888), production was not economically viable, so the operation was discontinued (Mitchell, 1907). From 1888 through 1915, Dr. Charles Shepard established and ran Pinehurst Tea Plantation and School near the federal government’s original South Carolina plot. There children obtained a free education, with a tea-based curriculum component, while helping grow and harvest award-winning teas.

In 1960, the Thomas J. Lipton Company (developer of the four-sided, Flo-Thru tea bag) bought the former Pinehurst Tea Plantation in Summerville, South Carolina.  Dr. Shepard’s plantation had been abandoned since 1915. The Thomas J. Lipton Company, worried about instability of the world’s tea supply, rescued the surviving tea plants and moved them to a research facility constructed on Wadmalaw Island, South Carolina.  Lipton later concluded, as the US government had almost 150 years before, that the unstable climate and high labor costs in South Carolina (8 times that in Asia) rendered American tea production economically unfeasible (SC Plantations, 2007).

Mack Fleming, horticulturalist at the Charleston Tea Plantation
Photo: USDA

In 1987, horticultural researcher Mack Fleming and third-generation expert tea-taster William (Bill) Hall purchased the island tea farm from their former employer, the Thomas J. Lipton Company. They renamed it the Charleston Tea Plantation because it stands just 22 miles from Charleston. The tea was sold by mail-order and Sam’s Club. By 2003, Fleming and Hall encountered financial difficulties and the plantation was closed to the public until 2006. The Charleston Tea Plantation, “America’s Only Tea Garden,” is currently owned and operated by Bigelow Tea—a 60-year-old, family-owned company founded by Ruth Campbell Bigelow—which purchased it for $1.3 million in 2003.  The company also sells internationally grown teas.

Since 1987, American Classic Tea has been the official tea of the White House. (Does your house have an “official” tea?)

If you would like to purchase some USA-grown tea, go to this website. If you would like to grow your own Tea plants and you live in planting zones 8 or 9 where the summers are hot and humid, see these recommendations.

Perhaps a new expression: “Not for all the tea in the USA!” will gain greater impact as time passes. In the year 2000, Francis Zee discovered a variety of Camellia sinensis, the Tea plant, that thrives in the rich volcanic soil and tropical climate of Hawaii.  A collective of Hawaiian Tea growers is expected to have 240 acres of Tea under cultivation by 2008.

* Note that we follow the practice of capitalizing the Tea plant species’ common name, and not capitalizing tea when referring the commodity produced from this plant’s leaves [Cf. E.F. Potter, On Capitalization of Vernacular Names of Species, 1984].

Monday, October 29, 2007

Jon Anderson: One Cold Flower

Thanks to friend and poet Patrick Collins for alerting us to the death of his former teacher, whose one line—the last in the poem below—has stayed with us for twenty-one years. We had forgotten the flower that leads to it.

Back in 1986 we were participating in a poetry reading at the Austin History Center and came upon the beautifully hand-printed broadside of a poem by Jon Anderson. Never heard of the fellow. But his poem had an enticing title so we read it, and the final line lodged like a piece of shrapnel.

Yesterday we learned that Anderson died October 20 in Arizona, age 67. That’s young, isn’t it?

“My prime motive for writing is self-confrontation,” he told an interviewer once. “My poetry isn’t for everyone. It’s for people like myself who want to contend with themselves.”

Thanks to Patrick Collins (a contender). Years ago, we quoted the shrapnel line to him and he reminded us of its author; Anderson had been his teacher at the University of Arizona. May Patrick and everybody else be consolable at last, if not today.

Dahlia after first frost
Ithaca, NY
Photo: Craig Cramer/Ellis Hollow

The Secret Of Poetry

When I was lonely, I thought of death.
When I thought of death I was lonely.

I suppose this error will continue.
I shall enter each gray morning

Delighted by frost, which is death,
& the trees that stand alone in mist.

When I met my wife I was lonely.
Our child in her body is lonely.

I suppose this error will go on & on.
Morning I kiss my wife’s cold lips,

Nights her body, dripping with mist.
This is the error that fascinates.

I suppose you are secretly lonely,
Thinking of death, thinking of love.

I’d like, please, to leave on your sill
Just one cold flower, whose beauty

Would leave you inconsolable all day.
The secret of poetry is cruelty.

-- Jon Anderson

Saturday, October 27, 2007

Missouri Psyches Out Volunteers

Hoping to double the size of its Adopt-a-Highway program, Missouri comes on floral.

Missouri’s sneaky new Adopt-a-Highway sign
Photo: via Greener Roadsides

The Show-Me State of Missouri needs renaming: the Sneaky State. But if you can trick the public into seeding wildflowers, that’s sure an improvement over most state government skullduggery. Well done!

All over the nation, departments of highway transportation are angling for volunteers to “Adopt-a-Highway” (code for “wear an orange vest and pick up trash along the road for half a day"). Texas started the program back in 1985 and Missouri was close behind, beginning its own road adoptions in ‘87. But in a brilliant move announced last week, Missouri now offers potential “adopters” a choice. Rather than bending over for Bud Lite cans and plastic ice bags, they can plant native wildflowers.

“Department Director Pete Rahn said he hopes the flower option will double the participation in the Adopt-A-Highway program, which now involves 3,772 groups that have adopted 5,281 miles of highway.” To entice new groups to adopt, Missouri also has unveiled a flashier brag-sign, with big coreopsis flowers. (Coreopsis and echinacea—purple coneflowers—will be two of the many varieties sown.)

Cosmos and other wildflowers along a Missouri highway
Photo: Heidi Kosch

Rahn said that volunteers have been saving the state highway department about $1 million per year. Four groups that were among the first Missouri adopters are still in the program: Viva Cuba Beautification Committee, Kiwanis Club of Mountain Grove, the City of North Kansas City and the W.E. Sears Youth Center in Poplar Bluff.

Somebody there in Jefferson City is smart, because who in their wildflower-loving mind would walk right by the shredded feed sacks, Big Gulp cups, newspapers, and old tire treads they’re sure to find as they’re seeding the roadsides with cosmos? No, Missouri is getting itself a new breed of double-duty volunteers, who’ll be picking up trash AND planting flowers.

We’re eager to hear how successful this new option is in attracting volunteers. (And that pounding sound you hear? That’s the folks at TXDoT stomping their cowboy hats for not thinking of this first.)

Thursday, October 25, 2007

Carlo Maggia: In Cahoots with Nature

An Italian artist wades in, collaborating with flowers, wind, and water.

Art work by Carlo Maria Maggia
All photos via www.carlomariamaggia.it

In some respects we’re at a great distance from Michelangelo, who could look for—and find—the Pieta in a block of marble. But Carlo Maria Maggia is doing his share of art-finding right now, too, only with a lighter touch and a more pagan sensibility. Sometimes he works with stone and chisels, but for the most part his tools are hands, a camera, and the old elements of earth, air, water, and the blazing Italian sun—fire.

“I started to ‘produce’ art at 8 years old but only after 32 years I decided to do my first public exhibition,” Carlo writes. Many of his pieces retain, we think, that wonderful piddlingness of childhood—the delight in arranging sticks just so or making a boat out of leaves, pods, and blossoms and then floating it merrily down the stream. Anyone lucky enough to have spent lots of time out of doors as a child remembers sandcastles, mudpies decorated with dandelions, or mayonnaise jars filled with pebbles and thornapples. Maybe Carlo Maria Maggia’s work is such juvenilia that’s grown up—into an awareness of transience and decay (thing kids don’t dwell on).

We especially like his most “collaborative” efforts—his partners being the elements. In these pieces it’s not clear where Nature ends and human handiwork begins. Maggia calls himself “a conceptual artist,” and we sense that co-creation is his primary idea. Maybe an agave actually would look better with star-shaped conchos running up each leaf. Perhaps a chorus line of marigolds could wash in with the tide.

Maggia was born in Torino (Turin) in 1964. He writes, “I moved to near Monte Carlo where, deep in nature, I can create more easily my operas.” Operas? Well, yes, this red fabric unfurling on a precipice seems to deserve that name. In June of this year, his piece “Africa Today” was included in the prestigious Venice Bienale. And he has an upcoming show in Cherasco (a town in the Cuneo region of Italy’s Piedmont). That show runs November 1-25 at Galleria Evvivanoe, and we think the name of the exhibit is “Truffle of Gold” but it may be “Gold Watermelon.” Drat, our Italian is molto pietoso. And using babelfish didn’t help; we came up with lingua-clods like this from the resume Carlo so graciously supplied:

“2007 Selected for Cow Parade to Milan Sacred Finalist “At the Same Time.”

Our apologies. We have no idea what that means, though it sounds like it must be good. We are, however, very taken with these human-floral collaborations, sailing down from the sky, riding lily pads, or decorating a bathtub in the woods. Make sure to spend some time investigating his beautiful site.

“I am a conceptual artist, I use nature and particularly flowers to communicate my message,” Carlo writes. “In spite of my conceptualness, my art has to follow aesthetic rules, has to be beautiful, has to be understood at first sight, so flowers help me indeed in pursuing this purposes.” We’re following you, Carlo.

Monday, October 22, 2007

Kolkata’s Durga:  From Home to the Himalaya

Sandy Ao brings a chronicle of the Durga Puja, honoring Hinduism’s Great Goddess and overflowing with flowers in the great city of West Bengal.

A clay idol representing Hindu Goddess Durga
floats in the Hooghly River, Kolkata, India
Photo: Sandy Ao

“So many pandals, so little time!” (“So many” as in 20,000 of these temporary shrines, and that’s in Kolkata alone!)

Headlines of India’s newspapers convey the frenetic and happy spirit of Durga Puja—the long, lush fall festival now winding down. ”Now sinking” is more accurate, since after a week of festivity, the clay statues of the Hindu goddess Durga are being taken from their dry-land pedestals down to the closest river’s edge and ritually submerged.

The pandals are ephemeral shrines—temporary structures put together to shelter Durga’s statues, along with all the flowers, food and other offerings given in her honor. During this season, the people of Bengal and much of the rest of India drop everything to visit these splendid altars. The Durga custom is especially strong in Kolkata, making us at the Human Flower Project especially fortunate. Our friend and correspondent Sandy Ao has been trekking all over the city to photograph Durga Puja. This year, rather than visiting the larger community-built pandals and following their parades to the Hooghly River, Sandy sought out an older observance, the traditional family Durga Puja, conducted in private homes.

A pandal honoring Durga
is attended by a pandit (priest)
part of household worship ceremonies known as “puja”
in Kolkata (Calcutta), India
Photo: Sandy Ao

“It’s so different from the Durga Puja that I had been attending my whole life,” she writes.

Worship of the great female goddess Durga may be as old as Hinduism itself, but the celebration to venerate her intensified in Bengal during the Mughal period, the 16th Century. At that time, the wealthy families of the region began to elaborate the old religious rituals with more complex and ostentatious observances. Leading families (in Eastern India’s version of potlatch) put on competitively exorbitant, private displays.

And of course, that requires flowers, lots of them.  Sandy tells us that the pink lotus is one flower especially beloved by Durga. But with the puja season extending over several days, each one with its own demands, many other plants and blossoms join the celebration. Among them are marigolds, hibiscus, spicy “kusum” and medicinal “horitoki flowers” (Terminalia chebula Retz.) .

“For the daily puja, simple garlands are used,” Sandy explains, but for Durga puja, “the garlands have to be made with 108 flowers.” This is a sacred number in Hinduism, she says: “Almost all the God and Goddess have 108 names, and it also refers to the reincarnation of lives—108 times.”

Sandy spent most of this holiday visiting the home pujas of the Rashmoni family, who own several sumptuous properties in and around Kolkata. One of them—13 B Rani Rashmoni Street—is occupied by descendants of the fourth daughter of 19th century civic leader Rani Rashmoni (more about her in a later post).

Offerings are made to the fire god Agni, a purification, before approaching Durga’s statue in ceremonies at 13 B Rani Rashmoni Street
Photo: Sandy Ao

Here the durga statue is a doll-like figure dressed in doily white. “The man sitting before the pandal is a pandit (Hindu priest). He is praying for anyone who comes to visit the Goddess Durga,” Sandy explains. She also photographed fire ceremonies. “On the side of the puja hall, there is a room below the floor, the room for offerings to Agni (the fire God).  In Hindu religion, praying to Agni is always done first before the other puja begins. Bael wood is used for this ritual. You can see marigold flowers in the pit.”

With ritual foods and flowers, prayers and offerings changing daily (check this listing for some basics), it takes a religious specialist to keep everything in order. One wonders about the social roots of such an elaborate rite. A cynic might ask, “Was it all made this complicated so that only the rich people could worship rightly?”

A pandit (Hindu priest) sits before the pandal to Durga, greeting devotees
in home ceremonies of Durga puja at 13 B Rani Rashmoni Street, Kolkata
Photo: Sandy Ao

Over the last hundred years, the Durga puja celebration has been popularized and, it appears, somewhat secularized too. Now community groups pool resources to build beautiful pandals of their own. Schools and colleges, organizations and even businesses all take part. And just as the old zamindar (property-holding) families of Bengal once used the Durga puja to outdo one another, these popularizers also seem to be melding the god-pleasing rituals and public relations.

For example, we read about the newly established Indian Association of Retired Persons building a pandal, apparently, to lobby for the over-50 crowd. Meanwhile, at a Kolkata college, the pandal manages to celebrate both Durga and the Indian cricket team’s recent victory over Australia.

There’s even an edible pandal.

Sandy Ao’s insight and generosity – as well as her wonderful photographs—help us to quit grappling so determinedly against what can feel like impossible contradictions. She writes:

“The whole concept of Durga is actually the wish for good rainfall during this monsoon season on this side of the Ganges. While immersing the idols, they will bid farewell to Durga, reminding her ‘not to forget to come next year!’

Devotees bring Durga’s idol to the Hooghly River, the finale of Durga puja, 2007
Photo: Sandy Ao

“She is supposed to go back to her residing place, Kailash (a mountain in the Himalaya) where Lord Shiva, her husband, resides most of the time. The waters of rivers Ganga and Jamuna and Brahmaputra all flow from the Himalaya snows. During monsoons the water rushes down from the hills, enriching the State of Bengal and the country Bangladesh where rice- paddy is cultivated. They say Durga has come down to earth through the rain, by boat. That could be a nice way to pacify us, not to lose heart when we face floods during the rainy season.

“After the monsoon, we will have fine weather for the harvest of the paddies, and the water will be evaporated back to the atmosphere, to the hills and the mountains. When they say ‘do not forget to come and visit us next year...’ they ask that the rain come on time so we will not face drought.” (Here in Texas, we really understand that, Sandy!)

“Actually Hinduism is not a religion,” she writes, “It’s a deep philosophy. Otherwise we humans find it very hard to face hardship in life—if we do not have some good discourse on Nature around us.”

With 108 thanks to you, Sandy Ao!

Sunday, October 21, 2007

Georgia’s News Bouquet:  3rd Week of Oct.

Georgia Silvera Seamans, of local ecology, tidies up the news garden and brings back floral stories from Afghanistan, New York, and Kenya. Thank you, Georgia! 

Government agents destroyed an opium poppy crop in
Ningarhar, Afghanistan, in April, 2007. Some recommend
that the crop be harvested and used to supply needed
pain medications for people with chronic diseases.
Photo: Ahmad Masood, for Reuters

By Georgia Silvera Seamans

New York Times reporter, Donald G. McNeil, Jr., wrote about the use of the Afghan poppy as a pain reliever for the world’s poor. Senlis Council, a drug-policy think tank with based in London, Brussels, and Kabul, is advocating for “protected status” for Afghanistan’s poppy crops as opposed to the current U.S., British, and local Afghan governors’ policy of eradication.

The feverfew and the common bachelor button have also made the headlines, this time on ABCNews.com, for their curative properties.  The flowers contain parthenolide, a derivative of which is believed to be effective in the treatment of leukemia.  As of the reporting on October 9, phase one trials (to be conducted in Britain and, if successful, then the U.S.) have not yet begun.

In a less serious vein, a bride sued her florist over the “egregious” substitution of pastel green and pink hydrangeas for her contracted colors - dark green and russet.  Anemona (note that Anemone is a genus of species in the buttercup family) Hartocollis of the New York Times reported that the bride felt the pastels clashed with the décor of luxury restaurant Cipriani where the wedding was held.  The bride is seeking $400,000 in damages.  She paid $27,435.14.

Though working conditions in Kenya’s flowers farms have attacted international criticism and some major outlets in the U.K.have threatened to cut their consumption of African blooms, Kenyan growers have expanded their sales. Catherine Riungu writes for the East African that Kenya’s flower industry reports “an 8 per cent leap in market share for the period up to September.”

Finally, the Arizona Republic carried a Newsday story about an upstate New York resident who gardens with plastic flowers.  Perhaps gardening is not the most appropriate term for this activity.

Thursday, October 18, 2007

American Lotus: Taking Sides on a Michigan Symbol

In Southeastern Michigan, landowners and conservationists spar over eradication of a plant on the state’s threatened species list. And not just any plant—but a symbol.

Dr. Bruce Manney with lotus husks near Plum Creek, Michigan
Photo: Charles Slat, for Monroe Co. News

Why is this man smiling? Because he’s found seed pods of the American Lotus, a species that’s been on Michigan’s list of “threatened” plants for years. The plant is now making quite a comeback, to the delight of most Michigan naturalists and the chagrin of some shoreline landowners.

Dr. Bruce Manney works with the U.S. Geological Survey’s Great Lakes Science Center in Ann Arbor. A few months back, at the height of lotus blooming season, he toured the Monroe County Lotus Garden Club through several watery stretches of Southeastern Michigan and delivered boatloads of good news: not only is the American Lotus (Nelumbo lutea Willd) growing well, but “whitefish have been found spawning again in the lower half of the Detroit River for the first time in 90 years.” According to Dr. Manney, “The Detroit River has got to be a lot cleaner than it’s ever been in a long time for those whitefish eggs to survive on the bottom of the river from November to March.” He added that some wildlife researchers had even seen baby sturgeon in the river, too, and mayflies, which the sturgeon eat. 

American lotus spread through Eagle Island Marsh, near the Automotive Components Plant outside Detroit
Photo: River Raisin Area of Concern

The Lotus Garden Club began its annual tours in 1992, after some of the future-members spotted the gorgeous water plants from the air growing near power stations on Lake Erie. They gained permission to seed more lotuses in the area. What it is about lotuses and factories? We found that two years ago the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service partnered with Automotive Components Holdings, LLC, to turn 240 acres behind the company’s plant into a coastal wetlands, now called Eagle Island Marsh. The American Lotus appears to have taken off there as well.

Meanwhile, closer to Detroit, folks aren’t so happy with the lotus’s roaring comeback. Tina Lam of the Detroit Free Press interviewed residents of Hickory Island who want the plant cleared from Gibraltar Bay. They say that a once-small patch of lotus has been egged on by conservationists who’ve seeded the edges of the natural growth—so that now a floating lotus garden extends across 10 acres, choking the waterway and making it impassable for their boats. Since Amercian lotus is on the state’s list of threatened species, removing it can bring a fine of up to $500; but if indeed these lotuses were sown, they wouldn’t qualify for protection.

The very same plant, in fact, is considered a ”noxious weed” in Connecticut. And we came across this interesting message from Chuck Surprenant, now retired from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Michiganers leery of the lotus have cause for concern, he writes. “Experience here in southern Illinois on Crab Orchard Lake (7,000 acres) has shown the plant to be mysterious in its ability to dominate one portion of the lake for years, then inexplicably decline and appear in another part of the lake. For 20 years, American Lotus dominated Grassy Bay, in the south central part of the lake; then it mysteriously died off. Currently, the plant is spreading rapidly in the upper location of the lake, growing from a small 1-acre patch to at least 1,000 acres in just a few years.” That sounds less like “threatened,” more like “threatening.”

American Lotus
(Nelumbo lutea Willd)
Photo: Susan R. Crispin

We find the push and pull, the “noxious” v. “threatened” debate over the American lotus fascinating. It’s a showy example of how even the most rigorous science can sometimes be swayed by the powerfully symbolic force of flowers (a sway-ableness we consider admirable and wise, by the way). For in Michigan, Nelumbo lutea Willd is not just another plant whose numbers decline and increase. The native lotus is, as Tina Lam writes, “the state’s official symbol of clean water.” The president of Monroe County’s Lotus Garden Club, Jeanne Micka, stressed, “They’re like the canary in the cave. If you see a lot of them, it means your water quality is pretty good....If they disappear, you’d better look out.”

Micka added (in keeping with the “mystery” Chuck Surprenant described) that lotus seeds can remain viable for as much as a century. Oh, Jeanne, symbols tend to be “viable” a whole lot longer even than that.

Tuesday, October 16, 2007

Time for Bulbs & Identities

The students have come back to Cambridge with the task of identity-creation ahead. John Levett (who created his awhile back) opens his bulb order—too many—and searches for an open bench—too few.

St. Botolph’s Churchyard, Cambridge, England
All Photos: John Levett

By John Levett

One April, twenty-three years ago I was avoiding someone’s fiftieth birthday party. I had great affection (do I hear “But not enough!” from the cheap seats?) for the birthdayee, for her vivacity, her cultural confidence, her extravagant generosity, her food, wine, garden, car (not the crap record collection) but just couldn’t get along with her friends (all air-kissing & “Dahhhhhhling” & very Noel Coward & Diana Mitford-ish). So I drove up to Hull. I could have made an excuse, feigned an illness (“Don’t you ever do that. Ever make up excuses. Ever.” Gran once said. “God pays debts without money” plus “Many a true word spoken in jest” plus...and so it went on...), pleaded something or other, invented a previous something or other (God & debts got into that one too). But I drove to Hull. (“It all depends if I’m back from Hull in time.” “The traffic out of Hull on Saturday afternoon is wicked.” “When the fog comes off the Humber they have to close the bridge and the only way out is north through Leeds and that’s at least another hour’s drive, maybe two.” All sounded better than “I can’t come I’ve got piles” and didn’t amount to instant immolation by the debt-collector in the sky.) So I drove.

St. Edward’s churchyard (now benchless), in Cambridge

To Hull. For me, there was something to Hull that made it not Leeds or Sheffield or Bristol. Go back another twenty years. 1964 and a more decent starting date to the ‘60s than given by chronology & cultural history. On the first Monday of October, I took a meandering tour through middle England in some mate’s car to the banks of the Humber (“...And the widening river’s slow presence...”). Hull was my first university (of five during that decade) and I lasted three days. Got there on Monday night, registered on Tuesday, went back home Wednesday. (Following Monday I turned up at the London School of Economics and asked could I stay. They said “Yes” and I stayed ’til Christmas. The point of this parenthetical aside being that my abiding memory of LSE was opening the Yearbook, coming across a list of previous students recently deceased & stopping short at JFK’s name.)

Where was I? In Hull in ‘64 and it’s now a Tuesday afternoon in October and we have an hour’s induction by the librarian (“Wow! Fab! Groovy!” as we always allegedly said throughout the decade). If I’d had my wits around me and paid attention to the programme I’d have stayed. The librarian didn’t introduce himself but looked out from the platform at we spotty mass & said: “I feel like Hitler or John Lennon.” I should have been alerted by that but I was already planning an escape route. The librarian was Philip Larkin. I’d bought The Whitsun Weddings that year and never knew this speccy bloke was the library bloke in the place I was headed. I could’ve stayed and sat at his feet!

In the twenty years after that I’d never been near the place. Regretted never having read in Larkin’s library; kept a fond memory; thought I might one day catch a train for the day...“Swerving east, from rich industrial shadows and traffic all night north.” But never went back. Then in that twentieth year it was the place to go. In order to avoid. If you’ve followed so far.

Then I got diverted. I remember driving up the A1 (slow followed by slower in those days) as far as Newark and then took off through Lincoln and had a thought of driving up through the Wolds and over the Humber Bridge that I’d never seen. I got to Nettleton and saw a sign: Potterton & Martin. It rang a bell which tolled ‘Alpine Nursery.’ I turned left. It wasn’t a large affair but it had quality. And those stone troughs beloved of alpine gardeners and which last after you’re dead and take the plants on to next generations. I bought two troughs, plants to fit and enough to overflow onto a scree which I now had plans of creating. I’d already grown a habit of trailing down to Ingwersen’s in Sussex each Spring. Now I had P & M’s for the early Summer. And that’s how it turned out for the next few years before life changed along with habits.

I was reminded of this by a package last week. The annual bulb supply. One of those things I do in Winter—go through the new bulb catalogue, order more bulbs than garden space and allow myself to be surprised in October (“That many? Am I mad?”). Martin died a few years ago but the nursery remains as Potterton’s and still at Nettleton. Until a couple of years ago, when I gave up the car as an unnecessary expense, I drove up each year, carried on over the Humber and stopped for a coffee and a sarnie at the University. Always took a Larkin with me, sat just inside the library and read a few lines. On a fine day I’d drive out of Hull (“...beyond its mortgaged half-built edges...”) towards Spurn Head where “silence stands like heat.” I’d sit on a demolished pill-box and read ‘Here,’ ‘Afternoons’ and ‘Wild Oats’ then drive the long miles back in gathering dusk.

I did that on friend’s birthday. Then came home to the phone ringing. “Hi John. It’s Sarah. Mum’s been trying you all day. When you coming? Bring a bottle.” A few more lines of emotional blackmail later I went. Hated the friends but got blotto.

Autumn’s not only the bulb package. It’s the student-back-in-town time too. Old hands come back and the new ones can’t believe they’ve made it here. And there’s only a week (it might seem) to create an identity; the Emma Thompson-Stephen Fry-Hugh Laurie moment. Stand up, stand out, turn a head, turn heads (even better), find a niche, avoid a clich(é), stay up, stay awake, find a partner, find a foil, be myself, create myself (of course!).

St. Edward’s, Cambridge, England

When I was a student (a state I retained until age twenty-seven; one of my finest feats) the collective student distinguishing feature was a college scarf; without it a bloke looked like his dad and a girl looked like her mum. Until Bowie, everyone in Britain grew up to look like their parents. Now we all look like students. Hence the essential re-definition in the first week of October. In this town, avoiding the obvious and finding the item that stamps difference is good spectacle. Too much difference shouts ‘obvious’; too little makes you look like you’re back in the school you’ve just come from. The best I’ve seen this year (every year) comes from inside; think Ally Sheedy and Judd Nelson in The Breakfast Club. So simple.

One problem in Cambridge is finding a place to sit and watch the dance. We’re over-populated. It’s not just the universities (there are two); it’s the foreign-language schools, the specialist colleges, the sixth-form colleges, the out-of-season tourists, the film crews, the construction crews. And the residents. And the drunks. Cambridge, like...errr...everywhere, has a drink problem and that’s not including the masters of colleges. The town drunks, bless ‘em, get moved on from one neighbourhood to another, bench to bench; hence, lack of benches for people-watching.

St. Edward’s, Cambridge, England

Last week, a fine week of Indian Summer, feeling stressed from stressing myself, I looked for some old places where I used to quiet-down in town. Next door to Corpus Christi College is St. Botolph’s Church. There’s a narrow lane by its side and a gate into the small, overgrown burial ground. I used to come here when I first arrived in Cambridge in the mid-90s; catching up on a previous decade of non-reading, non-writing, non-reflection. It was a discovered spot; a place you walk past and beyond for an age and then it allows you to discover it. Your own place where you resent company. No chance of that now. Locked. I walked up Trumpington Street to St. Edward’s, squashed between the Arts Theatre and David’s Bookshop, more passed-by than passed-into. I used to bring a Chelsea bun from Fitzbillies here and read Blake. Not any more. Standing room only; the bench in the churchyard gone the way of the drunks it seems.

St. Botolph’s Churchyard, Cambridge, England

And spaces gone. Cambridge isn’t Buenos Aires or Johannesburg and it’s free of favelas but I still notice the closing in of space, the growing out of urban extensions, the accumulation of generic apartment blocks on what used to be someone’s back garden or a community’s vegetable plots, the easy sale of public space with rare payback to public sensibilities or planning gain. I was recently re-reading Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities and I know that many people now find it quaint and soooo of its time and so forth, but what it has above its words is its humanity. Lose the spaces and lose the human-ness. People come to this place because of what it was, what it represents, what it did and who did it here. I can still walk past places and feel a quickening of the pulse because I know who walked this lane, slept in that room, betrayed her in that park, sat under that apple tree (allegedly). It’s in the spaces between where I’d still like to reflect on these things. Then go home and let someone else sit down. With Blake. (Dan Brown? The next wagon leaves at noon!)

To Hull.

Sunday, October 14, 2007

On a Pillar, on a Flower Mountain

In Zaragoza, Spain, which marks Columbus Day (October 12) by honoring the Virgin of Pilar, citizen pilgrims build a floral pyramid.

Workers arrange
floral offerings to
the Virgin of Pilar,
Zaragoza, Spain
Photo: Luis Correas, for Reuters

In the Baptist Church of the U.S.A., they recommend a lot of hoisting: “Lift Me Up!"..."Lift up His Name!” For heights, though, the American Baptists could learn many meters-worth from the Roman Catholics of Spain. Anybody who’s stood in Madrid’s Plaza Mayor or walked uphill to the Cathedral in Toledo knows what we mean, as do those who’ve had the blessed fortune to participate in Zaragoza’s autumn celebration of the Virgin del Pilar.

According to Catholic teaching, the Virgin Mary appeared to St. James the Apostle as he preached and prayed by the banks of the Ebro. “She appeared upon a pillar”—a holy object, which is kept inside Zaragoza’s present-day basilica. Each October, the wooden statue and its column of jasper come into the city center, to stand at the top of a tall scaffolding. Then, local citizens, dressed in traditional costumes of Old Spain, parade through the streets bringing flowers to cover the huge armature, so that it turns into a brilliant floral throne. Now that’s being “lifted up”!

Children dressed in Spanish folk costume dance before the floral ofrenda
dedicated to Nuestra Señora Del Pilar, Zaragoza, Spain
Photo: Ususarios

The sacred column itself stands atop a large pedestal of all white flowers (shaped sort of like a fez); it is emblazoned with red blooms formed into the symbol known across Spain as the Cross of St. James. (Non-Spaniards may recognize this symbol from Velazquez’s famous painting Las Meninas. Velazquez was admitted to the Order of St. James by Philip IV and wears the emblem proudly on his chest.)

Though the birthplace and ethnicity of Christopher Columbus remain in question, his commission from Spanish royals Ferdinand and Isabella is certain. Therefore, Columbus Day, when he set foot in the New World and “claimed it” for the Spanish Empire, has been a day of Hispanic pride since the 15th century. In Spain itself, October 12 is Dia de la Raza (Hispanic Day), celebrated with traditional songs and costumes. As for the Virgin del Pilar, according to wiki, ”Every Latin-American nation has donated national vestments for the fifteenth century statue of the Virgin, which is housed in the chapel.”

Spanish ambition and aesthetics both seem contingent upon SCALE. Cristobal Colon, whoever he was, crossed a whole ocean. And Nuestra Señora Del Pilar, only 39 cm. high, stands on top of a floral mountain.

Friday, October 12, 2007

Bringing City Trees to Fruition

Urban forester Georgia Silvera Seamans proposes a novel idea—helping city trees flower, fruit, reseed, and grow, rather than programmatically killing them off. For more of such enlightened ideas, visit Georgia’s fine local ecology.

SW 12th Avenue Green Street, Portland, OR
All Photos: Georgia Silvera Seamans

By Georgia Silvera Seamans

“What are flowers for?” asks Harold William Pickett. Answering himself, he writes, “All the organization of a flower seems to be directed towards the transfer of pollen from stamen to pistil, a prelude to the formation of seed.”

Unlike the forest, the network of street trees does not rely on the flowering process to reproduce.  Instead, people – arborists, urban foresters, residents – purchase trees from nurseries, often located in less urban areas, and plant them in the grassy spaces between curbs and sidewalks or even within concrete sidewalks.  If trees must be removed because of declining health, hazard or damage through acts of vandalism or unaware drivers, they are simply replanted with new nursery stock.

Crataegus (Hawthorne) flower, Blake Street, Berkeley, CA

Even so, flowering and fruiting do occur.  I remember streets and neighborhoods by the trees they host.  I recall the exuberant flowering of Tilias along Melnea Cass Boulevard and the showy flowering of Pyrus calleryana on Garrison Street in the South End, both in Boston, the apricot-colored fruit of Ginkgo biloba in Boston’s Public Garden, the swinging fruits of Liquidambar styraciflua at the North Berkeley train station and Platanus on Telegraph Avenue in Oakland.

Liquidambar styraciflua (sweetgum) fruit, Carleton Street, Berkeley, CA

Yet, city trees rarely come fully to fruition.  On the street, unfavorable conditions like soil compaction, poor soil quality, and inconsistent moisture levels hinder the development of seeds, not to mention the stretches of impervious concrete or metal grates covering the tree wells.  Along tree boulevards (or even the grassy areas between the curb and the sidewalk), cultural practices like mowing remove seedlings, too.

The announcement of tree canopy goals by some cities—100,000 trees in Boston by 2020, 1 million trees in New York City by 2017— are more than commendable in a time of climate crisis, but, surprisingly, none of these campaigns – to my knowledge – mentions strategies to enable reproduction of street trees.  To my thinking, a sustainable urban canopy should include in situ reproduction, not just replacement of trees with more nursery stock.  Of course, in situ reproduction would be difficult to achieve in many of the settings where street trees are now planted.  However, changing how we plant and maintain street trees – and especially how we design city sidewalks—could provide more favorable conditions for in situ reproduction.

Shotwell Street Greenway (permeable landscape project), San Francisco, CA

Three American cities – Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco – have developed streetscapes which “mimic the forest floor” according to articles in Terrain and Landscape Architecture Magazine; at least Seattle’s program, known as SEA (street edge alternative), was designed with that intention.  Portland hosts several “green streets,” and a San Francisco nonprofit, Plant*SF, has transformed the sidewalks of a standard city block into a permeable landscape.  Each of the projects was developed to capture and cleanse stormwater runoff before it enters the municipal storm system and, eventually, natural water bodies. And each project has both reduced impervious sidewalk surfaces, thus increasing the growing area, and incorporated low to mid-layer vegetation to maintain soil health.  This change in streetscape design – from individual tree wells to more continuous planting areas – is significant.  But it is too early to know if such new practices of city landscape maintenance will make way for other forest floor processes: if seeds will be allowed to sprout and compete for light, water, and height!