Human Flower Project

Friday, November 30, 2007

Flower Syrup - A Lot to Lick

The East Austin arts tour suddenly took a turn for the sticky.

Bill Bishop and Michael May sample flower syrups made
by Rosie Rittenberry (right) and her mother in Austin, TX
Photo: Julie Ardery

Nudes and batiks and teapots and collages… the East Austin Studio Tour has evolved into something marvelously monstrous. The dozen artists who once worked on the poor side of the city, taking advantage of low rents for their foundries and kilns, have been joined by boatloads of other creative folks. There were over a hundred stops on this year’s open tour. The fold-up map has become a $5 booklet, and many a block north of Lady Bird Lake and East of Interstate 35 was crawling with guests the warm and sunny weekend prior to Thanksgiving.

Just as our spirits flagged, we trotted around behind an old house where a weird passionvine—or so we were told—was laden with crimson seed pods, bright as bobcat hearts. There we found a glamorous young woman ladling jellylike spoonfuls into little plastic cups—the size you gobble pills from. Purple, amber, green—these concoctions were all flower syrups. Rosie Rittenberry and her mother make and sell them, and what a refreshment they were. Our touring companions sampled several, as did we (the passionfruit was scrumptious), but what do you do with the stuff? Rosie provided us with a page of recipes, including “Citrus Flower Chutney,” a cake frosting, and a curry dish.

This one sounds especially good, though we haven’t tried it—yet:

Rosie Rittenberry dolloped out a taste of orange flower syrup
Photo: Julie Ardery

Rose-hips Tea Sandwich

Chicken salad
with rose hips and walnuts

1 1/2 c. cooked chicken
1/2 c. celery
1/4 c. rose-hip syrup
1T. capers
1t grated ginger
1/3 c. walnuts
salt and pepper
mayonnaise if desired (we desire)

Spread on good bread with crust removed
(keeping that crust on if you use this bread).
Cut bread into quarters and then top with parsley

Suddenly, the tea party got jazzy!

From our bit of hunting, it seems that flower syrups are most often used to doll up drinks, dress fruit salads, and, of course, top pancakes. Favorite flavors, in addition to those Rosie had to sell, are elderberry syrup, dandelion, hibiscus and lavender (the latter too much like cough medicine for us).

Jennifer Wickes posted this excellent article on the subject several years back. It includes basic directions for making syrups from flowers as well as lists of common edible flowers and (heads UP!) poisonous ones, too. (Having just seen Into the Wild, we’re more than usually wary.)

Many thanks to Rosie for the samples—and the delicious respite from art.

Wednesday, November 28, 2007

Harvard’s Flowers for All Seasons

There’s not much in bloom across New England now, save at Harvard’s natural history museum. James Wandersee and Renee Clary bring us in from the cold to an array of plants, shimmering since the 19th century.

Glass iris, Harvard Museum of Natural History
Photo: cf0171

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

First unblocked and explored in May, 1986, Lechuguilla Cave is situated in Carlsbad Caverns National Park, about 5 miles from the Carlsbad caves. Its precise location and entry point are closely guarded secrets to protect this warm, dry cave’s fragile ecosystem and its unique gypsum crystal formations, which could so easily be damaged by human contact and exposure. The majority of us will only be able to experience this natural geological wonder vicariously—through photographs taken by the select few who have been granted access to it.

A long way from New Mexico, Massachusetts has a human-made attraction, also fragile, one that became famous about a century before Lechuguilla Cave’s discovery. It mimics natural botanical wonders. Known as the Harvard Glass Flowers, it is a collection of fragile glass objects that entices plant lovers, and, in contrast with the Carlsbad crystals, public viewing is welcome. Averaging 120,000 visitors per year, The Ware Collection of Blaschka Glass Models of Plants resides within the Harvard Museum of Natural History, 26 Oxford Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts. The museum is open daily from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., 361 days of each year.

A visitor views The Ware Collection of Blaschka Glass Models of Plants
Photo: BikeNerd

This Boston-area attraction is little advertised, a bit hard to find, and somewhat difficult to reach without considerable walking, yet this is exactly what draws plant aficionados to the priceless collection—its nature as a “hidden treasure,” plus its distinct fragility.

Why are the “Glass Flowers” located in Cambridge, MA and not, say, at the Natural History Museum of Berlin? Answer: Because of the value that one Harvard scientist placed upon explaining science to the public.  The influential, albeit sometimes incorrect, European glaciologist and zoologist Louis Agassiz, had been recruited by Harvard University to bolster its sciences in the mid-1800s, at a time when well-to-do Victorians on both sides of the Atlantic were enamored of the new science of natural history. Agassiz saw comprehensive and accurate teaching collections as core elements of a world-class scientific research center.  At that time, teaching and research were seen as mutually sustaining enterprises—a university could not excel at one without the other.

Leopold and Rudolph Blaschka, glass artisans of Dresden, Germany
Photo: Rakow Research Library of The Corning Museum of Glass

George Lincoln Goodale, the first director of the Botanical Museum of Harvard, commissioned two German glass model makers, Leopold and Rudolph Blaschka. From 1886 to 1936, these Dresden artisans created realistic-looking plant structures--4,400 glass models, including amazingly accurate flowers and fruits, representing 164 plant families, totaling 847 species and plant varieties. Because of their anatomical precision--which has rendered them extremely delicate--the Harvard Glass Flowers remain a unique public teaching tool, even in the 21st century. Why? There is no place on Earth where anyone can go to see all of these plants in bloom simultaneously, much less examine them in three dimensions!

Prunus armeniaca, life-sized branch of an apricot in fruit
by Rudolf Blaschka, from colored glasses he made himself
Photo: Kris Snibbe, for Harvard University Gazette

In addition to encouraging you to see the Harvard Glass Flowers with your own eyes, we would also like to underscore the importance of service as patrons for a science museum’s programs.  Professor Goodale’s former student Mary Lee Ware and her mother, Elizabeth Ware, heir to a maritime fortune, agreed to underwrite the 1886 consignment from the Blaschkas. Such accessions and the Ware patronage continued across a time span of 50 years, including museum case upon museum case of leaf, stem, bud, blossom, and fruit--all life-sized. Accompanying them were examples of the sections and cross-sections that a botany student might make of stamen, pistil, and ovary (or fruit)--magnified as if by the laboratory’s own microscope.

Even though well-curated and recently restored, the Harvard Glass Flowers, like real flowers, will not last forever. They are relatively evanescent and ephemeral. Objects in the collection continue to break and to change color. Pennsylvania State University glass expert Carlo Pantano notes that even after it has been shaped and cooled, this glass is still subject to chemical changes through weathering and corrosion. Plus, the glass available when the flowers were created was not of the highest quality and purity. Unbalanced internal forces can cause the glass to fracture and split. Colors may shift and vanish. The beauty of the Harvard Glass Flowers lies partly in their fragility.

To paraphrase the 17th-century poet Robert Herrick,

See the Glass Flowers while ye yet may,
Old Time is still a-flying:
And the same flowers that inspire to-day
Tomorrow, in fragments will be lying.

Seeing plants in the field is best, but using replicas to prepare oneself to recognize and observe real plants is a close second. While we advocate noticing and appreciating the living plants around us all, we do think the Harvard Glass Flowers capture the visual essence of these botanical wonders and can help us all comprehend and appreciate the complex panorama that is the Plant Kingdom. 

Plus, you can view this fragile-yet-vibrant collection in the wintertime!

Sunday, November 25, 2007

Pollen-feld: A Bee Movie Review

Jerry Seinfeld sprouts six legs and casts himself as an apian hero in Bee Movie. Georgia Silvera Seamans has delivered this fun (and mildly critical) synopsis. Spoiler alert! (And you saved us $7.50, Georgia. Thanks!)

Barry (Jerry Seinfeld) finds a geranium haven in the rain
Photo: Bee Movie

By Georgia Silvera Seamans

The first time Barry, the bee protagonist of Jerry Seinfeld’s new movie, leaves his Manhattan hive, he and seasoned pollen jocks mistake tennis balls for flowers (daisies to be precise).  Tennis balls – like flower stigmas—are sticky, and Barry becomes attached to one.  He is unintentionally swatted off the tennis ball, out of Central Park, and onto midtown streets.  Unable to return to the park and the hive’s pollen jocks before the rain begins to fall heavily (bees cannot fly in the rain), Barry seeks shelter among geraniums in a window box. 

The apartment window is open and Barry (Jerry) flies in out of the rain.  Having never seen a light bulb before and thinking it to be the sun, Barry flies towards it, hits it, and falls into a guacamole bowl where’s scooped onto a chip.  He is almost swallowed when Vanessa’s boyfriend yells, “It’s a bee!” The boyfriend tries to kill Barry with his Timberland boots (product placement?) but Vanessa comes to our hero’s rescue.  She captures him in a tall glass and releases him back into the windowsill geranium.  Barry takes shelter overnight and in the morning flies back into the apartment to express his thanks.  He talks to Vanessa (thus breaking one of the bee rules).  She (the voice of Renee Zellweger) stabs herself with a fork to assure herself that she’s not dreaming.  They drink coffee and eat rum cake on the roof and become friends. We learn that Vanessa, a florist, wants to attend the Pasadena Tournament of Roses. 

Barry accompanies her to the grocery store, where he discovers that honey is being stolen by humans; even Ray Liotta is stealing honey (there is a Ray Liotta line of gourmet honey).  Determined to find out what is going on, Barry follows a Honey Farms truck across the George Washington Bridge into New Jersey.  At Honey Farms, he discovers rows of human-made hives, and people smoking bees out of them before robbing the honey.  He’s so upset that he files suit against the five biggest honey producers in the Supreme Court.  Barry wins the case when the mean-spirited attorney for “big honey” mistakenly smokes the bees in the courtroom.  The court requires all honey to be returned to bees.

Now oversupplied with honey, the bees stop making it, for the first time in 27 million years.  The remainder of the movie focuses on what their decision means for the world—the flowers begin to die.  Vanessa is forced to close her florist shop.  We see Central Park full of dead trees and flowers.  (Actually, many species of city trees are wind-pollinated and so would not suffer from a lack of bee activity.)

Barry and Vanessa team up to save the flowers
Photo: Bee Movie

After closing her shop, Vanessa decides to attend the Pasadena Tournament of Roses, the last inventory of flowers in the world.  What do roses have?  Pollen.  Barry accompanies Vanessa to the tournament with a plan to steal a float of flowers. They capture the Princess and the Pea float, transport the flowers to New York by plane, and with the help of the pollen jocks, re-pollinate the world. 

There is a hitch.  A traffic jam at JFK airport threatens to delay the flight, but Barry buzzes into the cockpit to tell the pilots they must deliver the cut flowers as soon as possible.  Of course, the pilots become alarmed at a bee—a talking bee—in the cockpit.  The outcome: the pilots pass out, Barry, Vanessa, and pollen jocks land the plane.  Barry is made an honorary pollen jock.  He and the others implement his pollination plan. 

The trees and flowers are revived, and the hive begins honey production once again.

If we may nit-pick (or bee-swat)—Pollination is not well illustrated in the movie.  The pollen jocks use a gun to collect pollen or nectar at the push of a button.  Of course, bees collect pollen on their rumps as they collect nectar.  Hey, Hollywood, that’s plenty good. Why suggest to children that bees use guns?

Tuesday, November 20, 2007

A Presidential Pass for ‘Flower’ the Turkey

U.S. President George Bush spared the lives of two turkeys, May and Flower, in a Rose Garden ceremony of uncertain origin.

Pres. George Bush and “May” in the White House Rose Garden
Tuesday, November 20, 2007
Photo: Pablo Martinez Monsivais, for AP

“Flower” was spared the petting hands and clattering cameras today. She (he?) was off-stage as President George Bush bestowed a formal “pardon” on fellow turkey “May” in the White House Rose Garden.

The two birds were presented to the president by members of the National Turkey Federation, a Thanksgiving custom in the nation’s capitol since the Truman administration. “I thank everybody who voted online to choose the names for our guests of honor,” said the president. “And I’m pleased to announce the winning names. They are ‘May’ and ‘Flower.’ They’re certainly better than the names the Vice President suggested, which was ‘Lunch’ and ‘Dinner.’”

“May” and “Flower,” named for the Pilgrims’ ship, will be flown to Disney World to be Grand Marshals in the Thanksgiving Day parade. (Preferable to being in Dick Cheney’s mouth? You be the judge.)

Bush and others have attributed the first pardoning of the turkeys tradition to Harry Truman, 60 Novembers ago. But according to the Truman Presidential Library, that’s not so its “staff has found no documents, speeches, newspaper clippings, photographs, or other contemporary records in our holdings which refer to Truman pardoning a turkey that he received as a gift in 1947, or at any other time during his Presidency,” says the library’s website. “Truman sometimes indicated to reporters that the turkeys he received were destined for the family dinner table. In any event, the Library has been unable to determine when the tradition of pardoning the turkey actually began.”

In his 2001 Pardoning of the Turkeys speech, Bush traced the custom back to Abraham Lincoln. Yes, this is President Bush, Mr. Nice Guy, who lets his VP wear the black hat and gets his facts a little messed up.

President Harry Truman receives a Thanksgiving turkey, 1947
Photo: The White House

For a portfolio of some past presidents pardoning turkeys (rather heavy on Republican office holders) check out this White House photo essay.  And here’s the picture of President Truman with this first turkey presentation, 1947. From what we can tell, that turkey had no name, and Truman looks to be working up an admiring appetite.

Happy Thanksgiving to Flower, May, and all!

Monday, November 19, 2007

Reely Beeg Shew Moves to Christchurch

The splashiest flower show in the Southern Hemisphere, Ellerslie, is uprooting and heading even farther south.

Potatoes, tomatoes and peanut pig on a spit
at Ellerslie Flower Show, Auckland, NZ, 2005
Photo: via wiki

The Ellerslie Flower Show drew 65,000 visitors this year in Auckland. The event, featuring New Zealand’s neon and unorthodox designs, has taken place in Auckland since its beginning in 1994. But the Garden City farther south, Christchurch, has snaked this popular event away, starting in 2008.

According to the New Zealand Herald, Auckland City Council’s chose to “bow out of a rescue package.” According to the paper, the city’s finance committee “rejected officers’ advice to contribute $50,000 over each of the next three years ... to keep the show at the regional council’s Botanic Gardens in Manukau.”

We always suspect the heavily-compounded-sounding claims of what such events contribute to local economies. But if the paper’s right, that Ellerslie brought $12 million to the region, it seems the city’s finance committee slipped up and lost Auckland a good thing. TVNZ, reporting on the switch, noted that Ellerslie visitors tends to be well-heeled and fat-pocketed. “Twenty per cent of the people coming here are from out of Auckland,” said a member of Auckland’s Chamber of Commerce. “They come here, stay in good hotels, go to good restaurants and spend money. These are the sorts of people that we want to come.”

Well, so long as the show’s moving, we can’t think of a more congenial place than Christchurch, with its two-legged blooms and floral aisles. Congrats, Garden City, for adding another blossom to your crown.

Saturday, November 17, 2007

Kigo & the Frenzy for a Sunflower Freebie

The festival of late-blooming sunflowers draws locust-like visitors to Tosa, Japan.

Sunflowers in Hokkaido, Japan
Photo: teck3939

Japanese culture is famous for how it relishes the emerging, ripening and passing seasons. The ritual viewing of sakura (cherry blossoms) each spring inspires those of us on other continents to stop, look, and apprehend the living world. But as summer follows spring and turns to autumn, there are many other events to witness. Peach blossom time, lotus season...and harbinger of the new year, the flowering plum.

Running through Japanese literature are familiar seasonal images. Called Kigo—these motifs situate writer and reader at a precise time of the year. Here’s one little concordance of kigo ~ seasonal words and phrases. They’re presented in sets that include human routines, heavenly bodies, animals, and of course plants and flowers. Not so surprisingly, those of us in other parts of the world, knowing no Japanese, will recognize the seasons of each image, too… colt, firefly, goose, oyster.

Or how about these? ...Dandelion, lily, apple, narcissus.  If phenology is the scientific observance of earthly cycles, kigo is the cultural equivalent.

In general, Japanese culture favors appreciating each activity, each flower in its due time, but there are exceptions. One beloved out-of-season bloom is the sunflower of Southern Japan. Himawari (sunflower) is, of course, normally associated with late summer across most of the islands and in the tradition of Kigo, too, but several regions of the south have managed to grow huge displays of sunflowers in autumn, drawing thousands of visitors. From what we’ve been able to learn, this tradition may be relatively new. One source refers to ”Sunflowers grown with the distortion method” on view from mid-September to early October at the Asahigaoka Observatory in Memambetsu.

A Japanese airline touts, “Hokuryu prides itself on having the latest sunflowers field in Japan, you may visit Himawari-no-sato at Hakuryu, Chiebun garden at Nayoro, (and) Mexican Sunflowers also can be seen at Shika Park at Oiwake.” It seems that autumn himawari is both a horticultural feat and a tourist attraction.

In Tosa, the excitement apparently boiled over when the local late-sunflower festival also invited visitors to take away the blooms for free. Did they ever! A field of 800,000 plants was stripped bare in three days.” The annual Izumaoki no Hana Hana Festa flower festival began October 28 and by November 1, the three blooming hectares were bare.

Sunflowers field in Tosa, three days after the festival began
Photo: Mainichi

Toshiki Kawasawa, who chaired the event, said that next year “we’ll double the space and number of flowers that are grown, set aside an area where flowers won’t be allowed to be taken and limit each visitor to taking home no more than 10 plants to make sure this kind of thing doesn’t happen again.”

Nothing like “free” to set off human grabbiness. We’re reminded of Ratso Rizzo in the movie Midnight Cowboy. Living and bumming on the New York City streets, he’s handed a flier and invited to a hispter party. He enters the apartment, looks around, bellies up to the refreshment table and begins packing sandwiches into his overcoat.

“Why are you stealing food?” asks the stoned-out hostess. “You know, it’s free. You don’t have to steal it.”
Ratso: “Well, if it’s free, then I ain’t stealin’.”

Plowing, lighting fireworks, bundling straw and cooking porridge—we know which seasons they belong to, but what about taking all you can get? Is this autumnal, a human version of squirreling away, or a year-round activity?

Thursday, November 15, 2007

A Yellow Rose for Marianne Moore

Superioress of American modernism, Marianne Moore (b. November 15, 1887) challenged the Language of Flowers.

Marianne Moore, 1952
Photo: Univ. of Pennsylvania

Marianne Moore, born in Missouri, settled in New York City with her mother at an exciting time, the 1920s. She worked at the city’s public library and became literary editor of the Dial, a hub of America’s literary avant-garde, publishing Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens....

The mirror of Victorianism had shattered—and 19th century Europe’s cultural conventions, cracked, began to glimmer with distortions peculiar and new.  In poetry, the old lines broke off and chunky stanzas bent into strange polyhedrons. Mythology with its winged sandals and all those Pre-Raphaelite women wearing drapery began to look rather silly under bombs, a war in the trenches.

In 1915, Marianne Moore published a poem in Egoist: 

If yellow betokens infidelity
I am an infidel.
I could not plant white roses on a hill
Because books said buff petals boded ill
White promised well....

Moore made her poem (later entitled “Injudicious Gardening") after reading the love letters of poets Robert and Elizabeth Barret Browning. In their correspondence, Elizabeth recalls that her suitor’s first flowers to her were yellow roses; after checking in The Language of Flowers, a popular source in Victorian England that allegedly decoded the secret meanings of flowers, she chides Robert for selecting a bloom that signifies “infidelity.” He answers her, saying he’s just planted a dozen white rose trees “to take away the yellow-rose approach.”

The Language of Flowers was just the sort of tripe that the Modernists would chop to the ground. Symbols? Cymbals! Can’t a yellow rose be a yellow rose, completely? (From the perspective of 2007, Moore’s own language may seem stilted, tentative, arcane, but that’s another mirror...)

In the spring of 1938, ee cummings gave his painting of a yellow rose to Moore. She wrote to him April 12, “After studying this very noble rose,—the turquoise under-leaf and touch of red reflected back even to the petals, I can surmise why botanical gardens and over-flowered shops do not abound in yellow roses. Yet they might, and still lack this one.”

Gloire de Dijon
Photo: Poldiri

For Moore, all yellow roses didn’t mean anything; it was each yellow rose that warranted precise consideration—“study.” Her contemporary William Carlos Williams wrote that Moore could see “the vastness of the particular”—in a rose, in a gift, in a creative effort. She went on to thank cummings, “I try not to think of your loss in the fact of my having the painting. We say what a man has done, he can do again, but can he? An affect is got once. But another awaits him.”

We tried unsuccessfully to find a reproduction of cummings’s painting. But if you’re in Philadelphia, you can see it for yourself at the Rosenbach Museum. There, Moore’s Greenwich Village living room has been exactly recreated, with the yellow rose on the wall.

Sunday, November 11, 2007

Apple Day

John Levett tastes tastes, names names. Old varieties like Ribston Pippin recall when the city and the country were more clearly connected.  They lead forward, too, in the movement to save England’s allotments.

Story & Photos by

Some years ago BBC Radio 5 ran a Doris Day in celebration of Dorises everywhere. They even managed to get a phone link to the iconic pre-feminist post-ironic Doris of Doris & Rock fame. Doris Day (we’re back to the ‘day’ now) was, of course, a take on the variety of ‘days’ that any feeling-neglected-getting-no-attention-need-awareness cell announces to a no-notice-taken-shout-louder public.

It’s often seriously worthy groups dealing with frequently-unmentionable-and-I’d-rather-you-didn’t inner and outer bodily bits that feel left out of the giving & taking joys of such as Christmas, Easter, Halloween, the essential remembrances of Armistice Day and the vapid creations of The-Day-Diana-Died banality. Then come varieties of tree huggers, save-the stoaters, wear-a-kilt-for healthers, stop-nail-biting-in-under-fivers; to name none that I’ve heard of but am convinced they’ve had a day to themselves.

Apple Day is one such day—made up by old apple growers of old apples and confined, as far as I can tell, to Cambridge. It seems it’s been going for eleven years, attracts queues, sells out its stock of everything apple-related (ciders, juices, toddies, pies, cakes, jams, chutneys, honeys hived in apple orchards), identifies your apples, gives apple history lectures, warns of pests and sells you forty varieties of eaters and cookers. And (inevitably & predictably) there are ‘apple art activities’ for families (kids can’t go anywhere these days without having to draw something; what happened to clambering over stuff and carving your name on it?)

It’s housed (or should that be ‘tented’?) at the Cambridge Botanic Garden & sponsored (essential to get global monopoly capitalism behind you these days) by Waitrose. Actually I can understand Waitrose’s participation in this. I haven’t checked out yet how many of these varieties the up-market retailers stock themselves but I’d guess they do a few; here in Cambridge I’m convinced Waitrose match your food to your style of clothing (“We have a very nice cut of Aberdeen steak, madam. It matches your autumnal twin-piece perfectly. Our veal goes with the ear-rings too.”)

A friend phoned me up & asked “Wanna go?” so we did. Autumn this year has been stunning. It seems it has something to do with the washed-out Summer and the extraordinary creation of sugars in the trees, which is no consolation to the flood sufferers but it does make the best out of Cambridge. Sunday was cloudless, the Garden was only a walk away but friend has convertible so we drove and sat in traffic and gas-guzzled. (“Heat that planet up and we can have our very own Cambridge Pineapple Day for the grandkids,” I say.)

The first thing that struck me was the queues outside the tasting tents. Vast! Is queuing an Anglo-Saxon thing? I can remember queuing to get into a glass foundry on the island of Majorca once when a bus load of Italians fell out the bus and trooped in disorderly non-file straight through into the workshop. Quelle horreur! Bounders ought to be shackled!

So, Italian style, we walked to the exit and started there. It was like being a kid again in a sweetshop. Truth to tell, I’ve never been a great apple fan. When I was growing up there was an orchard (bombed but trees still standing) at the top of our plot; great for cricket, camping and playing at failing to hang ourselves (I kid you not!) And pigging out on apples. I went over to bananas which, being just after the last war, still had rarity value. Gradually apples went out of my life, supermarkets came in, taste never came back.

Apple Day changed that. If I’d ever remembered, I’d forgotten what an apple could taste like. I tasted all forty & went back (that would be ‘backwards’ having come in through the exit) to check the taste again. Then bought some. I went for the names knowing that the variety wouldn’t disappoint. Here’re some: Zabergäu Reinette (Germany 1885), Orleans Reinette (France 1776), Ribston Pippin (UK 1707), Rosemary Russet (UK 1831), Crispin (Japan 1930), Belle de BosKoop (Netherlands 1856).

Even the crosses sound wonderful: Charles Ross (Cox’s Orange Pippin x Peasgood Nonsuch), Gloster (Richared Delicious x Weisser Winterglockenapf). Then the cookers: Lane’s Prince Albert (1841 Russet Nonpareil x Dumelow’s Seedling), Ontario (1820 Wagener x Northern Spy), Striped Beefing (1794 from Lakenham in Norfolk).

What took me so much was that each variety had a history; came from a place, had a birthday, knew its mother and father, appeared at some time in a nurseryman’s catalogue. Here’s Ribston Pippin raised from a pip brought from Rouen to Ribston in Yorkshire in 1707. I can appreciate that, being a rose grower. I like to know where my roses were raised, something about the rose grower, which crosses brought forth seed, which unlikely parents worked the trick. If Jack Harkness hadn’t done his apprenticeship at J. Burrell & Co. just outside Cambridge about 1930 and learnt hybridizing from Edward Doncaster, I’d never have had Doncasterii in my garden; it’s placing it in history that matters.

This next paragraph is pretty predictable but I’ll do it anyway. I can walk into Asda and pick up a (plastic) bag of Cox’s Orange for a quid; plastic bag because Cox’s would never grow uniformly to fit into a uniform. Golden Delicious do; so they’re beloved of supermarkets. Braeburn fit the same moulded nests. Cox’s have blemishes. GD’s don’t. Cox’s don’t taste quite the same this month as they did last. GD’s do. There was a tale told some time ago that the only country that eats Golden Delicious by the truck load is the UK; stacked up port-side in Calais waiting for the day trippers. I despair. Same goes for tomatoes, potatoes, onions and shallots, pretty much any veg—no acknowledged begetter.

My mother ran a small grocer’s shop when I was growing up and everything had a name—potatoes were King Edwards, tomatoes were Cheshunt Tangellas, onions were Bedfordshire Champions. And from the name you knew when they’d been dug, when picked, when planted and the name of the farm, the name of the nursery, was on the sack, on the box and, as likely as not, they were local. Even living in the city there was some country connection. London’s East End families taking two weeks each year hop-picking in Kent most easily comes to mind (read Orwell’s ‘A Clergyman’s Daughter’) and, living in South London in the mid ‘60s, there was still spending money to be got from fruit picking on the Weald.

Allotments are coming back into fashion. There was a danger some decade or more ago that town and city plots were likely to be swallowed by residential development so neglected and abandoned had many of them become. The rise of the organic food trade, the fuss over GM technology, the blandness of supermarket produce, the downturn of taste in readily available fruit and veg & the recognition that a valuable public resource was likely to be lost for ever from our culture translated into a (mostly middle class but not to be deprecated for that!) upsurge in interest & uptake of rented municipal plots.

I can remember renting two plots in the early ‘70s for about £5 each and got seeds and sets from the local allotment association at cost. I also got community. Even then, when Tesco was only at the early stages of mustering its troops, there was something radical about growing your own stuff and that mindset is within the current movement back to allotments. They arose out of the Enclosure and Commons Acts of the Nineteenth Century and the subsequent loss of working class cultivation land (how else to drive them into the factories?) There was a high of a million and a half plots during the last war down to a quarter million by the millennium. The news that the 2012 Olympics would bulldoze some local communal land holdings brought the allotment issue back to the fore. We know what we can lose here.

The average cost of an allotment (250 square metres...think two and a half lanes of a 100m track) in Cambridge is £20 a year. Then think variety, taste, companionship, digestion, exercise, wildlife, conversation, sharing, history, recipes, snacks, soups, roasts, seed catalogues, harvest, summer, timelessness, early morning, sunset, sandwiches, chutney, an apple tree.

It’s not only fruit and veg. I used to grow sweet peas on the plots I had thirty years ago from seed I got every September from Bolton’s near Haverhill in Essex. Twenty varieties each year. Bolton’s have long gone but there are plenty of nurseries who keep the old varieties in their lists. Delphiniums grew there too; sow-‘em-and-see varieties from the Delphinium Society (whose seed list came this week).

It’s something that passed out of my life and high time that it passed back in. I’ve just glanced at Chiltern Seeds’ catalogue—twenty-eight varieties of bean, twenty-three basil, huauzontle and jicama, couve tronchuda, kiwano, miner’s lettuce, scorzonera, vegetable spaghetti. Get some!

Friday, November 09, 2007

Pretty on the Inside

If you don’t think algae’s anything to write home about, consider these images of plant specimens, and get out your pen.

Lycopodium clavata (club moss)
Photo: Jim Haseloff

Iris—in our opinion, one of the most glorious of all flowering plants— is rather humdrum, when compared with bamboo and wood ferns. We’re talking about the inner life. Jim Haseloff’s stunning collection of stained microscopic plant specimens checks our overhasty judgment of complexity and beauty. We find that some of homeliest plants have the most dazzling interiors once those botanical rooms are lit up with concoctions like “Safranin O and haematoxylin”—tried and true plant stains.

Jim’s fine site Plant Cellular Anatomy is an amazing and generous work. For those of you who may want to run out and start staining in earnest, he recommends Plant Microtechnique and Microscopy by Steve Ruzin, Oxford University Press.  Those who’d like to start out more slowly may want to try these simpler directions.

Caltha (family of marsh marigold)
Photo: Jim Haseloff

Why stain plants at all? Isn’t that like putting lipstick on a parakeet? From our very limited understanding, staining makes cellular structures easier to see. Also, stains can reveal information about plant parts: “Starch, protein, and even nucleic acids can be brought out using special stains.”

For the moment, it’s enough to revel in the normally unseen beauty of acer, caltha, dryopteris, and many more—including beloved iris. These are floral interiors Jim Haseloff has forced into bloom.

Coleochaete scutata (algae)
Photo: Jim Haseloff

Ammophilia (a.k.a.Marram grass)
Photo: Jim Haseloff


Cuscuta (Dodder)
Photo: Jim Haseloff

Wednesday, November 07, 2007

Desperate Compromise in Kenya’s Rose City

The city council of Naivasha, the biggest flower growing region of Kenya, has scaled back its demands on farms, in the interest of two bathrooms.

A woman packs roses
at one of Naivasha, Kenya’s, scores of flower factories
Photo: Antonty Njuguna, for Reuters

Some say that Naivasha is the most unequal city in all Kenya. Once a favored haunt of rich white hunters, it’s now mainly a pass-through for tourists traveling from Nairobi to wild game safaris. In 1988, Naivasha’s planners estimated that the town would grow to only 50,000 residents. But there are more than 300,000 people living here now, and 50,000 of them are crowded into the Kargita slum.

Most of these new residents have been drawn to the region by the hope of work in Kenya’s booming cut-flower industry. Kenya supplies over 30% of Europe’s cut flower market and the Naivasha area accounts for 75% of production; one third of the local population works growing or processing flowers. But as the farms have prospered and numbers of in-migrant workers swelled, the municipal infrastructure of Naivasha itself has collapsed. The city is deeply in debt and basic facilities are strained, broken, or non-existent.

“These farms earn over Sh9.8 billion every year,” said Naivasha’s town clerk, Maurice Ochieng. Yet the municipality has thus far been able to assess the industry only for business permits and the land it owns —not sales. That means Naivasha the city takes in only about $32,835 annually (2.2 million Kenyan Shillings) from the flower industry. Furthermore, wages at the flower farms amount to only $37-$104 per month.

This past summer, municipal leaders made a push to tax the farms 1% on their annual output. But 57 growers, threatening to move their operations to neighboring Ethiopia, took the matter to court and won.

Naivasha via Google Maps

This week, reports George Omondi of Nairobi’s Business Daily, Naivasha’s city leaders met with the Lake Naivasha Growers Group and vowed to cooperate with the industry rather than battle on. “It is common knowledge that most of the concerns raised previously are true and obvious,” said the city’s Maurice Ochieng, “but we must be able to move past them for the good of our town.” According to Omondi “Some flower farms, such as Oserian Development Company, have already started lending out their vehicles to the municipal council to help in garbage collection.” It will take the joint efforts of the farms and the city to handle these day-to-day chores—and to deal with the ecological perils that rapid growth and the flower industry in particular have wrought on Lake Naivasha, home to hippoes, many species of fish, and over 400 species of birds. 

How dire are conditions in the city of Naivasha? George Omondi writes of yesterday’s meeting between town and business officials, “Most growers could not hide their shock as Mr. Ochieng proceeded to read his wish list for the town to them. It turned out from his priority list that the town of roses does not have a single fire fighting engine. The construction of two public toilets is also listed as an urgent project for the council. He wants the farms’ assistance in solving some of these problems.”