Human Flower Project

Thursday, January 31, 2008

Slow Down for Quince

Two fruity and flowery shrubs (at least) go by this name, both of them fine enough to give anybody pause.

Flowering quince (Chaenomeles speciosa), thriving in Berkeley, California
Photo (detail): Georgia Silvera Seamans

Screech! Blossoms of flowering quince (Chaenomeles speciosa) will detain any errand. Blooming early, usually on shiny black twigs, they are defiant.

Especially so in the city, where deflecting human fixation is more challenging. Everybody’s so busy, dead-set to get where they’re going. Georgia Silvera Seamans of Local Ecology sent us pictures of her neighborhood quinces in Berkeley, California, and writes about their impact in her intensely focussed city. She also reflects on a recent visit to Spain: “In Madrid we ate quince jelly (dulce de membrillo) with cheese (queso) at tapas bars.” Just that thought is pause-worthy.

The classic detainer of the Mediterranean region is not Chaenomeles (native to China), though, but Cydonia oblonga. Its ”fuzzy, yellow, apple-sized, somewhat edible fruits” were most likely the ingredient in Georgia’s Spanish maremelade. The blooms look more like apple flowers, too, not so colorful as “flowering quince” but very, very lovely.

Eve, by Lucas Cranach
Image: Galleria Uffizi

Did you catch that “somewhat’ edible? Cyndonia oblonga (quince) may look like a pear, but it’s sour enough to make you cringe. Only a lot of sugar and cooking can make it really palatable. See how Andrea at Heavy Petal has been doing just that. (By the way, Chaenomeles also has sour fruit, and can be made palatable; Georgia says so!). But humans do not live by marmelade alone. The plump golden green of Cyndonia oblonga is decidedly alluring.

We remembered The Owl and the Pussycat:

They dined on mince, and slices of quince,

Which they ate with a runcible spoon...


Runcible spoon or chop sticks, quince seems to be if not an outright aphrodisiac then romance food. The fruit was an attribute of Aphrodite, whose demands have a way of bringing all business to a halt. Ancient newlyweds were said to nibble on quinces before entering their bridal chambers. So, perhaps, did Eve. Painter Lucas Cranach and others allege that the original sin was eating not an apple, but a quince. Eve may have been fallen, but her breath was delightful!

Mythology’s most legendary Cydonia oblonga, however, belonged to Atalanta, the dashing beauty who outran all of her admirers. After their defeat, her suitors would be put to death right there at trackside. Hippomenes had the foresight to slow his sweetheart down. He prayed to Aphrodite for help, and she gave him three quinces to bowl across Atalanta’s path during the deciding race. Who could resist them? The undefeated sprinter reached down to gather each fruit, and in doing so gave Hippomenes time to catch up, then to win.

The Race for Atalanta, by David Spear

Has anyone on Barack Obama’s staff considered quinces?

Monday, January 28, 2008

Enrique Grau: Flower Magician of Cartagena

A Colombian artist bequeathed over a thousand works to his cherished seaside city, and gave its performers a perpetual bouquet.

Las Toreras (1981)
by Enrique Grau
Image: Galeria el Museo

In the era before MFA programs, painting was not so much a career path as a craft and a social adventure. Take Enrique Grau. He was born in 1920 into a rich family of Cartagena, Colombia. At age 20 he won a prize in Bogota for his rendering of a sexy ”mulatta” sitting in a clingy dress amid cannas and watermelons. The Colombian government paid his way to the Art Students League in New York in the early ‘40s, and in the ‘50s Grau crossed the Atlantic, studying fresco painting in Florence, Italy.

Viva Tulipán Primera (1990)
from Triptico de Cartagena de Indias
by Enrique Grau
Image: Villegas Editores

He returned to Colombia, paintbox (and heart) bursting with delicious contrarieties—European and American Modernism, Renaissance figurative painting, an aristocratic heritage, a scrappy bunch of artist chums, worldliness, devotion to indigenous culture. Oh yes, and the floral legacy of Colombia, one of the great flower-producing regions on the globe.

In Grau‘s work there are flowers everywhere. Behind a bullfighter’s ear, between the feet of a corpse, heaped in a basket between a sullen couple. One of his last great works, Triptico de Cartagena de Indias, painted in homage to his hometown, shows red roses scattered in the sky, trailing from a biplane. Critic Hank Burchard writes that this image memorialized the first plane flight over Cartagena. “Grau’s aunt, known as Tulipan, who was Colombia’s first national beauty queen, ...was aboard the first airplane to fly over Cartagena, and took with her baskets of the cut flowers for which Colombia is famous to scatter over the city.”

Our favorite of Grau’s flower paintings—enough to inspire anybody’s flight to Cartagena—is the gorgeous backdrop he made for the city’s Teatro Heredia.

Backdrop
at the Teatro Heredia
Cartagena, Colombia
by Enrique Grau
Photo: Stefan Ruiz, for the New York Times

It shows a huge bouquet extended over the city and the sea. Cartagenan monuments drop through the air (thank you, Rene Margritte), and a satin ribbon flutters toward the theatre’s wings. (So much for canned laughter or electric “APPLAUSE” signs!)

Before his death in 2004, Grau donated “1,300 works of art, including some by other artists, to the city of Cartagena to set up a museum.” The Triptico de Cartagena de Indias was first exhibited at the Inter-American Development Bank Cultural Center; we’re still searching to discover its permanent home, and then get there to see it ourselves.

We understand that Cartagena has caught on, again, with the snazzy young travel set. One 20-something described the city to the New York Times as “Civilized but wild.” Okay. Or how about classic and surreal, celestial and earthy, plain and florid? In a word: Vamanos.

Friday, January 25, 2008

Lewis Carroll’s Cranky Flowers

Do you consider flowers silent and demure? Go ask Alice.

Charles Dodgson
Photo: Musical Compositions

Lewis Carroll (nom de plume of mathematician and author Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) was born January 27, 1832, the oldest child of an English parson.  Was he a giant of children’s literature or a troll of proto-surrealism? You make the call, but only after revisiting his writings.

The most conversational of his human flower projects is Chapter Two of Through the Looking Glass: Alice, recently of Wonderland, finds her way along a path with many switchbacks to a garden of chattering flowers. Why had no bloom ever spoken to her before?

“It isn’t manners for us to begin, you know,” said the Rose, “and I really was wondering when you’d speak! Said I to myself, ‘ Her face has got some sense in it, though it’s not a clever one!’”

Our looking-glass voyager soon finds herself in floral crossfire vitriolic enough for FOX television.

Through the Looking Glass
Illustration: John Tenniel

“Aren’t you sometimes frightened at being planted out here, with nobody to take care of you?” Alice asks....

“There’s the tree in the middle,” said the Rose: “what else is it good for?”

“But what could it do, if any danger came?” Alice asked.

“It could bark,” said the Rose.

“It says ‘Bough-wough!’” cried a Daisy, “that’s why its branches are called boughs!”

“Didn’t you know that?” cried another Daisy, and here they all began shouting together, till the air seemed quite full of little shrill voices. “Silence, every one of you!” cried the Tiger-lily, waving itself passionately from side to side, and trembling with excitement. “They know I can’t get at them!” it panted, bending its quivering head toward Alice, “or they wouldn’t dare to do it!”

“Never mind!” Alice said in a soothing tone, and stooping down to the daisies, who were just beginning again, she whispered, “If you don’t hold your tongues, I’ll pick you!” There was silence in a moment, and several of the pink daisies turned white.

“That’s right!” said the Tiger-lily. “The daisies are worst of all. When one speaks, they all begin together, and it’s enough to make one wither to hear the way they go on!”

Ah yes, the tranquility of the garden...and the peculiar sensibility of Lewis Carroll. He understood that children for the most part find blithe and moral stories just plain dull. Let’s have nonsense and very bad puns. Let’s have flowers that bitch!

“I never thought of that before!” says Alice, being told that too-soft beds put flowers to sleep.

“It’s my opinion that you never think at all,” the Rose said in a rather severe tone.

“I never saw anybody that looked stupider,” a Violet said, so suddenly, that Alice quite jumped; for it hadn’t spoken before.

“Hold your tongue!” cried the Tiger-lily. “As if you ever saw anybody! You keep your head under the leaves, and snore away there, till you know no more what’s going on in the world, than if you were a bud!”

Robert Novak must have this book on the bedside table.

The Garden of Live Flowers: Madi Ferguson (Tiger Lily), Sally Stevens (Violet),
Caroline Jansen, Charlotte Duggan , and Karli Cole (Daisies), Lauren Rover
(Rose) and Hanna Noel as Alice.
Photo: Mt. Airy (Maryland) Players

Do you enjoy Carroll’s garden spats and irritable flowers? Then make sure also to read the Gardener’s Song from his story Sylvie and Bruno. It begins:

He thought he saw an Elephant
That practiced on a fife:
He looked again, and found it was
A letter from his wife.
“At length I realize,” he said,
The bitterness of life!”

One biographer notes that Carroll first made the cranky flower-ringmaster of Through the Looking Glass a passionflower, but learning of that plant’s religious associations changed the character to the Tiger Lily. (Wouldn’t want to make Daddy angry!)

For the whole argument among them—Tiger Lily, Rose, Violet, Larkspur—and the Red Queen’s entrance too, here’s the full chapter. We find it all about as much fun as digging a nice long trench.

Wednesday, January 23, 2008

Extraordinary Fashion Pipal

A young designer, a craftsman of New Market, and an ancient holy leaf: Sandy Ao skips along with Kolkata’s latest foot fashion.

Dried leaves of pipal (Ficus religiosa)
100 sell for 25 Rupees at New Market in Kolkata
Photo: Sandy Ao

Last night in the classroom of a Catholic church here in Austin, TX, we spotted an interesting calendar. It was round, and divided the year into liturgical slices: the sacred seasons—like Lent, Easter, and Advent—and big chunks of ”Ordinary Time.” Western culture seems especially prone to demarcations like this. We apply the psychic Marks-A-Lot—a lot! Let’s draw a thick line between what’s sacred and what’s profane, between the “work week” devoted to money-grubbing and the “Sabbath” for piety and giving back.

Perhaps the same thing goes on in India. We’re quite ignorant about Indian culture, have never even had the pleasure of visiting. But from what we’re learning thanks to our friend Sandy Ao in Kolkata, India seems to reach for the Marks-A-Lot a whole lot less. Instead, the primary cultural tool there seems to be the spoon. Sacred and secular, ancient and modern, commercial and religious get stirred together. There’s less of a gap between holy festivals, next to no “ordinary time.”

Anupam Chatterjee of Kolkata,
a young Indian designer
using an ancient plant
Photo: Sandy Ao

Sandy Ao set us off on this train of thought with some pictures she took recently at Kolkata’s huge New Market, formally known as the Hogg Bazaar. The shopping area was built in the mid-19th century so that English colonials wouldn’t have to rub shoulders with Kolkata natives. (Talk about Marks-a-Lot!) Today, though, and for many decades, the New Market has been everybody’s favorite place to shop. “In recent years we have many malls in Kolkata,” Sandy writes, “but New Market is still everyone’s choice.” Not only are prices better, she says, “It’s a paradise for the shoppers! You can get everything under the sky”

Even a pair of winged sandals. Sandy found ethereal footwear in the making during a recent visit to New Market. “It’s the idea of this young fashion designer from Kolkata. He is hardly 23 years old. His name is Anupam Chatterjee, a young man full of imagination and working hard towards his dream career - fashion designing.”

Anupam told Sandy he uses fresh flowers often, and even made a gown “fully covered with fresh jasmine.” For the sandals he chose pipal leaf, which dried looks like a swatch of white tulle. Years ago, Sandy tried her hand at creating this beautiful filigree. “When we were young in the school we used to pick up those fallen pipal leaves and would soak them in the water, excitedly changing the water daily and waiting for the green pigments of the leaves to fall off till the leaves turned to this beautiful fibre structure. Most of the time we would end seeing our pipal leaves letting us down.” The dried pipal leaves at New Market are processed locally, she says.  “For 100 perfect pieces of these leaves they charge Rs. 25/- only!!!  It’s like my dream come true.”

Imtiaz deftly folds pipal leaves into ‘flowers’
Photo: Sandy Ao

Anupam Chatterjee has been collaborating for two years with a New Market craftsman named Imtiaz. Buying pipal right there at the market, Imtiaz has learned how to fold the leaves into airy flowers by watching others in the stalls close by. He earns Rs. 100 apiece for each pair of fancy slippers, spooning the pipal flowers together, Sandy explains, with “duck feather, dried arecanut fibres and flowers made of reeds.” We’re not sure how Anupam prices the finished footwear, but he’s already received enthusiastic response. Liking the look of pipal leaf, Chatterjee used it in a recent fashion show. “And the show was a great success,” Sandy writes. “Who knows? He may be another Sabyasachi Mukherjee in the making!”

Pipal Tree, terracotta tile
Mohenjodaro, 2500 B.C.
in current day Pakistan
Photo: Iowa State Univ.

We don’t ordinarily mention shoe fashion and religion in the same breath, but, pipal (Ficus religiosa) is not ordinary. “The peepal is the first-known depicted tree in India: a seal discovered at Mohenjodaro, one of the cities of the Indus Valley Civilisation (c. 3000 BC - 1700 BC), shows the peepal being worshipped.” In the Vedic period, people used this wood as a firestarter, with the old rubbing method.

It is a deeply sacred plant for both Hindus and Buddhists.  According to legend, the Buddha received Enlightenment under the Bo (or pipal) tree. And here are several Hindu spoonfuls: Vishnu was believed to have been born under the pipal tree and Krishna to have died beneath it. “Some believe that the tree houses the Trimurti, the roots being Brahma, the trunk Vishnu and the leaves Shiva. The gods are said to hold their councils under this tree and so it is associated with spiritual understanding.”

How about a few dollops of science and manufacturing, too?: Ayurvedic medicine uses all parts of Ficus religiosa, and tannin from the bark works its way into Indian leather. Sandy relates also that in Bodh Gaya, folk artists paint on that region’s tougher pipal leaves: landscapes, portraits, and images of the Buddha.

Sandals with sacred pipal leaf and duck feathers
in Kolkata’s New Market
Photo: Sandy Ao

We asked Sandy if anyone would take offense at artists, designers and producers tinkering so freely with a plant holy as pipal.

“We are a country that loves arts and crafts, and always have an open mindedness for any creative work with a good sense,” she replied. “I am sure there will never be any objection coming from any side about this young designer using dry pipal leaf for his sandals. After all, these leaves do look like wings on feet, so unreal and so out of this world.”

Ordinary? What’s that?

Monday, January 21, 2008

Kahu: Leis for the March from Selma

On the holiday to remember Martin Luther King, we honor a Hawaiian civil rights leader, too, and his floral gift to the historic march on Montgomery.

Martin Luther King and marchers
March ‘65, on the way
to Montgomery, AL
Photo: via Hoover

In late February 1965 Jimmy Lee Jackson, a teenager in Perry County, Alabama, was shot and killed by a state trooper during a peaceful demonstration in the courthouse square. The black community there came together in outrage and dedication; they decided to take their grievances over segregation and police violence to the statehouse in Montgomery. When Gov. George Wallace forbade their demonstration, Martin Luther King, Jr. traveled to Washington, D.C., appealing to President Lyndon Johnson for support. Meanwhile, the activists began their march out of Selma…

“When the marchers reached the city line, they found a posse of state troopers waiting for them. As the demonstrators crossed the bridge leading out of Selma, they were ordered to disperse, but the troopers did not wait for their warning to be heeded. They immediately attacked the crowd of people who had bowed their heads in prayer. Using tear gas and batons, the troopers chased the demonstrators to a black housing project, where they continued to beat the demonstrators as well as residents of the project who had not been at the march.”

Bloody Sunday, March 7, drew the nation’s attention like never before to the civil rights struggle. Returning to Alabama, King led a symbolic march to the bridge two days later. And on March 25th, a third march began. King and some 3200 others walked east out of Selma, twelve miles a day, sleeping in fields. They arrived in Montgomery five days later, and before a crowd of 25,000, King spoke:

I know you are asking today, ‘“How long will it take?” Somebody’s asking, “How long will prejudice blind the visions of men, darken their understanding, and drive bright-eyed wisdom from her sacred throne?” ...How long will justice be crucified, and truth bear it?  I come to say to you this afternoon, however difficult the moment, however frustrating the hour, it will not be long, because “truth crushed to earth will rise again.” How long? Not long, because “no lie can live forever.” How long? Not long, because “you shall reap what you sow.”

Muddy fields and tear gas, aching feet and billy clubs, what part do flowers have in the brave Selma marches?

We found startling pictures yesterday of King and others somewhere along the route from Selma to Montgomery. They’re festooned with glorious white leis!

Rev. Abraham Akaka
receives a kiss on his 75th birthday from Danny Kaleikini (1992)
Photo: Star Bulletin

These were gifts from Reverend Dr. Abraham Akaka, better known in his native Hawaii as ‘Kahu’ (shepherd). Akaka was the pastor of Kawaiahao Church, the ‘Mother Church’ of Hawaii, for nearly 30 years. He was also the state’s first commissioner for civil rights. When King came to the islands in 1964 to celebrate Civil Rights Week, they met at the University of Hawaii, beginning what was to become a close friendship. That following spring, Kahu lent his support to the courageous marchers out of Selma by adorning them with flowers.

Though we had never heard of him, Rev. Akaka was a giant in his homeland, “the most influential and widely known Hawaiian since Kamehameha the Great. Newsweek once described him as having the ‘charm of a beachboy and the force of a Billy Graham.’” In 1962, both Hawaii’s candidates for governor asked “Kahu” to run with them, for lieutenant governor. He turned them both down. “I’m a bridge between the Republicans and Democrats,” Akaka said. No doubt the clash at Selma’s Edmund Pettis Bridge on Bloody Sunday incited him and inspired this gift.

We don’t pretend to fathom the meaning of the lei in Hawaiian culture. Meanings is more like it, since there are ceremonial garlands of many kinds, each with flowers, seeds, feathers, and shells selected for their special beauty and spirit-power. We hope that lei experts will be able to decode for us the symbolism of these particular objects. And we would be MOST interested to learn if a local Selma florist had the fortitude to make them! How did they get here and around the necks of the marchers?

Selma Civil Rights March: March 21, 1965.  From left: U.S. Representative John Lewis (D-GA), an unidentified nun; Ralph Abernathy; Martin Luther King, Jr.; Ralph Bunche, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth wearing leis sent by Abraham Akaka.
Photo: Susannah Heschel

We can be fairly certain that Kahu’s leis were to bring the civil rights marchers protection and honor. Further, leis carry with them a spirit of peace: They “were given to ali’i (royalty) as a sign of affection and when two warring chiefs settled their differences, they wove a lei which meant an end to the hostilities.” Did Rev. Akaka send a lei to Wallace, too?

In a society that fixates on individual personality and prowess, we in the U.S. mark “Martin Luther King Day.” But one pedestrian doesn’t make a march, or one flower a lei. Many thousands of others, like Jimmy Lee Jackson and Reverend Akaka have led, followed, flowered, and died in this struggle. With respectful thanks, we celebrate them all.

Friday, January 18, 2008

Diversity: Madagascar v. NYC

A “new” species of palm has been discovered on the island of Madagascar, thanks to its flowering finale.

Blossoming to the end
Tahina spectabilis
Photo: Xavier Metz

Botanists around the world are popping the corks over Tahina spectabilis, a gigantic palm tree just discovered in the northwest of Madagascar, even though the plant, blooming its head off, is about to die. ”Details of the flowers and branches suggested it was a species and genus of palm that had never been described before,” reports the Guardian. “Genetic tests on the plant confirmed that it comes from an evolutionary line that was not previously known to exist in Madagascar.”

Actually, plant discoveries have been coming pretty fast and furious on this big island off the east coast of Africa. “Out of the 10,000 plants native to Madagascar, 90% of them are found nowhere else in the world.” The huge palm gave itself away with a spectacular show of flowering.

Whereas most palm trees bloom periodically throughout their lives, this giant shoots the moon. “Once it is fully grown, the tip of the stem branches into hundreds of tiny flowers that sap nutrients from the plant so rapidly that it collapses.” On a stroll with his family, Xavier Metz, the manager of a nearby cashew plantation, spotted the huge flower stalk cascading in the sky. He took pictures and posted them on the web, attracting the attention of the plant experts at Kew Gardens and botanists around the world.

Tahina spectabilis
Photo: Xavier Metz

“Ever since we started work on the palms of Madagascar in the 1980s, we have made discovery after discovery,” said John Dransfield, an English scientist. “But to me this is probably the most exciting of them all.” Tahina spectabilis is a thrill for several reasons: its size (some say it grows ”six stories tall”), its novelty, and its dissimilarity from other palms thus far found on the island.

Press releases said that the tree was named for Metz’s daughter Tahina, and that “‘Spectabilis’ means ‘blessed’ or ‘to be protected.’” But we side with the Ethical Paleontologist, who believes that Tahina must mean “blessed” in Malagasy (whether it’s Metz’s daughter’s name or not); and “spectabilis” means, well, “Geez, lookadat!”

Bioclimates of Madagascar
Map: Missouri Botanical Garden

Madagascar owes its immense plant diversity primarily to two features: its range of climate zones and its isolation. There are tropical rainforests on the island’s eastern side, while the west and south, “in the rain shadow of the central highlands, are home to tropical dry forests, thorn forests, and deserts and xeric shrublands.” This shoot-the-moon palm tree was discovered in yet another bioregion, the northwest part of the island. Check out the map at right, via the Missouri Botanical Garden, which has a concerted plant research project of its own ongoing in Madagascar.

We find it curious that in the plant world, isolation is so conducive to diversity, whereas in the human social world, those environments that are least isolated tend to be the most diverse (New York City versus North Dakota). Cities seem to attract ethnic complexity, even as they destroy it—melting down distinctions in the longer run. There is a case to be made for geographic isolation in human culture, too. We think of Gee’s Bend, a particle of land cut off by a loop in the Alabama River. The society of Gee’s Bend is not in itself diverse, but its relative isolation fostered an original flowering of its own, rare and spectacular as a six-story palm. ”Gee’s, lookadeese!”

Wednesday, January 16, 2008

Flowers as Misdirection

In two recent U.S. bank robberies, flowers are accessories to the crime.

A thief “disarms” bank staff with flowers in Minneapolis
Photo: via KARE

Those Minnesota criminals sure have style!

A man bearing a lovely bouquet (they appear to be pink roses—hard to be sure with those fuzzy surveillance cameras) pulled a gun on the teller of a Minneapolis bank last Thursday and demanded that money be loaded into a black canvas sack.

Did he give the teller those flowers? We’re not sure, but the same fellow’s also suspected in two other recent bank holdups in the area (because there were pink flowers involved in those crimes, too?).

In Maple Grove, Minnesota, another thief drew an unwitting local florist into his scheme. According to the FBI, he “paid a florist to deliver a bouquet and a wrapped package to a Maple Grove Wells Fargo Bank..... In that package was what appeared to be a bomb” (presumably one of those cannonball looking things with a long sparky fuse).

As the package was opened, the thief called the bank manager and demanded that a bag of cash be delivered to his limo, idling just outside.

Presto! Flowers! Stick ‘em Up!
Image: Discount Tricks

In the world of magic this is called “misdirection”: using some prop or gesture to put observers off guard. “Look over there!”—not here, as I’m dealing from the bottom of the deck. To this end, what could be more eye-catching and disarming than flowers? The fact is, both these flower plots worked (though a suspect’s been arrested in the Maple Grove case).

About a year ago a thief in Boise, Idaho, held up the Key Bank, jumped into a yellow getaway car and drove off. Apparently, he didn’t get far, nor did he intend to. He stopped into a local flower shop and spent one new $50 bill on blooms. A case of misdirection-backfire: the $50 note was easy evidence, promptly traced back to the bank.

Robbery 101: Flash your flowers before or AS you break the law, not afterward. It’s hard to vanish with a rose between your teeth.

Sunday, January 13, 2008

Behold the Wollemi Pine!

With the discovery of “living fossils” in China and, now, Australia, the EarthScholars administer a gentle bump on the head. Wake up! You might have just missed a plant celebrity. Thank you, Jim and Renee.

Through One Eye
By Joan True (1940-2006)

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

It seems rather “common sensical” to us that when we look at something repeatedly, we observe whatever is present to be seen, and over time, it becomes increasingly familiar to us. But is that really a defensible assumption?

Shall we conduct a little test? Surely you have watched the fingers on your hands move countless times. If you are currently sitting at a table, position one of your hands forcefully flat on the table top in front of you.  Question: Which finger is the only one that cannot be easily lifted up by itself, separately, while the remaining four are kept flat?  Although most people have looked at and used their fingers every day of their lives, few people predict that it is their ring finger which has the least dexterity. Why don’t they know this? Visual cognition studies show that we often “look” without selectively paying attention to or concentrating on particular aspects of our visual field.

Thus, the verifiable but seldom chosen answer is the ring finger—for anatomical reasons that turn out be fairly complex. However, and this is important, if you were guided by a mentor to observe your fingers systematically for an extended period of time--such as in learning to type, to play a musical instrument, or to perform sleight-of-hand magic tricks--you are much more likely to answer that question quickly and correctly, based upon your visual memory of your own finger movement. Thus, observation is really “systematized looking” that we consciously wish to make available to us for future recall—this happens whenever we are looking with a vested interest or a purpose in mind, or whenever we are looking carefully in order to try to understand something.

Another example: How many times have you looked at a US penny? Thousands of times! You get pennies in change and you count them; you lay out your pennies to pay a restaurant bill exactly; you place your pennies in a coin dish for later use. You don’t do these things with your eyes closed, do you? Questions: Does the president’s head on a penny face right or left? Which US president is it? How many times and where does his image appear on a single penny? On which side and at which clock-hour position does the word liberty appear? Is it written as LIBERTY or Liberty? It’s not easy to recall these details, is it?—unless you are seasoned numismatist (coin collector). If so, you are used to observing these features and using them as indicators to establish the grade or condition of each penny in your collection. Similar limitations apply to the untrained eye’s observations of plants, but to an even greater degree—because most people look at individual plants quite infrequently.

In our January 10th, 2006 Human Flower Project article entitled “On Seeing Flowers: Are You Missing Anything?” we explained the basic principles of our plant blindness theory which asserts that, especially in urban settings within developed countries, people tend subconsciously to overlook, undervalue, and fail to differentiate the plants in their environment—consciously sensing only a “green blur” or a verdant backdrop of vegetation against which human and animal activities of interest to them take place.

It should be noted that the United States is an urbanized nation, with 80% of its population residing in cities and suburbs. Thus, it seems likely that, unless they have been influenced by a plant mentor or are self-taught plant aficionados, plant blindness is the default botanical- attention state for most US citizens today.

People pay more attention to large plants than small plants. The largest plants in the Plant Kingdom are trees (which, studies have shown, young children don’t even consider to be plants). Trees comprise about 25% of all plant species and are the defining life forms of many large terrestrial biomes--including the temperate coniferous forest biome, deciduous forest biome, and tropical rainforest biome. You would think that by the present day, humankind would have discovered all the large species of trees on Earth—and you would be wrong. How could even experienced plant explorers overlook some strange-looking, tall trees, you may ask?

The discovery site of the Wollemi Pine
Image: Bradshaw Foundation

Consider this. In 1994, approximately two dozen 100-foot-tall trees from the age of dinosaurs (90 million years old) were discovered growing in the sandstone gorges of a wilderness area only 125 miles northwest of the most populous city in all of Australia—Sydney, the home of over 4 million people.

These trees were discovered in Wollemi (WALL-um-eye) National Park of New South Wales by David Noble, a bushwalker/rock climber/park and wildlife officer. Having previously made hundreds of expeditions exploring the park, Noble was an experienced plant observer who suddenly realized he had never seen such trees before. He stashed several twig specimens in his backpack to show to expert dendrologists (tree biologists) and plant taxonomists.  The trees that caught Noble’s attention turned out to be an entirely new tree species, and even a new genus of tree, apparently related to the ancient Araucariaceae (ah-rou-carry-ACE-eh-ee) family of evergreen coniferous trees, a family dating back 200 million years. Other members of this family include the Norfolk Island Pine (Araucaria heterophylla) and the Monkey-Puzzle tree (Araucaria araucana).

In 1998, these newly discovered living trees were officially named the Wollemi Pine (Wollemia nobilis), with the species epithet nobilis honoring its discoverer, David Noble. Part of its common name, Pine, is (as with the Norfolk Island Pine) a misnomer, because this tree merely resembles a pine (true pines are members of the genus Pinus and are typically found only in the Northern Hemisphere).

Wollemi Pine: Fossilized leaves and living leaves, in two or four flattened ranks
Photos: Paula Offutt

Later, paleobotanists discovered that existing specimens of fossil pollen and fossil seed cones (including some recovered during Australian dinosaur excavations) matched those of the living Wollemi Pines. There is now quite a well-established fossil record of this species. Journalists often call such a plant species a living fossil: an informal term for any living species (or clade) of organism that appears to be the same as a species otherwise only known from the Earth’s fossil record and that has no close living relatives.

In paleobotany, a Lazarus taxon (plural, taxa) is a classification category that disappears from one or more periods of the fossil record, only to appear again later. (The term refers to the biblical story of Lazarus, whom Jesus miraculously raises from the dead.) Lazarus taxa are observational artifacts that can occur due to incomplete sampling or local extinction in areas later resupplied. In the case of Wollemia nobilis, some existing fossil pollen and seed cones were shown to have been previously misidentified, and thus some gaps in its fossil record have now been eliminated.

Artist’s rendering of a Wollemi Pine
Image: Edge Cinema

Later scientific studies have shown that Wollemi Pines
(a) total about 100 mature naturally-occurring, living specimens, divided into three small populations within the park;
(b) populations reproduce sexually but show virtually no genetic variation—these trees are all clones;
(c) are susceptible to attack by foreign pathogens carried by visitors (hence researcher access has been carefully controlled via quarantine at the three secret natural sites within the park and $133,000 fines are posted for disturbing these trees);
(d) are strangely capable of shedding entire branches rather than just individual leaves;
(e) are host to a fungus which produces taxol, an important anticancer drug;
(f) can be raised from seed, plus be successfully propagated quite rapidly using modern tissue culture techniques;
(g) are found in three similar ecological niches featuring permanently moist, active-stream gorges, with similar soils and light regimes; and
(h) often have multiple stems originating at the base of their trunk--as many as 160.

The Australian government has helped the Wollemi Pine become a plant celebrity. Potted specimens were sent on tour to the nation’s botanic gardens. Sydney’s botanic garden organized a cooperative venture between the government and the private business sector to use tissue culture techniques to propagate and sell the tree on a commercial scale, with an international marketing plan.  Royalties from its plant sales will support conservation of the Wollemi Pine. Thus, North Americans can now order their own “living fossil” Wollemi Pine tree (check here) for a cost of less than $150. It can be cultivated as a tall tree, patio plant, or potted plant. Because this ancient and initially rare tree has attractive, unusually dark green foliage and bubbly (coco-puff-like) bark, sprouts multiple trunks, and is shade-tolerant, it is quite likely to become popular worldwide, both as a plant celebrity and geobiological teaching tool to heighten public understanding of plant evolution, biodiversity, extinction, refugia, and geologic time.

Plant zoo? Rare Wollemi Pine exhibited inside a cage for its own protection
Photo: Biotechnology Online

In 1948, the announced rediscovery of the Dawn Redwood tree (Metasequoia glyptostroboides) in China near Modaoxi by Zhan Wang (1943)—a tree previously known only by its fossils—rocked the botanical world. It is the only living species in the ancient redwood genus named Metasequoia. An easy tree to grow from seed in temperate climates, it can reach a height of 135 feet or more within a century after planting. Or, if you have no room in your yard for such a tall tree, you can grow one as a miniature bonsai tree.

As if to anticipate the focus of this article, it should be noted that Wollemi is an aboriginal word meaning “Watch out!” or, “Look around you!”

Our message is that paying attention to plants necessarily involves comparison and attending to details. We often look without seeing, without knowing what to look for, and thus we miss much more visual information than we should. Two other hikers accompanied David Noble on the day of his great discovery, but only David noticed the huge Wollemi Pines. The emotional, intellectual, and participatory rewards of careful plant observation can help give our lives and the lives of others meaning and purpose. That’s what David Noble’s and Zhan Wang’s discoveries teach us. As for the Wollemi Pine, Sir David Attenborough spoke for the embedded biological explorer that resides within each of us when he exclaimed: “How marvelous and exciting that we should have discovered this rare survivor from such an ancient past.” A plant celebrity? Indeed!

Thursday, January 10, 2008

To Those Who Value Spirit of Place

John Levett abandons a museum trip to explore Amersham, rose-tinted, despite a winter rain. Thank you, John.

In Amersham, out the Metropolitan line
Photo: John Levett

By John Levett

London still gives me a buzz.

I wasn’t born there but I was supposed to be. Mum was travelling from Brighton to South London sometime during the night of 4th August 1944 when a nearby explosion of a V1 somewhere in the countryside around Tunbridge Wells brought on labour and I was delivered the following day. A few hours later and I’d have been a Deptford boy. At least, that was always the family myth; like most creation stories, shot through with inconsistencies but when the myth becomes convenient, stick with the myth. We spent a few years moving from one flat to another, one member of the extended family to another until we settled in Luton, the post-war Detroit of the British motor industry but without the Great Lakes. It was around the Summer of 1949 that mum took me on a first-ever trip out of Luton back to London.

One thing I’ve kept from birth is a wide-eyed astonishment at the existence of everything, and it was the Maternal Grand Plan that I was supposed to. Bringing up a child as a single parent at the end of a war, without a home, looking for a job and coping with insecurity is tough, but I was given wonder out of an orange and a piece of string. It was popping into the newly-regenerated St. Pancras terminus a month ago that recalled the first trip and its wonder.

I can now do a day trip to Paris but Luton to London 1949 still compares. The hugest station ever (Wanna be a train driver). The walk up Euston Road (Wanna be a taxi driver). The stuffed bear outside the entrance to Heals in Tottenham Court Road (Wanna be a trapper). The pier at Charing Cross and the first bottle of Pepsi since the war (Wanna be a Melican). There were lots of ‘Wanna be...’ that day. We took a trip up the Thames estuary on the steamer Royal Sovereign to Southend, walked the mile-long pier to the promenade, ate fat and sugar off sticks & out of paper bags, sailed home into a sunset.

I never got bought stuff as a kid. We did trips and got history. Later, books. Nothing’s changed. I’m grateful. Last December I skipped (and I do mean ‘skipped’, so flush was I with amazement and memory) out of St. Pancras into Starbucks opposite the British Library. (Starbucks! Is it just me or has anyone else noticed the inverse correlation between Starbucks and the numbers of free public lavatories that work? Do they have shares in the firms that make these HAL-operated lock-in Pay-to-Pee obelisks?) I sat and scoffed and remembered commissioning for a present a watercolour of St. Pancras in the early ‘70s, around the time it was within weeks of being demolished. I still admire Kings Cross as better architecture but it doesn’t have 1949.

Having polished off a cinnamon swirl and double espresso and sworn a voodoo curse for having contributed another three quid to global cultural levelling, I hoofed it up the road in the direction of Marylebone for reasons I’ve forgotten but which were no doubt worthy.

John Betjeman’s encomium to England’s railways and stations
Image: Amazon UK

Once I’d got as far as Marylebone Station I remembered a number of things. First was, is this the age when I ought to start writing lists of what I should do when I get there? Secondly, I was going to the Louise Bourgeois exhibition at Tate Modern. Thirdly, I’ve never travelled anywhere from Marylebone and where do trains go to from here? Finally, they go to Metroland and that’s where John Betjeman went to when television was still in black and white (at least in our house) in whenever it was, and didn’t Julian Barnes write a novel about it, and wasn’t it made into a film in whenever it was? So I was there in the Underground wondering if this is Part 1 of dementia, looking to change at Baker Street for the Jubilee Line and thence to Southwark for the Tate and seeing Amersham lit up and thinking I’ve never been there and getting a buzz of wanting to.

Now come a couple of digressions. Digression one: the tyranny of the list. This comes from childhood too—always finish what you start. So if it’s on the list then it’s gotta get finished or I go to hell—the Jesuitical equivalent of Getting Things Done. Bourgeois was on the list so get thee hence to Southwark. So to Baker Street for the Jubilee Line I went and having arrived there Amersham was available again via the estimable Metropolitan Line. Falling off the cliff-edge of the list and towards the infernal regions I’m now at… Digression two: I’m drawn towards bits of England I missed and Amersham at the end of the Metropolitan Line in a small depression of the Chiltern Hills has an iconic value to those who value spirit of place. Louise got dumped.

Through Amersham to Aylesbury and the Vale,
In those wet fields the railway didn’t pay.
The Metro stops at Amersham today.

When Betjeman made his 1972 documentary it was still (just) possible in the counties surrounding London (Kent, Essex, Hertfordshire, Bucks) to walk a day in the country and meet no-one; to stand on a hill like the ‘pilgrims’ in Michael Powell’s 1944 ‘A Canterbury Tale’ & see the cathedral of Canterbury with little to distract you in between; to picnic near a pond without the bother of other people’s kids (“Precious to you madam but a pain in the arse to the rest of the nation”); to sit without a background drone; to pitch a tent in a field without need of armed guard.

Amersham illuminated, December 2007
Photo: John Levett

I exaggerate no doubt but from this distance it feels like it was that way. (I’m writing this listening to Vaughan Williams’ Pastoral Symphony which can befuddle the memory.) But it was an idyll of sorts that fuelled the growth of Metroland. In the post-Great War decades arterial roads and the new industries grew westwards out of London; people and houses followed. Villages knowing little change since Victoria’s reign save for lost youth now lost certainty and permanence; the newcomers (£5 deposit and an uninterrupted lifetime to pay off) got a piece of rural England and a peace of some sort. If I’d been an Amersham villager I’d have been mightily pissed off.

I took the Underground, becoming overground past Finchley Road. I once owned the original shooting script by Edward Mirzoeff for Betjeman’s film and vaguely remembered the stops; the poet in the centre of the old stadium at Wembley (replaced by the beached whale of corporate pomp and bloated hubris that is now English football’s home); Harrow-on-the-Hill; Pinner and its Mediaeval Fair; Chorleywood and the Voysey house. And Amersham at the line’s end. Home to Cromwell’s wife; loyal to Parliament’s forces; solid for the first bourgeois revolution.

In Amersham, one monument to the first bourgeois revolution
Photo: John Levett

It was a grey day with almost-drizzle that hangs. I walked around the collection of shops; hardly a town, a charity shop on each corner, surprised by a still-working Woolworth’s, dispirited by the Tesco Express new-build. A sign pointed down the hill to old Amersham. Worth a soaking.

This was the direction the newcomers built their way out of Amersham-on-the-Hill towards ever-less faux rurality and touching a bit of real essence. Those with a bit more cash, more to buy more space, the bank manager not the salaried clerk. Then a gem.

High and Over in the mist, Dec. 2007
Photo: John Levett

I came to High and Over which sounds like no great shakes but is. Depending on your view of what constitutes Modernism, its history, its span, the dates that bookend it, High and Over was the first Modernist building in England. At least, one that le Corbusier would have been happy with. (Betjeman rubbished it.) It was completed around 1931 (a bit late for Modernist houses but England never took to ‘foreign’; much better off with clap-board Tudor) and there have been changes since but it’s still iconic. What the burgers of Amersham thought of it I’ve no idea but it’s brought trade to the town; if I’d connected town and house I’d have trekked here sooner.

Bucked by this find I skipped (for the second time that day) down the hill, past another Tesco, into the old town and out the other end. Old Amersham is standard fare for what’s left of villages these days; bijou boutiques; antiques and antiquities; huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’ clobber; travel agents; chiropractors. I always look for the antiquarian bookshop in places like this but too often they’ve been reduced to the pile-’em-high-sell-’em-short second-hand paperback trade but not even that here. The end of the village took me to the main road towards Aylesbury, stopping off at Great Missenden, Little Hampden, Wendover if I had a mind to, the days to and the boots to.

Public housing in Amersham, built c. 1920
Photo: John Levett

It was drizzling more heavily by now and was closing in on the surrounding hills. I walked a different route around the back of the village, through the public housing which I judged to be mid-1920s. ‘Homes for Heroes,’ provision of social housing as a civic responsibility, communal plots for vegetable growing, the village hall—a society which could identify itself and aspire to something. When Betjeman was in his pomp, England was, too—rotten to the core with class, racism, hypocrisy, poverty and exploitation but with its pockets of tradition made in spite of all that; a labouring class keeping itself intact, subverting the master’s ideology, making sense out of having little and expecting less. For no reason other than it comes to me most often when I catch this ‘How-we-used-to-be’ mood, I remembered the final scene of Humphry Jennings’ end-of-the-war documentary ‘A Diary for Timothy’; a small gang of kids running through a bomb site towards a distance which was all our futures. I could see High and Over from where I stood; two ideas of a future. I could see Tesco, too.

Still from ‘A Canterbury Tale’
Michael Powell’s film (1944)
Image: Screen Online

Addendum: The mind sometimes doesn’t serve history well. After writing this piece I realized I had confused myself slightly. Betjeman didn’t take the Underground on the Metropolitan Line, he took the railway which, in its days of majesty, went beyond Amersham to Aylesbury and almost as far as Buckingham which is stretching the adjective ‘metropolitan’ a tad. Both Underground and train use the same station at Amersham which also accommodates a fine staff who patiently service the confusion of seekers after rose-tinted England.

Tuesday, January 08, 2008

Swedes Do It Differently

An exhibit of floral photographs shows the ranging sexuality Linnaeus saw, recorded, loved.

Tragopogon pratensis
from Herbarium Amoris
by Edvard Koinberg

Could it be that a culture’s sex life is revealed in its floral art?

An exhibit of photographs by Edvard Koinberg called Herbarium Amoris suggests that may be.  Koinberg shots and assembled 38 flower images to celebrate botany’s first librarian, Carl Linnaeus of Sweden (his 300th birthday was last May). Koinberg points to Linnaeus’s candid and loving study of plant sexuality as the inspiration for his own art.

“Flowers are nothing other than the breeding organs of plants,” Linnaeus wrote, “yet with that difference from those of animals, which we regard as so foul that witnessing them awakens shame, so that, in animals, nature has in most cases found a way to cover them up. On the other hand, in the plant kingdom these parts are not hidden but instead firmly exhibited for all to see, Oh, yes!”

Koinberg writes that with Systema Naturae‘s publication in 1735, it took only two months for Linnaeus to become famous. “His ideas concerning the sexuality of plants caused some alarm, but people were also titillated by them. He was accused of leading young people astray with his accounts of the plants ‘love life.’ This, however, simply added to his reputation.”

There’s nothing new about titillation leading to celebrity. But a couple of things make this exhibit enormously interesting. First, the Swedish Institute, a state agency “established to disseminate knowledge abroad about Sweden´s social and cultural life” has sponsored Koinberg’s show and made possible a three-year global tour. Now, certainly MGM and Warner Brothers are only too glad to disseminate (sorry) U.S.A.-style sexuality abroad, but the U.S. government?? Not in 300 or even a million years.

Secondly, Koinberg’s interpretation—the depiction of sexuality in his flower photographs—is quite astonishing, especially for those of us accustomed to the sleek, quasi-pornographic breast and phallus imagery of Americans like Robert Mapplethorpe. What a shudder, that we’re invited to see the amorousness in an image like this:

Paeonia lactiflora

Or how about this?

Dryopteris flix-mas

It’s not too late for New Year’s resolutions!!

Readers who investigate the Swedish Institute’s site can explore Koinberg’s work in the same spirit as Garbo-watching: without one bit of “shame.” Another delight is to see the variety of ways that Herbarium Amoris has been installed across the world. Perhaps there are clues to sexual behaviors here as well; keep it elevated, oh yes, and tell us what you find.

The Orangery Garden in Österbybruk, Uppland, Sweden (2005)
Photo: Herbarium Amoris

The exhibit continues its tour this year; here’s a rough schedule:

8 Jan. - 16 Mar. 2008: House of Sweden, Washington D.C. USA
15 - 27 January, 2008: Angebo Folkets Hus, Sweden
13 Mar - May, 2008: National Museum of History, Minsk, Belorussia
Sept - Oct. 2008: Museum of Nature History, Belgrade, Serbia