Human Flower Project

Medicine

Sunday, October 04, 2009

Spanish Moss…You Don’t Say!

A Southern Belle changed the rules of radio and put seven wispy seconds between “live” and “broadcast.”

Tillandsia usneoides - Spanish moss— sways from oaks
on St. Simons Island, Georgia
Photo: Allen Bush

By Allen Bush

The thin, dangling, curly wisps of gray Spanish Moss draped over huge branches of multi-trunked live oaks (Quercus virginiana) are a stunning landscape feature of the southern U.S. coastal low country. But walking in the beautiful squares of Savannah, Georgia, last week and driving along roadways on Sea Island and Jekyll Island, I kept thinking of Kentucky radio reporter Fred Wiche. Few know that Spanish moss—neither a moss nor lichen, but an epiphytic bromeliad, relative of pineapple—changed radio protocol forever far inland, in my hometown of Louisville.

I got very confused on Wiche’s Saturday morning radio show in September 1994. I blame it on Spanish moss (Tillandsia usneoides). I was sitting four feet across the table from the beloved WHAS radio personality. We were talking about powdery mildew on phlox. The trouble was I was hearing him again through the ear piece on a small, radio walkman that he had handed me just before the show began. The annoying echo of my own response—seven seconds later – was driving me nuts. At the first break, I asked what was going on. Fred muttered something about Spanish moss. He said I was doing fine and he’d explain at the end of the program.

Fred broadcast the “Weekend Gardener” remotely each week from his back deck, overlooking the orchard, vegetables and flowers on his beautiful farm near Simpsonville, south of Louisville.  Fred and I chatted on the air about durable perennials for the Ohio Valley and callers asked good questions. I never got adjusted to the weird echo. I was listening to the radio while he was tuned into the studio’s direct feed. He wasn’t bothered by the seven second delayed re-play.

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Saturday, July 25, 2009

Soothing Linalool

When 16th Century Aztec poets and 21st Century Japanese scientists agree, we’re really onto something.

Xochiquetzal (Aztec Flower Goddess)
Image: from the Codex Borgia, via Mexicolore

Did anyone notice that Meso-American folk culture and Japanese chemistry reached accord this week?

It happened in a whiff of marigold. Akio Nakamura and fellow researchers who’ve been stressing out lab rats found that that linalool “reduced the activity of more than 100 genes that go into overdrive in stressful situations.” The tormented rats that inhaled linalool—a fragrant oil in lavender, sweet pea, marigold and many other plants—showed blood levels far lower in stressor chemicals. The research suggests that this fragrance both protects the immune system and produces a soothing effect.

“The Nosegay”
Image: Library of Virginia

So fas as we know, the 16th Century Aztecs didn’t need to restrain rats to figure this out.  Flowers were part of nearly all dimensions of sacred and secular life—from a complex cycle of flower poetry, to dances and games at harvest time, even military maneuvers. Aztec princes and warriors used nosegays to calm their nerves—and so did more everyday people: 

In his Historia de las Indias de Nueva España (1581), Fray Diego Durán wrote of the Aztec people: “They find gladness and joy in spending the entire day smelling a little flower or bouquet made of different kinds of flowers; their gifts are accompanied by them; they relieve the tediousness of journeys with flowers.”

(If only Henry Louis Gates had stopped by a flower shop on his way back from China, and the Cambridge P.D. issued bouquets along with handcuffs.)

Friday, February 06, 2009

Pick Your Poison

Allen Bush introduces us to plants that fomented the Iraq War and stopped the heart of Socrates. Proceed with caution.

Seeds of Castor bean, Ricinus communis
Photo: Steve Hurst, USDA-NRCS PLANTS Database

By Allen Bush

The Grateful Dead had a song, beloved by all Deadheads, called “Wheel” with a fateful line: “If the thunder don’t get you, the lightning will.” The warning apparently didn’t reach golfer Lee Trevino and the thought shouldn’t paralyze gardeners. The former P.G.A., U.S. and British Open champion knew how to handle an approaching thunderstorm. Trevino said the safest defense was to hold a two iron in the air. “Even God can’t hit a two iron,” he said.

Relatedly, here’s Donald Rumsfeld, in 2002, a year before going to war in Iraq: “There are known knowns. There are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we now know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we do not know we don’t know”  …a round about way of implying what “Wheel” said succinctly: A threat, even an existential one, can scare the Hell out of a lot of people.

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Tuesday, January 06, 2009

Just What the Doctor Should Order

Appendectomy? Two horticulture researchers document how flowers and foliage can hasten your recovery.

White cyclamen and cards at a hospital patient’s bedside, Louisville, Kentucky
Photo: Human Flower Project

“Get me outta here!” – the battle cry of hospital patients around the world.

Seong-Hyun Park and Richard Mattson, horticulturists at Kansas State University, have a new paper out that sheds light—and relief—on this ancient predicament. They found that having flowering and foliage plants in the room significantly improved patients’ comfort, health, and attitudes while recovering from surgery.

The researchers studied 90 patients who had appendectomies—a fairly routine surgical procedure—in a suburban Korean hospital. In half the patients’ rooms, the researchers placed twelve plants:

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