Human Flower Project
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Denver, Colorado USA
Hollywood, California USA
Ho Chi Minh City, VIETNAM
Thursday, February 02, 2012
HFQ #11: A Freight Forwarder?
Transporting plants internationally takes special expertise. Can anyone help this farmer in Austria find a “travel agent” for sweet potato slips?
Do you know of a reliable freight forwarder with experience handling plants?
A reader in Austria writes:
“We are a family farm in Austria, trying to import young specialty plants from the U.S. for a farm-trial this year (ipomoea batatas ‘slips’; 2 or 3 palletts (450kg each), in May 2012, to be specific).
“The nursery in the US producing them for us has no experience in overseas shipping and could not find any freight forwarder willing to take on the shipment… they all claim they categorically “don’t do plants,” the nursery tells us. Neither have I found any freight forwarder this side of the Atlantic interested/willing to do this, much to my chagrin.
“Therefore, may I ask if you could maybe recommend a freight forwarder, specializing in plant-transport? Or, would you happen to know a possible source/weblink for such freight
companies?
“Thank you so very much, any help is very appreciated.”
Thursday, December 15, 2011
The Unforeseen: Yahoo Falls
Plantsmen Allen Bush and Paul Cappiello, hunting for pink muhly grass, fall down a rabbit hole of botanical wonders in McCreary County, Kentucky.
Silene rotundifolia blooming near Yahoo Falls
McCreary County, Kentucky, November 2011
Photo: Allen Bush
By Allen Bush
I had no idea what was in store last spring, when Paul Cappiello began talking about an autumn day-trip to Eastern Kentucky. Paul is the Executive Director of Yew Dell Gardens in Crestwood, Kentucky. The premise – or the excuse for a fun walk in the woods - seemed simple enough: try to find cold-hardy native stands of the pink muhly grass, Muhlenbergia capillaris. They were there, somewhere in the Cumberland Mountains; we knew that. Julian Campbell had said so. And Julian knows where just about every native plant is, in every nook and cranny across the state. He had found pink muhly seedlings in Rowan County earlier in the year.
Friday, December 09, 2011
Thread-Brazen: Ooty’s Garden
Mumbai writer Lubna Kably discovers a garden in Tamil Nadu that stays in bloom year round. Thank you, Lubna!
Embroidered “houseplants”, including Begonia Rex,
Thread Garden in Ooty, Tamil Nadu, India
Photo: Shomita Mukherjee
By Lubna Kably
Ooty, known as the Queen of the Hills, lies in India’s southern state of Tamil Nadu and is rich in flora. Wild flowers sprout along walking tracks, tea gardens flourish on the slopes, a myriad varieties of trees especially the eucalyptus tower overhead. Yet, bang opposite a well known tourist landmark – the Lake—lies the Thread Garden.
It took twelve years and a dedicated team of 50 trained workers to create this garden, using a ‘self invented’ technology of four dimensional hand woven embroidery.
“This unique art of creating natural looking plants and flowers makes use of self developed techniques under the ‘Hand-wound Embroidery system’ without needles or machinery with specially selected and developed materials. All parts of a plant such as flower petals, leaves and stems are fully wound with thread using a shaped canvas bases inside for flowers and leaves and steel and copper wires for stems with keen concentration coupled with patience, keeping a machine made perfection, avoiding any overlapping or knots or gaps between the windings.”
Wednesday, October 12, 2011
Memory Fails Me Not
John Levett, venturing after poet Philip Larkin, recreates his own past —true to the present.
At Hull University
Essay and photos by John Levett
About a week ago I delivered a presentation entitled ‘Refractory memory.’ Some of the definitions of ‘refractory’ include obstinate, stubborn, mulish, pigheaded, obdurate, headstrong, self-willed, wayward, wilful, perverse, contrary, recalcitrant, obstreperous, disobedient, difficult. For this the research group, I was presenting work derived from a four day stay in the city of Hull on the Humber estuary; in the context of my own photographic practice, I was reflecting upon the persistence of pronounced subjects in the images that I capture. I was also asking why I keep returning to Hull. Screen dissolve.
In the first week of October 1964 I travelled up to Hull to the university. I stayed for three days. It was the first of five universities that I went to in the ‘60s. I could never settle to the life. It has only been of late that I have recognised the processes by which I learn and none of the places I went to in that decade let me get on with my own curriculum. With Hull, however, I never gave it a chance.
I went up on the Monday in a friend’s car and we arrived long after nightfall. I woke up in the morning in the hall of residence I’d been assigned, took a look around the barracks, found out it was miles from the campus and started making my exit plans. Day two included a talk by the librarian on what to expect. He stood above us (on a stage? on a podium? just tall?) and said: “I feel like Hitler or John Lennon.” It was at this point that I missed a trick. Anyone who comes out with a first line like that in the retentive context of the provincial university of that time is no bore. If he’d then read ‘This Be The Verse’ then I’d have taken notice, bought the book and hung around. He didn’t as he hadn’t written it yet, and he’d have found self-promotion vulgar anyway.
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