Human Flower Project

Politics

Thursday, May 08, 2008

Flower Electioneering: You Be the Judge

Did $11 arrangements break Oregon elections law? We plead the case of one judicial candidate.

Mr. F.E. Smith, lawyer
Could you buy his vote
with one pink rose?
Drawing: Vanity Fair/SPY
via Antique Maps and Prints

Flower power is very real - and chancy, working less like a strategic missile than a heap of gunpowder. BOOM, sometimes. But more often you get kablooey!

So discovered Doug McGeary, a lawyer in southern Oregon, who “deployed” $11 arrangements in his campaign to be Jackson County Circuit Court Judge.

In Oregon, the state bar association polls local attorneys on their preferences among judicial candidates, then makes those preferences public before election day. McGeary’s campaign advisor recommended that he send flowers to 25 law firms in the area as “modest floral reminders” intended to “get out the vote.” McGeary won the April poll of lawyers, by the way; according to reporter Sanne Specht, he pulled in 110 votes, many more than either of his two opponents (71 and 23 votes apiece).

But since learning of the floral gifts, one of McGeary’s opponents is calling the lawyers’ poll “tainted.” The flower strategy that first looked like a political bull’s eye now is careening like a wild pitch. The state of Oregon, like most others, prohibits any gift giving that could smack of vote-buying. What, exactly, smacks like that? According to a state election official, “Frisbees, hats and postage stamps” are out of bounds, but “balloons, bookmarks and pens are allowed.” What about nail files or cigars? What about bubble gum cigars, then? And what about flowers? Oregon law, it appears, is silent on any of them.

Doug McGeary and family (and flowers)
Photo: Doug4Judge

We aren’t eligible to vote in Oregon, but we would like to speak up on Doug McGeary’s behalf. Foremost, he seems to be someone who sincerely likes flowers. Check out this photo from his campaign website showing McGeary and the family, a bunch of placards flung around, and a folding table with a vase of flowers. Nice touch, Doug!

Second, Oregon election officials should note that in both Texas and Florida, flowers get a bye, at least on the opening day of the legislature. See our story on Florida here.

An arrangement priced at $18.50
delivery cost not included
Image: Flower Magik

And third, consider for a moment what sort of arrangement $11 will buy. We actually couldn’t even find one that, uh, “inexpensive” on any online florist’s site. The closest was this $18.50 selection: three pink (or lavender) roses, and bit of greenery in a glass cylinder. That price doesn’t include the delivery fee, by the way. Reasonably, we’d guess that for $11 a pop, Doug might have been able to send one rose or a couple of sprigs of alstromeria to each of these 25 law firms.

Now, think about the last time you were in a law office...and think about the lawyers you know. How big an impact could a floral arrangement on this scale have in one of those wood-paneled caverns? And when was the last time your lawyer friends were impressed, by ANYTHING?

Your Honor: the defense rests.

Friday, April 25, 2008

A Tall Order—Large Stature Trees

What lengths would you go to for shade, good drainage, and year ‘round beauty? Urban arborist Georgia Silvera Seamans explains the benefits of tall trees and ways to plant these giants successfully in cities. Thank you, Georgia.

Cycle path, Lincoln Parkway, Buffalo
Source: Heartland

By Georgia Silvera Seamans

The “Right Tree in the Right Place” (RTRP) concept encourages municipalities, NGOs, and homeowners to plant trees shorter than 25 feet under overhead utility lines. The crowns of large stature trees, encroaching on wires, can cause a number of problems: downed branches that interrupt utility service, tree trimmers’ perilous contact with live wires, and the conventional pruning of tree crowns into U-shapes (these tend to be structurally unsound and are nearly always unattractive).

Consequently, following RTRP along roads and in neighborhoods with overhead wires yields a short canopy. Redbud, purpleleaf plum, crape myrtle, “flowering” cherry, crabapple, Japanese lilac, and trident and hedge maples, these small stature trees both look and function differently than do streetscapes of large trees like elm, London plane tree, sweet gum, tulip tree, ginkgo, oak, and linden.

Let’s consider some of those differences.

Setback trees on private property create sidewalk shade.  Berkeley, CA.
Photo: Georgia Silvera Seamans

The aesthetic contribution of short stature trees tends to be limited to their flowering season, while the arching canopy effect of larger stature trees is a year-round feature. Also, short canopies, while beneficial to wildlife, produce smaller ecosystem benefits.  (See “Street Trees: Let’s Think Outside the Wires.” Short stature trees have tremendous habitat and food value.  Take urban birds.  They utilize different layers of the urban forest canopy. As Julie Zickefoose writes in Natural Gardening for Birds, short stature hawthorns provide berries, while larger stature ashes and locusts provide nesting.)

Here are other benefits provided by larger stature trees:

• They provide more shade for infrastructure like streets: “shade on the street segment with large-stature trees will reduce costs for repaving by $2,900 (58%) over the 30-year period compared to the unshaded street. Shade from the small-stature trees is projected to save only $829 (17%)” (From Why Shade Streets? by the Center for Urban Forest Research, 2006).

• In terms of air pollution, “the annual net reductions for pollutants range from 10.1 lbs for a 40-year-old large tree to 0.7 lbs for a 40-year-old small tree. And values range from $64 for a 40-year-old large tree to $1.62 for a 40-year-old small tree” (Center for Urban Forest Research, newsletter, January 2005).

To learn more, here are three good resources (al pdf files): the CUFR’s 2003 newsletter “The case for the large tree”; 2001 Factsheet #1 about the benefits of large front yard trees; and Dr. Greg McPherson’s 2003 article, “A benefit–cost analysis of ten street tree species in Modesto, California, U.S.,” published in the Journal of Arboriculture.

Another deficit of the Right Tree for the Right Place formulation is its ignorance of design factors.  Street trees are typically planted at the street edge of the sidewalk.  Wires are generally sited towards the edge of the sidewalk, too.  With this inevitable conflict for over space, streets with overhead wires are usually planted with short stature trees.  But, street trees could be planted on the building side of the sidewalk or in front yards (preferably through an easement so that the city has some oversight about removals).  There are actually several such “setback” programs in the U.S.  The City of Boston Parks Department sponsors one, (and is enabled to do so according to Massachusetts General Law).  Public trees can be planted on private property as long as they are within 15 feet of the public right of way.  EarthWorks Projects in Boston, MA, initiated the Setback Trees Project in 2007, self-described as planting “trees on private property for the common good.”

Bumpout (note this bumpout is not connected to the sidewalk) – tree is just outside overhead wires.  Berkeley, CA
Photo: Georgia Silvera Seamans

There are other design possibilities.  Trees could be planted in bump-outs located beyond overhead wires, in traffic circles at neighborhood intersections, or in the center of neighborhood blocks (see photo below).  (Traffic calming is one co-benefit of planting trees in the center of the roadway or at an intersection.)

And overhead wires could be buried.  This is an expensive proposition; according to The Seattle Times, the cost to the city of burying utility wires for a local project was $350-$400 per linear foot.  In another Washington community, the cost of burying electric, phone, and cable wires was estimated at $2500 per foot.

However, tall urban street canopies provide considerable benefits long-term.  The conflict between large stature trees and overhead wires is not new.  In his fascinating book, Republic of Shade, about the American elm (Ulmus americana) in New England, Thomas J. Campanella describes anti-elm sentiments expressed in an 1853 article from the New York Times:

“Most American cities were in urgent need of a pruning.  Larger, ‘weedy’ species should be removed at once, (the Times writer) argued, and replaced with smaller trees ‘of a character that can be trained around the wires.’ Elms, very big and very weedy, must be sacrificed to appease the goddess of electricity.”

Appeasing the gods of electricity: large trees pruned into u’s under wires on Old Brownsboro Road, Louisville, KY
Photo: Human Flower Project

Campanella also notes that changes in road technology affected trees.  Street surfaces before 1890 did not restrict “the passage of water, nutrients, or oxygen to the roots of adjacent trees,” but asphalt and concrete paving “virtually sealed the surface of the street,” depriving trees of all three. 

Another dimension of “Right Tree in the Right Place” is to select species according to the size of the growing area—most often the square foot of the sidewalk cutout or width of the tree lawn (the grass strip located within the sidewalk).  This is a very reasonable concept.  Healthy trees depend on adequate root systems, which requires sufficient area to grow.  Often, according to landscape architect and arborist James Urban, we look up at tree crowns and ignore what’s happening below ground.

Different cities have different standards.  In the City of Boston, the minimum tree well area is 24 square feet, often a 3x8 foot or 4x6 foot sidewalk cutout.  One East Bay, California city’s minimum standard is 2x2 feet or 4 square feet!  Generally speaking, a foot of root area supports an inch of trunk diameter.  Accordingly, at only four inches in diameter at breast height, a tree with a well area of 4 square feet has maximized the initial growing area for its root system.  This tree will seek additional space either within the sidewalk (made visible by buckling) or in someone’s front yard.

A small cutout clearly will restrict the size of the tree that can be planted initially.  For example, a 2x2 foot area cannot adequately accommodate a tree that is two inches in diameter whose root ball is two feet in diameter.  On average, for every diameter inch at planting, a tree needs a year to establish.  So, a two inch tree will take two years to establish.  Although, a 15-gallon tree (the size frequently planted in a 2x2 foot cutout) will establish faster, its aesthetic and functional presence is less significant than a larger diameter tree.

The 2x2 foot area is the minimum, so presumably a larger growing area will be provided if the sidewalk can accommodate it.  Although a 3x8 or 4x6 space is significantly larger, it can only support a 24-inch diameter tree within the original cutout.  Ideally, street trees would be given larger growing areas for their root systems.  However, if the sidewalk is space constrained (Americans with Disabilities law requires four feet of clearance for accessibility), what are the options? 

Annie’s Oak, Berkeley, CA
Photo: Georgia Silvera Seamans

One option is to install structural soil beneath the sidewalk.  Structural soil is an engineered medium that supports root growth while simultaneously satisfying engineering load-bearing requirements.  The most well known structural soil recipe was developed by Cornell University’s Urban Horticulture Institute.  An older version of structural soil is sand-based, also known as Amsterdam structural soil.  The most significant difference is that CU soils can achieve a greater level of compaction (important for load bearing) and still sustain root systems than can the Amsterdam soil – 95% versus 85-90%.  The installation of structural soils could be undertaken as sidewalks are repaired, redone, or created.  Like the burying of overhead utility wires, this solution is costly, but again, the potential benefits to a city, its trees, streets and people are significant. 

Wednesday, April 16, 2008

Kim Il Sung: Orchids & Embalming

Nothing’s too good for the former leader of North Korea, or his corpse.

Magenta orchids fill Pyongyang, North Korea,
for Kim Il Sung’s birthday and the new year, April 15
Photo: Gao Haorong, for Xinhua

Given the hostile silence between the U.S. and North Korea, it only makes sense that April 15th—the dreaded filing deadline for taxes here—is the jolliest day of the year there.

It’s the birthday of Kim Il Sung, who was North Korea’s leader from 1948 until 1994. Nearly half a century long, his reign (a more fitting word than “administration") includes what’s known on this side of the Pacific as The Korean War, which we understand has never formally been declared over by the U.S. We assume this diplo-lunacy is observed in North Korea, too.

Kim Il Sung’s birthday has been called “the North Korean equivalent of Christmas Day,” but it’s also New Year’s Day. His son and successor, Kim Jong Il, had the calendar changed to honor his father and start the year off April 15th.

The 2007 celebration of Kim Il Sung’s birthday, Pyongyang
Photo: Marc in North Korea

In Pyongyang, the capitol, official celebration has been ongoing for about a week. You can tell because magenta orchids have been amassed in the city’s public spaces. There are indoor hillocks of them, and pots filed in rows before giant paintings of the former leader, depicted lolling on the grass in suit and tie as smiling throngs surround him.

The holiday flower is a species of dendrobium orchid named for Kim Il Sung in 1965, on a visit to Indonesia. President Sukarno was showing the North Korean leader around Bogor Botanical Garden, when Kim admired this garish bloom. It was a new orchid, as yet unnamed, bred by one of the garden botanists (still unnamed). The story goes that Sukarno spontaneously honored the North Korean Leader by naming the purple flower for him.

Ever since, ”Kimilsungia," as the orchid is known, has symbolized the president. And with huge displays in April, it’s as if his ghost drapes Pyongyang like a heavy purple robe. We’ve never seen these New Year’s displays in person, but the photographs are intriguing. We see a huge outline of the North Korean nation, right down to the 38th parallel, packed with orchids. Many displays combine propagandist landscape paintings—the grinning Kim Il Sung flanked by 2-D flowers—and masses of live blossoming plants, creating diorama effects that are, in our view, quite marvelous.

Live orchids and painted ones honoring Kim Il Sung, 2007
Photo: Marc in North Korea

We understand that this year’s festivities had to be scaled back a bit due to the sorry state of the North Korean economy (our two nations do share a few things), though apparently, the cultivation of KimIlsungia remains a top national priority even in hard times. ”Despite the shortage of electricity, the greenhouses of Kimilsungia are always well taken of. During the famine and energy crisis of the late 1990’s, KCNA carried reports about how patriotic citizens asked the state energy bureaus to shut down their home heating systems during winter so that there is enough electric power for the glories of Kimilsungia.”

In the U.S. expenditure on flowers is routinely flouted as evidence of wastefulness. Politicians who spend freely on flowers or on their personal adornment are held up for ridicule.  But the North Koreans see things from a different angle. To mark the new year, the NK News Agency has announced with pride that $800,000 (USD) is being spent annually to preserve Kim Il Sung’s body, “the 9th eternally-preserved corpse among the former socialist countries’ leaders.” See for yourself, at the Mt. Keumsoo Memorial Palace; year round, there must surely be purple orchids near the mummy case. Kim Il Sung has been dead 14 years.

And to think John Edwards was shamed for a $300 haircut!

Monday, April 14, 2008

Mullickghat Rises from Its Ashes

Sandy Ao takes us to Kolkata’s huge flower market, destroyed by fire Friday night, back in business by Saturday.

The shops of more than two hundred flower sellers
burned Friday night in Kolkata, India
Photo: Sandy Ao

Fire broke out Friday night, April 11, at the immense Mullickghat flower market in Kolkata, India.  Eighteen fire engines were called to the scene along the Hoogly River, as blazes swept down Strand Road, charring more than 200 – nearly all – of the market’s flowers stalls.

The fire destroyed the 125-year Mullickghat just before the Bengali New Year, a huge floral occasion. For decades the largest flower market in all Asia (though now surpassed by the sales center in Delhi ), Mullickghat both served local customers in this city of 13 million people and exported the region’s tuberoses, marigolds, gladioli and scores more varieties to Europe, the Middle East and Asia.

Boys survey the remains of the market on April 12
Photo: Sandy Ao

Merinews reported Saturday, “About 2,000 flower growers from the districts visited the market daily to sell their produce”—a number that doubled around major festivals and during India’s wedding season, which is now beginning.  “The livelihood of 25,000 people has been affected.”

The Thai Indian interviewed Ramesh Kundu, a flower seller whose place of business was wiped out. “Each one of us has suffered a loss of minimum Rs.80,000 (roughly $2000 USD). With Bengali New Year on April 14 we had stocked four times more flowers than usual. Now this fire has turned us into beggars.”

Sandy Ao, who alerted us to the tragedy, has posted an amazing album of her photographs and a moving account of many experiences in the market on her weblog. She also generously shared many photographs and thoughts with us.

“The fire was around the Lady’s bathing ghat,” Sandy writes. “One cannot stop imagining that it is a case of arson; that’s what I heard people in the market hissing about.” Newspaper accounts confirm that many in Kolkata suspect the fire was set intentionally. The Statesman reports charges that the ruling party may have arranged to have Mullickghat destroyed to make way for an immense, modern (and expensive) structure that’s been on the drawing board for years.

Sudhangshu Sil, the local member of Parliament, was quick to announce: “The greatest consolation is (that) in February the Calcutta Municipal Corporation sanctioned the plan for a three-storey building with basement here, which will rehabilitate the 5,000 flower traders and be India’s first flower auction centre.”

Flower vendors make do after Friday’s fire in Kolkata
Photo: Sandy Ao

Sandy Ao says that arson fires tend to be Kolkata’s prelude to “improvement” projects; considering the horrors undertaken in the U.S., the razing of whole downtown neighborhoods, in the name of “urban renewal,” why should we be surprised?

Planners of the new flower complex say that it will include cold storage, facilities for sorting, grading and packaging flowers, laboratories for extracting flower oil, and lodgings. As proposed, the air-conditioned complex would be a far cry from the century-old street market. Centered around the Lady Ghat near the river’s Howrah Bridge, Mullickghat has been a traditional open-air venue. Before the fire there were more than two hundred small structures for vendors, but according to Sandy, many hundreds more flower sellers strung garlands and sold their calotropis and roses from bags and baskets below the bridge, along Strand Road and all around the edges.

“The official report was that Mullickghat had been completely gutted,” Sandy writes.  “Actually there are 265 odd shops/stalls as recorded in the Mullickghat Society book, each paying Rs.130/-per month as rent to be recorded as legal flower dealers here,
 whereas the other groups of flower dealers who do not own any stalls/shops pay Rs.7/- each per day to the society. 
And these groups are the backbone of Mullickghat.
 I should say 95% of the thousand flower sellers are made up of these groups.”

Is affection for the old open-air market and grief at the idea its replacement by modern facilities all stupid romanticism? It’s easy to relish the excitement of this place at a remove, through Sandy’s images, but what about withstanding the rainy season here, or enduring summer days, as roses wilt through the afternoon? Maybe the new flower complex would be better for everyone.

One of the Mullickghat flower shop owners who lost his business in the fire
Photo: Sandy Ao


“I got some feedback from some of the young Kolkatans,” Sandy writes, “They too express their skepticism about this new modern flower market in Mullickghat. You know, we have had so many such plans and projects. All took off the ground with grandeur, but all resulted in flop projects. In our point of view, this has become a golden opportunity for the greedy officials/politicians to dig their fingers into this goldmine.” She asks, 
“Who will rent the shops in this new facility?  Who will need such facility?
 Who will manage it?”

Even if public funds really are all diverted to the new building, Sandy offers some reasons why it isn’t needed – or even wanted – here.

“Most of the flowers they deal in at this market are related to some religious purposes.
 (Remember, each of the gods/goddesses has no less than 108 names!  In fact, with only 365 days a year, it’s hard to hold all the pujas and the rituals!) The flowers required for all these gods/goddesses are local products. Who will need cold storage for marigolds, tuberoses, tulsi, hibiscus, bael leaves, roses, sunflowers, cockscomb, daisies, jasmine, magnolia, lotus… all of which are hardy?” she asks. “Besides, most of these flowers get sold off within 24 hours!”

Doling out marigold and jasmine flowers after the fire
Photo: Sandy Ao

Exports from Mullickghat have been suspended for the next week, but there does appear to be a heavy trade in exported flowers, in addition to the strong local market Sandy describes. Perhaps it’s this more international end of the Kolkata flower trade that the new building is designed to serve.

Sandy raises questions about the operation of such a facility, if plans move ahead. “How will it be managed? as we are incapable of managing anything where strict discipline is required!
 We must remember, the Bengalis believe they are the image of Lord Shiva, who is the creator and the destroyer… But never the preserver!!!

 We have had many projects which ended being some monsters/eye-sores of Kolkata.”

If it is ultimately built, will the new market be a success? Our friend doubts it.

“At this moment we are having daily power-cuts —that, too, in 38.8C weather conditions. The real summer is yet to come. Where will the electricity come from to facilitate the cold storage?
 Nuclear energy? Not a chance, for our Left Party is not going to accept the Central Government’s signing the Nuclear Treaty.
 I can already see how this modern flower market is going to take shape in this summer heat: Then we’ll see the magic of Mullickghat’s flower power!”


The morning after the fire, Sandy took her camera to the market she’s photographed many times before. 
“A few of the stall owners simply sat there speechless. One of them, the supplier, told me his loss is unaccountable. Above all they lost the good season to do business within these two days; for Monday is the Bengali New Year. I too became speechless. I smelled burnt wood in the midst of the roses. I guess this smell will stay with me for a long time.

“Nothing seemed to be right, for the weather was very humid, dull and hot. 
But I was having hope in my heart that Mullickghat is not completely destroyed.
 And when I saw the crowd near the footbridge, my spirit lifted up!” Sandy said there were even more shoppers than on an ordinary Saturday. 
”I told myself ‘Good!  Mullickghat is still standing strong. I guess we Indian are the survivors.’”

Back in the business of lotus buds and marigolds, April 12, 2008
Photo: Sandy Ao

The Kolkata newspaper also reported that by Saturday, scores of the vendors were doing buisiness, their fresh marigolds and tuberoses arrayed on the ashes.

“People of this country have seen how many civilizations come and go,” Sandy writes. “Everything has its present, future and its past. In due course, Mullickghat will have a modern building for selling flowers, but the people will still put up their usual stalls around the building and sell their fresh marigolds, roses, calotropis, tuberoses, magnolia, bael leaves...like what they have been doing for the last 125 years.
 Those who want to rent a shop in the modern market can go ahead and rent a shop there. The other 95% of flower sellers will carry on doing their flower business in the normal way that they are doing now. It may not be exactly same like before, but it will not vanish either. If the government tries to stop them, they will use the mass-power to fight for their right. After all, in Kolkata we are very much aware of the effects of the mass-power! Otherwise Kolkata would not be known as the city of bandhs/strikes!!”


Religious observances go on Saturday, April 12, in Kolkata
with floral offerings to Shiva at the temple by the Mullickghat market
Photo: Sandy Ao


The city’s forensic experts have concluded that Mullickghat’s fire began when a fuel canister ignited at the Lady Ghat. Local officials say that the flower sellers – those with shops, anyway --will be compensated for their losses, and promise that the modern Mullickghat building, long delayed, will proceed.

But Sandy writes about the present:
”I see devotees still crowding the nearby temple offering the flowers to the gods with the same faith in their faces....And today I saw how they made beautiful calotropis garlands for Shiva to welcome the New Year.”


Saturday, February 23, 2008

Wedding Flowers for Two Grooms

When the couple about to be married are both men, will there be bouquets? Maybe. But consider a cascade.

Andrew Solomon and John Habich at their wedding dinner
Northampton, England, June 30, 2007
Photo: Jonathan Player, for the New York Times

It was a June wedding. Last summer, writer Andrew Solomon and editor John Habich celebrated their civil union before about 300 guests. The two men were married in England (Solomon has dual US/UK citizenship) where, as of 2005, civil unions between same-sex couples have been legal.

The New York Times published a gorgeous set of photographs by Jonathan Player. What an event! The ceremony took place on a broad staircase at Althorp, the estate of the Spencer family, below portraits of the late Princess Diana and her ancestors. At the reception and party afterwards, the newlyweds radiated happiness. Guests sat down to dinner in a “marquee” on the Althorp grounds, decorated in black and white, with lots of mirrored tabletops and waves of pink roses.

Solomon and Habich exchange vows amid floral drifts and tapestries
Photo: Jonathan Player, for the New York Times

But what about flowers at the service? Do grooms carry bouquets? No reason they shouldn’t. But Solomon and Habich chose not to. Instead wide swaths of hydrangeas stepped all the way down the staircase. And roses (we think that’s what these blooms are) hung from the upstairs balustrade, like fluffy pink tapestries. (Habich also wore a small pink flower on his lapel.)

Erin and Chloe
at their civil union in Vermont
September 2000
Photo: Erin and Chloe

From what we’ve seen and learned, lesbian weddings tend to double up with bouquets. Sometimes both brides wear floral head crowns as well. (Yet another reason to legalize same-sex marriage, we say!)

Several years back, we ran a piece about Flowers from the Heartland. This 2004 film documented a small movement of Midwesterners who sent flowers to the weddings of gay and lesbian couples in the U.S. as tokens of solidarity. Same-sex marriage is still controversial here. Twenty-six states (most of them in the Heartland) have passed laws against it. Only in Massachusetts is same-sex marriage legal; New Jersey, Vermont, Connecticut, and New Hampshire permit civil unions. Most recently, New Jersey’s governor has indicated he will sign a bill legalizing same sex marriage (after the November elections); California’s state Supreme Court will be taking up the matter next month.

What about the rest of the world? The map below, from wiki, offers about as vivid a picture of cultural differences as one could imagine. In the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Canada and South Africa (in dark green) same sex marriage is now legal. In Iran, Sudan, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, and Mauritania homosexuality (not same-sex marriage, just being homosexual) is punishable by death.

Map of the World’s laws on homosexuality, via Wiki

Two bouquets? One world? We’ve got a long way to go.

Wednesday, February 20, 2008

Lick an Ambassador: Floral Stamps

Can’t afford to send flowers? Give your postal carrier a thrill and leave your correspondents panting for more.

We wandered into a philateletic Eden yesterday and now return with tongue hanging out – ready to lick and send flying hundreds of floral stamps from around the world. Who cares what’s in the envelope? This Congolese acanthus bloom could take the sting out of an eviction notice, don’t you think?

A Polish website for stamp collectors offers thousands of familiar and exotic blooms. Every nation on earth, it seems, has issued floral stamps of some type. And in every case, we see how flowers serve as ambassadors to humankind.

Most commonplace are stamp series that show off spectacular native flora. We found this set of Zimbabwe’s desert plants especially striking, but there are scores more. Look around!

There are some very elaborate presentations, like this example from Lesotho: a native orchid sits (with perforations around it) below a waterfall. Just one stamp, but you feel as if you’re getting a whole landscape, a smart way to show a local plant in its habitat and, one would assume, boost sales.

For shaped stamps, Mongolia has gone to great lengths, scrunching flower images into triangles and leaning parallelograms. (To its credit, Mongolia is also the only nation we’ve seen that honors the dandelion with a stamp.) But Bulgaria’s set of flowers and honeybees is the most witty and elegantly shapely design, a cone dweller’s view with six sides.

Liechtenstein: Cornflower and Cattails

Flower stamps necessarily put local aesthetics on display. We were especially taken with two art nouveau sets of stamps from Liechtenstein, proof that good things come in small principalities. These are the most stylish of the many hundreds of flower stamps we surveyed. (And you may note that among all this website’s topical stamps, there are three times as many floral varieties as cats or sports or anything else.) From Scandinavia are many fine muted duotones. This Swedish set is especially lovely. And for some reason, this group from Finland, with their looming red crosses (signifying a tuberculosis charity) was delightfully eerie.

Cambodia

In stupendous contrast to the Nordic designs are candy-colored sets like these from Nicaragua. Other rainbow-robbing flower stamps have been issued by Zimbabwe, Surinam, and these beauties at right, from Cambodia. Planning to write a Dear John letter? Well, at least have the wherewithal to hunt down cheerful postage.

Some countries have not only living flowers but floral art to boast of in the mail. The most gorgeous examples we spotted were these from Germany, with details from illuminated manuscripts in Deutschland collections. Would somebody please mail us a letter with one of these affixed? Paraguay also has issued several floral stamp sets featuring international works of art.

Monaco: Concours International
de Bouquets (1974)
commemorative stamp

All you florists out there need to start lobbying your national postal services to keep up with the Joneses in Monaco, Malaysia and Romania. Each of these countries has issued special stamps featuring flower arranging. Monaco appears to have hosted the Concours International de Bouquets several years running, and on each occasion has issued a set of stamps showing a range of fine floral designs.

Our tongue’s getting dry...too much to mention. The photographic flower stamps of Cyprus (other examples from Turkey and Tanzania) don’t strike our fancy but may appeal to shutterbugs. Micronesia may have produced the most educational Human Flower Project stamp set – showing four native flowers and how each one is used in traditional leis and crowns.

North Korea:
Homage to Kimjongilia

But remembering that stamp designs are always chosen by someone in government – to reflect the administration’s interests, even in such a marginal matter as national floral imagery— we must end with a bow to blatantly political, gummed ambassadors. These flower stamps from Yemen are tiny collages of plants and national emblems, both overseen by someone important looking (We’re not sure, but would guess this to be longtime president Ali Abdullah Saleh in his younger days).

Most stamps from the United Kingdom, even these without one letter of type, still include the silhouette of QE2. And North Korea, of course, offers Kimjongilia, the red begonia named for Kim Jong Il; the North Korean issue includes quite a lot of supporting material, including what appears to be a musical score, for those ardent types who sing about dictators and flowers as they mail.

The most wonderful political stamp set we’ve seen yet is this collection from Cuba (much in the news this week, with Fidel Castro’s announcement that he’ll be stepping down). In colors as vibrant as the Mexican loteria, each stamp shows a hero of Latin American history with a tropical blossom – as charming a human flower postal project as we’ve discovered on any envelope. (Make sure to see the entire set for full loteria effect.)

Cuba: Historia Latinoamericana

There are many hundreds more interesting examples on the site, ahem...so dear Cuban readers, and all others within licking distance of floral stamps, we aren’t too proud to beg. Please write.

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.

Thursday, January 03, 2008

Human Hair in the Potting Shed

A U.S. company is importing human hair from China and India as a gardening aid, reviving an old idea. But can it overcome racial history?

A new herbicide?
Photo: Rapunzel’s Delight

A scalp-tingling gardening idea called SmartGrow is garnering endorsements across the Southeast U.S. The product is a thin mat made entirely of human hair and marketed as a deer repellent, organic fertilizer, and herbicide.

‘’In the beginning, we were saying, `Human hair? What is this?’’’ asked Luis Naranjo, owner of Octavio Taylor Nurseries in Dade County, Florida. According to Tere Figueras Negrete’s report in the Miami Herald, Naranjo “now expects 80 percent of his nearly 1 million plants, like ground orchids,… will be cozily blanketed with the mats by this spring.” He says that the hair mats “saved him $45,000 in pesticides last year, and $200,000 in labor.”

Plant pathologists at the University of Florida also like the results they see, as does a major heirloom tomato grower in Georgia.

Old timey gardeners have long known about the benefits of gardening with human hair, folk knowledge that’s trickled down (up?) through institutions like agricultural extension programs. The State of Missouri’s extension office website, for example, advises gardeners:

”Human hair is a repellent that costs very little but has not consistently repelled deer. Place two handfuls of hair in fine-meshed bags (onion bags, nylon stockings). When damage is severe, hang hair bags on the outer branches of trees with no more than 3 feet between bags. For larger areas, hang several bags, 3 feet apart, from fence or cord around the perimeter of the area to be protected. Attach the bags early in spring and replace them monthly through the growing season.”

To keep deer away, the Illinois Walnut Council also recommends human hair, as well as “sulphur/egg mixtures, large cat feces from a zoo, and even human urine.” (Hair cuttings begin to look like the easy way out.)

The SmartGrow mat, of human hair
Photo: SmartGrow

The idea for SmartGrow originated in a Huntsville, Alabama, hair salon, when stylist Phil McCory saw images of Alaskan otters covered with oil after the Exxon Valdez spill and began to experiment with human hair as oil-absorbent material. Blair Blacker bought the patent from McCory and tried selling his discovery to the petroleum industry (not interested); then learning of the folk gardening customs, he shifted his focus to plants.

Where did the 30,000 pounds of tresses in Blacker’s Florida warehouse come from?

“SmartGrow relies on two hair brokers—in China and India—to procure the hair, which is boiled in 120-degree water, dried, loaded onto 40-foot boats and shipped via waterway to a port city in China.” At a factory in Zhaoyuan, the hair is piled onto “an old-style needle-punch machine, formerly used to make carpets. A hopper blows air through the hair to loosen it, and the strands are then woven into a loose felt-like mat of mostly dark and shiny follicles, with the occasional gray strand peeping through.”

Shorn hair dries in the sun in India
Photo: India Hair Weave Technique

Negrete’s article notes that gardening with human hair involves “an admitted yuck factor,” something SmartGrow fans try to dismiss fast, by changing the subject to manure. But for us, the aversion goes deeper.

The thought of applying human body parts to utilitarian ends brings a shudder, even for those who advocate embryonic stem cell research and organ transplants. And the use of human hair in particular revives grisly images from the end of World War II. When Soviet forces liberated the death camp at Auschwitz, in January 1945, they found seven tons of human hair. Shorn from those imprisoned and killed in the Holocaust, these body parts purportedly were to be shipped back to Germany and woven into cloth.

Blair Blacker says that the raw material for SmartGrow mats comes from India and China, because it’s hair less likely to have been dyed or otherwise chemically damaged. Surely that’s so. (There’s also an interesting photo essay by Adriene Jaeckle showing tonsure—ritual hair cutting—at a temple in India.) But it seems obvious, too, that the trade in human hair is primarily a transaction between people who want fatter vegetables and people so desperate for money they’ll sell off parts of themselves.

Maybe that’s no more degrading than working in a call center or weaving rugs, but maybe it is. The images from 1945 give us a long pause.

Monday, December 31, 2007

Benazir Bhutto - Amid Flowers

The former prime minister and leader of the Pakistan People’s Party was killed December 27th at a rally in Rawalpindi. There, at her burial place in Garhi Khuda Baksh and across the nation, flowers fell in her honor.

A mourner lights a candle during prayers for Benazir Bhutto in Lahore, Pakistan, December 29, 2007.
Photo: Mohsin Raza, for Reuters

Bhutto’s daughters Asifa (at left) and Bakhtawar pray beside the funeral bier covered with rose petals and marigolds. The former prime minister was buried Dec. 28 at the family mausoleum in Garhi Khuda, next to her father and two brothers.
Photo: Aamir Qureshi, for AFP

Photo: David Guttenfelder, for AP

Bhutto had returned to Pakistan in October after eight years of self-imposed exile. On October 18, another assassination attempt failed, but killed 130 her supporters, wounding many more. She prayed with the widows of those who died.

Photo: Mian Khursheed, for Reuters

In floral regalia, opposition leader Benazir Bhutto waved to crowds at the election rally in Rawalpindi December 27, just before a gunman and suicide bomber killed her and many of her supporters. Bhutto had served two terms as prime minister but been forced out of office on charges of corruption, charges she always denied.

“In our part of the world, politicians have to take their campaigns to the street,” Pakistani political analyst Nusrat Javed told TIME. “Bhutto’s base doesn’t watch TV. They need rallies, cavalcades. Unless you do it this way, you cannot survive as a populist party.”

At least 31 of her supporters also died in the attack. There are conflicting reports as to the cause of her death—whether by a gunshot or from the impact of the bomb blast. Thus far the family has not called for an autopsy, a practice that is considered desecration in most of the Muslim world.

Bhutto’s friends and political supporters mourned over her grave at the Bhutto family mausoleum in Garhi Khuda Baksh. The Pakistan People’s Party named her 19-year-old son as its new leader Dec. 30 and announced it would contest the upcoming general elections.
Photo: Asif Hassan, for AFP

Bhutto’s supporters lay flowers in front of the leader’s portrait during a ceremony, Saturday, Dec. 29, in Rawalpindi, Pakistan. The service marked the third day of her death (known as Soyem).
Photo: Mohammad Zubair, for AP

Monday, December 10, 2007

By Way of St. Giles

Taking the long way, through Walden Pond, the Spanish Civil War and Larkin’s poetry, writer John Levett gets up to speed.

Churchyard wall
at St. Giles
Cambridge, England
Photo: John Levett

By

The fine Journal of The Philip Larkin Society, imaginatively entitled “About Larkin” (took some thinking-up did that), arrived this week—Number 24, all twenty-four of which can now be had for £115 which seems steep to me but why complain while it seems I’m sitting on a goldmine.

I joined up some decade or so ago just as it was starting up, joining up to some half-dead but still resonant connection I had with Larkin, Hull and a sunny afternoon in October 1964. I remember a December afternoon a couple of years ago having a splendid chat in The Eagle (a local pub famed for stuff) with a student who was writing a dissertation on Larkin and his readership, and he asking if Larkin predominantly appealed to a particular generation and me agreeing; being of that generation born in a decade spanning 1940 and remembering England (always England, never Britain) in its shoddy 1950s parochialism, its frayed & faded threads of Empire and influence. I read Larkin and know why I do. More to do with a time rather than timelessness, I can’t take Larkin out of a time in my life and his.

Back to “About Larkin.” There’s a quote from “Autumn” (1953, Coronation, conquest of Everest, how we cheered!) and its phrases catch: “the year goes suddenly slack”; “And summer, that keeps returning like a ghost, Of something death has merely made beautiful.” Last Tuesday I took myself off on a sad, spitting afternoon on the road out to Girton to St. Giles burial ground (it’s called something else these days but I can’t recall what and it’s probably got corporate sponsorship and a Health and Safety Certificate as well).

Burial grounds are ripe for encouraging bad photography and even worse amateur poetry. When I arrived in Cambridge in the mid-’90s I got wind of Wittgenstein having been buried there. I’d invested time over decades in LW so went looking for his remains. The stone, scattered once with coins (I wish, I wish, I wish...) was appropriate, as sparse and downbeat as his alleged deckchair in his room at Trinity. It’s more washed out now, coinless but with candle (disgracefully extravagant).

Philosopher with ferns
St. Giles burial ground
Photo: John Levett

I’ve kept going back there every year or so, usually for want of somewhere fresh to walk to, someone new to trip over—economist Alfred Marshall in a corner, scientist Max Perutz in inappropriate off-white, the appropriately-named philosopher John Wisdom, George Moore sulking under a tree, a Darwin & Cornford pairing with a view of the wheat fields. All so low-key. So Church of England. So provincial. So suburban. It could do with something Roman, steps to catacombs, evidence of vampire activity, magnificence, decadence.

I’m reminded of the Dorotheenstädtischer Friedhof in Berlin. Fichte and Hegel together forever, Brecht and Weigel similarly and a useful guide map to their location beside the less-lionised. Or the Orthodox graveyard with its extravagances the other side of that city. Even better the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. Death in England as always an unfortunate interruption, to be got over, got through, dispatched.

Darwin and Cornford, double headstone
St. Giles burial ground, Cambridge
Photo: John Levett

But then again...the reason that I keep returning is the expectation of being surprised. So it was with Frances Cornford. I’d never noticed the stone before and my thoughts went direct to her son John. He’s mostly forgotten now (if he was ever that remembered outside family and the Left). He fought in Spain and died there near Lopera outside Madrid. Reading his poem “Full Moon at Tierz: Before the Storming of Huesca,” I feel I’m missing a time that was never a part of my life. A lot of it’s moonshine on my part—pictures in my head of collecting tins, food parcels, street battles with fascists, “Commitment” writ large. Operation Iraqi Freedom it wasn’t. Here’s the last stanza:

Our fight’s not won till the workers of all the world,
Stand by our guard on Huesca’s plain,
Swear that our dead fought not in vain,
Raise the red flag triumphantly,
For Communism and liberty.

It’s easy to dismiss it as pathetically naïve or ingenuous but in comparison to our century’s infantilizing of politics it’s as shining as the beacon it was conceived under. He was lied to but didn’t know it; we’re lied to, know it but pass on by. Too comfortable by half.

The most difficult time to live though is one’s own. Not just the epoch, the decade, the year or season. But the moment—the only time that one can live in, do something, achieve or fail, try; and it’s so often so unattractive, so without promise, so without momentum. Hence the comfort of falling back into elsewhere. “...And the countryside not caring: The place-names all hazed over, With flowering grasses, and fields, Shadowing Doomsday lines, Under wheat’s restless silence” (Larkin: MCMXIV). There’s a high spot I ride to on a sunny day around harvest time which overlooks the Cambridgeshire plain, not far from Orwell’s cottage near Baldock. In the past I’ve taken “Coming Up for Air,” sat there in the quiet and with ease imagined myself the best part of a century back.

St. Giles burial ground, Parish of the Ascension, Cambridge
Photo: John Levett

I went back to the burial ground the next day and sat on a tomb reading John Cornford’s letters to Margot Heinemann. They’re like his poetry—immediate, a sense of living out on a ledge, the last thing he might write, what he writes might never get read. It’s what I contrast with Larkin. With Larkin I always get a sense that something-someone-someplace has just been left, lost or never quite happened, out of reach.

Back home I shelved the Spanish Civil War verse and snatched a glance at the pile nearby: Poetry of the Thirties, Poetry of the Forties, English and American Surrealist Poetry, David Gascoyne’s diaries. Old stuff. Stuff I didn’t live through. It struck me that I’m living too much in another time, too much of a generation. Not quite walking through a graveyard but close by one. Like Roquentin’s chestnut tree in Sartre’s La Nausée, the books by my bedside took to life and rose up: Galsworthy’s A Modern Comedy, Kierkegaard’s Journals, Thoreau’s Walden, a Left Book Club edition of John Strachey’s The Theory and Practice of Socialism, Marianne Hirsch’s Family Frames. Too much in the past, too much looking for meaning there, not enough present.

It didn’t take long to recognize that my current photographic project is about remembrance and family narratives. In a real sense all photography is about the past but not every photographer anchors themselves there, and it struck me that that’s what I was choosing to do and the reason for my choice was to do with narrative. I’ve never been more than less-than-half-convinced that post-modernism (or Post-Modernism if you are convinced) has substance, so “narrative” and the search for it has always featured in how I’ve gone about life and I know I’m not singular in that. Even when there isn’t any, we still seek (maybe convince ourselves of finding) narrative structure in the most mundane of occurrences and when it comes to lives and deaths it’s hard to avoid.

There’s another burial ground in Cambridge that I often walk through on the way from somewhere to elsewhere, and one stone I stop by occasionally is that of Private HJ Slack. The dates seem so significant to me that my story seems it must fit.

Private Slack (no Christian name) was killed on 8th November 1918—three days before the Armistice was declared.  He was 31 years of age. There are two others in the grave. A daughter died in 1935 aged 17. Born in 1918; conceived on Private Slack’s last leave? Was she born while he was still serving? Think of the young married couple, knowing that the war was coming to a close, a bairn to care for; a new life awaiting.
Sarah, his wife, is in the plot too; the same age as her husband. She’s widowed; childless now; never re-married. She died on 3rd September 1939, the day that Britain declared war on Germany. Could she not take the thought of another slaughter? Was she so overwhelmed by her memories of what might have been in her life that she took it away herself?

It’s easy to make histories for these families but, for the Slacks, my story of them has never seemed far from the likely.

This evening I’m off to the opera—Britten’s (out of Henry James’) Turn of the Screw. Ghosts, hauntings, imaginings, lives bent, lives dwelling elsewhere. This afternoon I’m looking out onto rain and grey with Jon Kabat-Zinn’s book on Mindfulness Meditation on the couch beside. I bought this back in the mid-’90s (that would be the 1990s) at a time when creative visualization, psychosynthesis, self-hypnosis, affirmations, shamanistic practices, candle lighting, aromatherapy and sundry works of late-capitalistic creative demand invention occupied most waking (truly awake) moments. Judging by the way the book falls open I’ve never got past page forty-five but now I’m trying. To get past the past.

Gravestone of philosopher
Ludwig Wittgenstein (with coins)
Photo: John Levett