Human Flower Project

Culture & Society

Friday, May 02, 2008

How Does Your Garden Reblog Grow?

With book clubs, meet-ups, and contests, the field of garden weblogging is now a thicket of online writers and photographers. Reblogging sites that collect posts from other blogs have helped bring the field into focus, partly by raising questions of copyright and profitability. Caren White, editor of one of the first garden reblogs—Garden Voices—talks about what’s happened and where it all may be heading.

Back in late 2005, we were contacted by a fellow named Joshua Mack about whether we’d like Human Flower Project to be included in a compendium of weblogs, a new venture called Garden Voices that was branching off of gardenweb.com. This popular spot where gardeners shared advice and photos had recently been purchased by iVillage, an online media group targeting women.

We were flattered and—as the flattered should always be—leery. Human Flower Project, many days, has little to do with gardening. And there was a more craven concern: Did it make sense to turn our unpaid labor and thought over to a for-profit enterprise, one featuring makeup tips and stories titled “Do You Cook Better Than His Mom?” —especially when we wouldn’t share in any of those profits? 

Eventually we settled on what seemed reasonable terms—Garden Voices would post our headlines and subheads but no photos or stories in full, provided they’d include a link back to Human Flower Project (other blogs apparently have other arrangements). There were a few bumps along the way, but eventually things smoothed out, thanks to Caren White of Middlesex, New Jersey. Caren, with her own A Gardening Year site, tends the Garden Voices reblog, and has been unfailingly accommodating.

Garden Voices, a compilation of hundreds of gardening weblogs, began in 2005
Image: Garden Voices

And so it went for over two years. Until late January 2008. For several weeks Garden Voices, which had grown into an international choir of weblogs, shriveled to a few squeaks and then went dumb.

When we wrote Caren to ask what was happening, even she was perplexed. Was Garden Voices malfunctioning, on hiatus or plain dead?

NBC/Universal had acquired iVillage for $600 million in 2006; by early this year there were lots of pieces moving on the corporate chessboard. The new management tried an iVillage TV show, which was cancelled in March. Thirteen iVillage employees lost their jobs earlier this year, and the remaining ones were shuffled from the New York offices to Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey. The Healthology website (purchased for $17.2 million in 2005) was discontinued; would Garden Voices be next?

The site is back up and running now. But during the uncertain weeks of February we corresponded with Caren, taking the vagaries of the reblog as an opportunity to learn about Garden Voices. We asked Caren about the set-up of the site, its past (since in February its future was an open question) and her outlook on the gardening blogsphere. With many thanks to Caren, here you have it:

HFP: When did Garden Voices begin and how? What was the motivation behind the site?

Caren White: Garden Voices was begun late in 2005.  I can’t speak to how or why it was launched.  Joshua Mack who headed the team who developed and ran the site has left iVillage for personal reasons.  I do know that he had originally intended that it be a “blog about blogs”.  This wasn’t communicated clearly to me at first so I came up with my own concept of what it should be and ran with it.

When I began garden blogging in 2005, there were not a lot of garden blogs and the few that were out there were difficult to find.  I wanted to create a site where anyone interested in reading garden blogs would be able to find blogs on any topic related to gardening from anywhere in the world.  I deliberately reached out to bloggers outside of the US because I was interested in gardening outside of the US.  It took about a year, but I reached my goal of having blogs from every continent except Antarctica.  I’m still trying to reach my goal of blogs from every state. 

Initially, there were a lot of articles from the Home & Garden sections of regional publications that were great as fillers, but as the number of blogs increased, I dropped them and the site is now purely garden blogs.  I was also asked to blog on the page but I found it too difficult to maintain multiple blogs.  I gradually stopped blogging and commenting.  I really wanted the focus on the blogs themselves.

Caren White, editor of Garden Voices, also operates A Gardening Year, works another job and volunteers at Rutgers Gardens, where she’s pictured here
Photo: Mary Anne MacMillan

HFP: How did you come to be involved in it? And how do you maintain the site?

CW: Josh contacted me initially in November 2005 about adding my blog to the page.  Then he asked me if I would be willing to be the editor.  I did a post about my initial involvement. 

His original estimate of 1 to 2 hours a day to update the page was right on the money.  I was expected to update once a day, Monday through Friday.  I’m an overachiever, so I try to update twice a day, seven days a week.  Each update takes about an hour.  I check the feed to see all the new posts, skim them for content, “snip” them, tag them and then publish them through Movable Type software.  All of this was set up and is maintained by iVillage/GardenWeb.  I have no control over anything except the blog contents.

What took up a lot of my time initially was hunting for blogs to add.  I would spend 2 to 3 additional hours a day surfing the web, reading blogs and emailing bloggers asking if they would like to add their blogs.  Two things I asked for to help bloggers find me, was an “Add Your Blog” link on Garden Voices and a button for bloggers to add to their blogs.  They did add the link to the sidebar, but when the email addresses changed after NBC bought iVillage last year, the address on the link was never updated.  Development of a button for bloggers to use on their blogs was started, but never finished.

I’ve stopped recruiting blogs for the page due to space limitations.  The template is frozen at 40 entries.  There are already too many blogs to be able to fit everyone’s posts every day.  I requested an increase from 40 entries but was told that Garden Voices is not a blogroll.  Instead, I should choose “the best” posts of the day and publish those.  I’m not comfortable judging other people’s blogs so instead I publish the first 40 posts in my reader.  Occasionally I get complaints from bloggers that their posts are not appearing.  I always explain why and then make an effort to ensure that their posts get in more regularly.

Despite the fact that the “Add Your Blog” link no longer works, bloggers are still finding me.  They either leave comments on my garden blog or email me.  Here’s a hint to bloggers who want to get on sites like Garden Voices:  have an email address on your blog.  It’s so much easier for someone like me looking to add blogs to a site to be able to email a blogger directly rather than leaving a comment on a post.  If you are concerned about privacy issues, do what I did and have a separate email address for your blog.

I’d also like to do a shout out to Kathy Purdy of Cold Climate Gardening who gives out my email address to bloggers who want to add their blogs to Garden Voices.  Thanks to her, I’ve been able to add some really awesome blogs to the site.

HFP: Have any garden bloggers asked to be removed from the site?

Continue Reading

Wednesday, April 30, 2008

Faith, Realism, Enterprise: All in a Mustard Seed

A talisman from the 1960s reaches back two centuries and forward, to this very spring in California.

Sunset on mustard-covered hills, Tepusquet Canyon, California
Photo: Caroline Joyes Woods

“It is so completely covering our hills right now,” writes Caroline Joyes Woods, “that you can smell its honey-with-a-dash-of-fetid (the fetid being just a tiny after-smell) fragrance in the morning when you first come out and the air is still and the moisture still in the air...nice!”

“It” is mustard, and “our hills” are Tepusquet Canyon, near Santa Maria, California, where Caroline and her husband have been ranching for many years. “Nice” and a lot more than that is Caroline herself, a childhood friend, apple tree climber, and moss garden maker.

We contacted her this spring having dimly remembered a human flower project from back in the early 1960s. When we were still in elementary school, Caroline used to wear around her neck a silver chain and glass amulet with a mustard seed encased inside. We went treasure hunting and were thrilled to find one several weeks ago at Uncommon Objects here in Austin. But aside from, now, being souvenirs of childhood, what were these charms all about?

Caroline reminded us that Christ told his disciples “If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed-nothing shall be impossible unto you.” (Matthew 17:20) In several of the gospels Jesus also compares the kingdom of heaven to a mustard seed “which a man took, and sowed in his field:
 Which indeed is the least of all seeds: but when it is grown, it is the greatest among herbs, and becometh a tree, so that the birds of the air come and lodge in the branches thereof.” (Matthew 13:31-2)

Mustard seed “Remembrancer” and prairie phlox (Phlox pilosa)
Photo: Human Flower Project

Someone turned the parable into a trinket that caught on. A few clicks through ebay (and the trip to Uncommon Objects, too) proved how popular these items once were—though somehow we can’t imagine preteens of today much going for them. It turns out they were manufactured by the Flint Company, a mom and pop operation in Kansas City.  In Richard Weiss’s book The American Myth of Success, we learn about Maurice and Alice Flint, a Missouri couple who had fallen on hard times after World War II. They consulted Norman Vincent Peale, a leading pop-religious figure of the time (Dr. Phil, Billy Graham, and Donald Trump rolled into one).

Weiss writes that it was Peale “who advised them to repeat the following New Testament injunction whenever they felt despondent: ‘If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed…nothing shall be impossible unto you.’ Flint asked his wife for a mustard seed to carry as a reminder, and she obliged with one from the family pickle jar. One day, feeling low, he reached into his pocket for the seed, but it was gone.” He then struck on the idea of capturing a mustard seed in a protective container and started making costume jewelry. “The Remembrancer,” as he dubbed it, “was advertised a ‘Symbol of faith – a genuine mustard seed enclosed in sparkling glass, makes a bracelet with real meaning.’”

Remembrancer pin and cards from the Flint Co.
Photo: Collectible Jewels

The Flints opened a charm factory and did very well, it appears; according to Peale, “These articles sold like hot cakes.") “The Remembrancer” was being marketed at least by 1951, and Caroline was wearing hers in 1964. A good streak.

The mustard seed also makes an appearance in Buddhist legend, and, as you might guess, conveys a very different message.

A woman named Kisa Gotami was wandering in grief, after the death of her only child. “Her sorrow was so great that many thought she had already lost her mind.” Pleading for help, she went to the Buddha, who promised to bring her son back to life—if she could gather “white mustard seeds from a family where no-one had died. She desperately went from house to house, but to her disappointment, every house had someone who had died. Finally the realization struck her that there is no house free from death.” She was renewed, and comforted, and continued on the path toward enlightenment. (We don’t know if the Remembrancer ever caught on among Buddhists.)

Are these the same story or contradictory stories? Can “When you wish upon a star” be the same as “Wake up and smell the mustard”? We’re not sure, but Caroline seems to have found faith and truth in bloom together—“honey-with-a-dash-of-fetid.” Nice going, old friend!

Tuesday, April 22, 2008

Geobotany: Rocking the Garden World

Nature first put flowers on stone pedestals, but gardeners of the Picturesque school followed, with painterly landscapes of their own. Well done, say the EarthScholars: But, please, give rocks equal time!

Trees, Fort Greene Park, 2004
by Kerry O’Neill

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

Unwittingly, people view landscapes through the lenses of their prior knowledge and experiences. They compare the new landscapes they visit with ones they already know.  Given that more than half of the world’s inhabitants now live in big cities, more and more people lack an extensive personal knowledge of nature. Nor have most people, urban or otherwise, traveled to explore a variety of conserved natural ecosystems —experiences they could use in making comparisons and aesthetic decisions about the new landscapes they encounter.

There are many theories about how humans perceive landscapes. The Australian environmental scholar Andrew Lothian poses the question: Is landscape quality inherent in the landscape or in the eye of the beholder? He opts to defend the latter.

R.P. Taylor, writing in the journal Leonardo, recalls that, “In art school I was told that Monet’s water lilies calm the observer, while van Gogh’s sunflowers electrify. To what extent, however, do paintings [of landscapes] really affect the observer’s physical condition? The foundations of this question date back to 1890, when the connection between psychological states and physiological states was first considered.”

A famous African Savannah,
the Maasai Mara
Photo: Masai Mara

Judith Heerwagen, in her article on the Psychosocial Value of Space, notes: “Drawing on habitat selection theory, ecologist Gordon Orians argues that humans are psychologically adapted to and prefer landscape features that characterized the African savannah, the presumed site of human evolution….If the ‘savannah hypothesis’ is true, we would expect to find that humans intrinsically like and find pleasurable environments that contain key features of the savannah that were most likely to have aided our ancestors’ survival and well-being.”

Features of the savannah landscape include a fairly unobstructed “big sky” view, a high diversity of flowering plants, scattered clusters of trees with high canopies, swaths of open grassland, occasional rocky outcrops, multiple visual corridors, and topographic changes to enhance predator surveillance and long-distance escape movements.

Do humans really prefer these, or other, particular landscapes? History shows us that colonialists and emigrants sometimes attempted to transform their new landscapes of residence into replicas of those they had known. Presuming the superiority of “The Old Country,” they tried to mimic what they considered “civilized spaces”—importing plants, seeds, and even rocks from their landscapes of origin.

Just as people’s first maps showed their tribes or cities at the center of the world, it is common for us all to judge new landscapes by the rather xenophobic criteria of familiarity and congruence with our original cultural values and preferences.

In 18th century England, complex debates developed about the essence of beauty in the landscape--with followers of the ‘Sublime’ school inspired by wild, natural landscapes (simultaneously fascinating and startling), while those of the ‘Picturesque’ school wanted ‘painterly’ landscape views (human-designed to be blurred, disjointed, and soft composites of color and contour).

Followers of the latter were willing to have flowering plants moved from their traditional positions in borders or against walls, provided they were regrouped to form non-linear, painterly compositions (“painting with plants”). The eye of the landscape artist (painter), with its aesthetic understanding of nature and training in the principles of composition, was thought to be the best guide to good planting design.

Plant Hunter Joseph Dalton Hooker’s Rhododendrons of the Sikkim-Himalaya (1849-51)
Image: Garden Visit

The Picturesque school had a pronounced effect on landscape design. It both justified using foreign plants in British gardens and provided a system of compositional principles to harmonize the intermingling of exotic and native plants and natural objects. Instead of the plantings being natural of themselves, landscape designers were to use art to imitate rugged natural scenes in aesthetic ways.

In the second half of the nineteenth century the Picturesque Style was used, for example, in the making of woodland gardens. Landowners on the western shores of the British Isles installed rhododendron woods, arranged in “painterly compositions.” As can be seen from Hooker’s print (above), the art that inspired Paxton’s landscape (below), making effective use of jagged irregular lines of plant and rocks, represents the furthest possible conceptual distance from an artificial geometrical regularity. In contrast, fractal geometric patterns predominate—for both plants and rocks.

Landscape at England’s Birkenhead Park, Designed by Joseph Paxton
Photo: Garden Visit

Like Charles Darwin, Joseph Dalton Hooker saw the need to integrate botany and geology to understand nature. When he was only 5 years old, Joseph regularly attended his father’s botanical lectures at the University of Glasgow, and displayed a genuine interest in the subject. Because his parents thought Glasgow High School’s curriculum was too limited, he and his brother were withdrawn from formal schooling to be home-schooled. In those days, botany was still regarded as merely a branch of medicine, so like every other young Glaswegian botanist in his day, Hooker studied for his medical degree at the University of Glasgow. This education later proved to be quite expedient because, in 1839, Sir James Clark Ross, famous discoverer of the magnetic north pole as well as his father’s good friend, offered young Joseph the position of Assistant Surgeon on Clark’s expedition to the Antarctic, aboard the discovery ships Erebus and Terror.

This four-and-half-year voyage allowed Hooker to botanize in many lands and also to notice the natural relationships between botany and geology. At the Kerguelen Islands, where Captain Cook had managed to collect just 20 new species of plants, Joseph identified and collected over 150 different species, including flowering plants, 3 ferns, 35 mosses, and the rest lichens and seaweeds. This was no easy task, as the cold, harsh weather and rough terrain made collecting very challenging. Hooker wrote: “Many of my best little lichens were gathered by hammering out the tufts, or sitting on them till they thawed.” Joseph later became assistant director of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, near London.

One result of the English affinity for Picturesque landscape design was an enthusiasm for rock gardens. A European rock garden, also known as an alpine garden, features extensive use of rocks or stones, along with plants native to rocky alpine or tundra environments. 

Alpine flowers on tundra along Trail Ridge road
Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado
Photo: Q.T. Luong

In 1803, Europe’s first alpine garden was constructed at Belvedere Castle in Vienna. The best rock gardens were designed and built to look like natural outcrops of bedrock (e.g., limestone, sandstone). Stones were aligned to suggest a bedding plane and plants were often used to conceal the joints between the stones. This type of garden was especially popular in Victorian England as well.

The first rock garden of appreciable size to be constructed at an American botanic garden opened at Brooklyn Botanic Garden in 1917. Today, some of the best alpine rock gardens may be viewed at the Royal Botanic Garden in Edinburgh, Scotland; Le Jardin Botanique Alpin du Lautaret, Grenoble, France; Cambridge University Botanic Garden, Cambridge, England; Royal Horticultural Society Garden, Wisley, England; New York Botanical Garden, Bronx, NY; Devonian Botanic Garden, Devon, Alberta, Canada; Göteborg Botanical Garden, Gothenburg, Sweden; Betty Ford Alpine Gardens, Vail, Colorado; Jardin Botanique de Montrèal, Montreal, Quebec, Canada; and the Tromso Arctic-Alpine Botanic Garden, Tromso, Norway.

A Picturesque rock garden at Chatsworth Manor, England
Photo: Michelle Anstett

Although the use of rocks as decorative and symbolic elements in gardens can be traced back to very early Chinese and Japanese gardens, rock gardens dedicated to growing alpine plants have a shorter history. During the age of the great plant explorers (basically, the 1800s) there was great interest in the exotic discoveries being brought back to England, and people wanted to grow these amazing new treasures successfully. Although others had previously written about growing alpine plants, it was actually Reginald Farrer who, with the 1919 publication of his two-volume book The English Rock Garden, rocked the gardening world for the first time. There was great interest in Farrer’s method and approach to creating large-scale, naturalistic settings for growing alpine plants.

(For more about the man credited with starting the rock gardening craze, read Nicola Shulman’s biography of Farrer).

Alpine Crevice Garden
Alpine Garden Society Center
Pershore, Worcestershire, England
Photo: Stone Garden

Because our own research group focuses on the integration of botanical and geological knowledge, we strongly recommend that public rock gardens interpret both the plants and the rocks that are present. The public trails we have designed always include geobotanical interpretation. As visitors tread the rock garden’s paths examining the alpine plants, we think it is helpful for the visitors to understand the geologic history of any garden site, to know what kind of rocks they are seeing and their influences on plant growth.

We appreciate, for example, University of Florence’s Botanical Garden exhibit that interprets the geobotany of the alpine plants of Italy’s Dolomite region via a simulated outcrop of limestone derived from the Dolomite Mountains themselves. Similarly, we think the rock garden at the Botanic Garden of Montreal is exemplary from a geobotanical perspective. It’s not only a rock garden, but also a mineralogical garden, with rocks and minerals drawn from all over Canada.

Finally, if you live in the US, be sure to experience the Denver Botanic Garden’s remote 1.5-mile Walter Pesman Trail through the alpine tundra on Mount Goliath, a mountain peak section of the Mount Evans area within the Arapaho National Forest (17 miles from Idaho Springs). Volunteer guides will interpret not only the plants but also the rocks that you see in this “nature-made” alpine rock garden, but only during the summertime days when the alpine flowers are in bloom, June 26th to August 7th. (Reservations are required: phone 720-865-3539). The Denver Botanic Garden within the city also has a fine rock garden, with thousands of different rockery plants collected by Panayoti Kelaidis--the godfather of American rock gardening.

We conclude with a passage from author Donna E. Schaper: “Building a quiet [sanctuary] of stones and plants, slowly and meditatively over time, is [a rock garden’s] true meaning. Process over product, journey over destination, forever a work in progress—rock is the best metaphor we have of everlastingness.”

Friday, April 18, 2008

In Iris Society, ‘It’s What You Like’

Dishwater blondes, clowns and upturned beards, the American Iris Society has seen it all.

Members of the American Iris Society, in Austin, Texas
for their annual meeting, toured the mammoth iris bed
at the Natural Gardener on April 17, 2008
Photo: Human Flower Project

Peachy, icy, frilly – and then there’s the one that looks like a grimy t-shirt.

Iris fanciers must be the most broadminded of all floral enthusiasts, because there’s a greater range among the flowers they breed, grow and travel cross country to see than any flower–type we know.

You orchid people may take issue. But who has seen a two-tone brown orchid? Who’s bred one the color of rag and named it “Ugly Duckling”? We saw Ugly Duckling and many fairer species with our own eyes yesterday, tagging along with the experts as the American Iris Society descended on Austin for its annual weeklong convention.

Miracles of azure, crystal puffs and mongrels in several shades of tinkle-yellow…what a range of color! Shapes too. We saw iris blooms delicate as meringues and others like smashed pinwheels, enough to make a small child cry. Much to their credit, the iris people seem to enjoy them all. Here was one the color of a puddle. “You either like it or you don’t,” Jim Morris of St. Louis told me. “I like it.”

Jim Morris of St. Louis, an iris grower since childhood and veteran of many meetings—thus the badges—took notes on the flowers Thursday; the year’s winning iris will be announced Sunday, April 20
Photo: Human Flower Project

There have been lectures, judges training sessions, and classes for the 430 participants, but the highlight, as at every iris convention, has been the garden visits, seven in all. Thursday, April 17, the group bussed west of the city to the Natural Gardener, one of Austin’s premier nurseries, to check out the 800-plus varieties that have been grown in the big full-sun bed made just for them.

Convention locales are decided at least two years in advance. That way, breeders can send their rhizomes ahead to be planted and get established so that by meeting time, if all goes well, they’ll be in full, healthy flower.

Some of the irises had “bloomed out” before the AIS members arrived. Other plants were still a just few green blades, but scores more were performing well. Jim Morris, who’s raised irises since childhood, was taking careful notes, as were many others. On Sunday evening, all the convention-goers will cast ballots for the best flowers they’ve seen this week.

Augustine, a bearded iris (non-space age) bred by O. Schick, 2005
Photo: Human Flower Project

Barbara Sautner, president of the Iris Society of Minnesota, explained that judges look for “branching, bud count, and growth.” (To our surprise and chagrin, fragrance doesn’t matter.) Sautner, and many others, too, lingered by an unnamed seedling, AM0010550-3, bred by Anton Mego of Slovakia. These are new varieties that have yet to be introduced to the market. “They want to see if we like it,” said Patricia Wurtele, of Ramona, California. From all the eye-bugging and finger-pointing, Mego’s tall purple, yellow and red iris is a winner, and for a $15 registration fee, will get a name. Since this lilting three-tone iris had thrived here in Texas, how about “Jimmie Dale Gilmore”?

A successful seedling, as yet unnamed, from Slovakian hybridizer Anton Mego
Photo: Human Flower Project

Sautner said that several of the nation’s biggest iris companies are located near Portland; Schreiner is in Oregon today, though it began in the 1920s in Minnesota. “They started bringing in iris from France and the Mediterranean that couldn’t survive our winters,” she explained. So the big hybridizers eventually moved west.

We’d never thought of Central Texas as iris land (not like back in Kentucky). Skimpy white “flags” are among the earliest flowers here in Austin, often blooming in mid-February and spent a week later. We have some pretty, but also frail, passalong purples that flower in March. And our neighbors David and Wendy Todd have many tall Louisiana iris, bright yellow, now blooming around their pond.

But the huge bearded hybrids these iris experts most admire are Bouvier des Flandres compared with our local fidos. There are double scoops of sorbet – like the aptly named Trinotostare. And the iris socialites appear to be especially taken with “space age” varieties. These irises, Richard Wurtele told us, were introduced over the past ten years and bred with weird beards. Rather than hanging down, a little bristle down the center of the iris “fall,” these beards are flexed into “horns, spoons and flounces.”

Hybridizer Jack Worel talks to Jean Morris and Barbara Sautner about
his Silver Creek iris, which has taken to Central Texas beautifully
Photo: Human Flower Project

Jack Worel, from Osseo, Minnesota, said that hybridizing iris is fairly easy (Note: Jack may be at a genetic advantage—his great aunt Elsie Peterson was one of the first iris judges in the U.S.). On Thursday his Silver Creek, a white iris with a deep orange beard, drew a crowd. “Wow, what a clump!” exclaimed Jean Morris of Baldwin, Missouri, as she scribbled in a notebook. Jack said that Silver Creek is the offspring of Michelle Taylor, another white iris, and Shirley M, pink with a blue beard. Loaded with cigar like buds and rippling blooms, it seems to like it here in Austin.

A “space age” iris with upturned beard and plicata (speckles)
Photo: Human Flower Project

After encountering Worel’s beautiful white iris, as well as Hurry Up Sun, Augustine, and Full Figured, we will have to give bearded iris a try. Patricia Wurtele says these spectacular hybrids aren’t hard to grow, so long as they’re shallowly planted and receive a half day of sun. They do like water (a problem here) and good drainage. “And they’re hungry flowers,” she says, recommending alfalfa pellets to enrich the soil.

But just because a hybridizer can concoct an iris with a red, spoon-shaped beard that sticks two inches in the air, does anyone want one? Apparently so. “It’s what you like,“ Jim Morris says serenely. We like Jimmie Dale Gilmore.

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, April 12, 2008

Twickenham, or London ‘Recovered’

Unfolding a map of London, John Levett sets out for an old bastion of privilege; crossing a bridge, here are magnolias, a common, a view. Thank you, John.

Mogg’s postal district and cabfare map of London
Image: Emonson Family History

By

I was almost born in London but not quite. My mother’s labour came too early for that so I was diverted elsewhere but we arrived there some six years later. I grew up in the fiercely middle class suburb of Bromley. My mother ran a small grocer’s shop and was visited at yearly intervals by the freeholder to see what needed doing to the property then did nothing. For the post-war British middle class, time was going to have to stand still at some point and it was in the early 1950s that time came to an end for those of a certain age in Bromley for whom the Coronation year of 1953 was possibly ‘the last best time.’

I came to this thought from having discovered a cousin. I write ‘discovered’ but should, maybe, describe her as ‘recovered.’ I lost contact with what remained of my extended family in the mid-’90s for reasons it would take a book to explain and another to describe what led me to seek them out; my cousin and her husband were the only ones I once knew who were still living. They were of a generation born at the start of the ‘Long Weekend’ of the 1930s who came to maturity in the early 50s and would now be enjoying the fruits, benefits and cookies of non-compulsory activity — life with the kids, safaris (didn’t those go out with Grace Kelly, Clark Gable and Mogambo?), walks across Indian beaches, watching the sun go down on Ayers Rock. They won’t be doing any of that; my cousin has a degenerative neurological condition and the only treatment is to make the decline easier than it might otherwise be. But describing her as ‘recovered’ is still appropriate.

I’m not getting here into a palaver about the resilience of the human spirit or the beauty of the inner self; knowing you’re degenerating and losing contact with all the facility you once had isn’t uplifting—not for you nor anyone around you. This was the time you looked forward to; promises you made to yourself and each other; something deserving after the toil and toeing the line. Not to be. I started visiting my cousin regularly, catching up on both our lives and the trip-ups in both. Our pasts are always there but this past also had something concrete.

Fenced tree, Ham
Photo: John Levett

As a result of the various deaths in the family my cousin had become the ‘keeper of the family archive’—the snaps of a century. There’s too much to tell here so I’ll cut to the chase. The family had become Londoners in the second half of the nineteenth century, coming down the fifty or so miles from Suffolk and setting up their stall in south London near Greenwich before spreading throughout Kent. Looking through the family albums and reflecting on the scattering of the seeding family a quaint thought came to me—how little of London I’d known outside its south-east boundary and its arterial roads into its centre. I noticed how I’d always travelled into London by the same routes and out the other side by a similarly familiar trail. Throughout my growing-up years I’d clung to the safe—same buses, same trains; same clubs, same pubs; same bookshops, same record stores—never touching another point on the London boundary.

Last Thursday I took out a map of London and found out where I’d never been. There was a lot of it. I looked west along the course of the Thames—Barnes and Chiswick; Richmond and Twickenham; Brentford and Hounslow; then north through Harrow, Ruislip, Northwood; south even to Wimbledon and Kingston. I’d never had any cause it seems. I could attach associations—Battle of Britain fighter squadrons, sport, horses, births and deaths —but no compulsive need to trip off there. So I chose. Twickenham would do.

Dutch House, Twinckenham
Photo: John Levett

The moment I chose I knew why I’d never been there. Twickenham is home to the English Rugby Union and throughout my growing years rugby was associated with the class enemy, chinless wonders, hooray harrys, unearned privilege, family advantage and not the sport of the sons and daughters of toil and soil. It’s changed; they’re now as unremittingly bourgeois as the rest of western Europe. I trooped down from Cambridge and caught the 11.50 out of Waterloo. Another first; I’d never taken a mainline train from there before. (Footnote: John Schlesinger made a film of Waterloo station early in his career, Terminus 1960.) I passed through Clapham Junction and made a note that I’d never been there either. Thence to the suburbs.

St. Alban’s Church, Twickenham
Photo: John Levett

Twickenham promised nothing. Like every suburb, town, city in this increasingly dis-United Kingdom it’s got the full complement of corporations in the High street (with the singular exception, as far as I could see, of Woolworth. Whatever happened to them? I used to spend an afternoon in Woolworth as a kid just looking at stuff). I took off for the nearest available Thames bridge some two miles away.

As I walked I began to warm to the place. Much of the housing development was post 1880s and was in great debt to the early patriarchs of Modernism—Voysey, Webb, Townsend. It tails off into early 1900s pattern-book eclecticism but there are enough features on enough houses to stop for. As I closed on Teddington lock I stopped at St. Alban’s church. It was begun during the high point of mid-Victorian self-confidence and opened to the prayerful in 1899, curtailed its activity when the subscriptions dropped off and fell into disrepair. Like many similar parish enterprises it now serves as an arts centre. I crossed the Thames into Ham.

Ham Common
Photo: John Levett

Now I knew that ‘Ham’ had something to do with a bend in the river and that didn’t take much working out but beside that I knew nothing. So I asked. Ham is on the southern boundary of Richmond Park which is deemed to be a Royal park which means that some Royal stole the land from the peasantry who held it in common. That Royal was Charles I who clearly paid heavily for the theft. Needless to say the payment didn’t involve handing back the land. Some common land was left; cunningly named Ham Common and a fine spot it is. Having walked around the backside of Ham and getting the impression it was all 1920s social housing with the inevitable mock Tudor affairs, Ham Common was a joy. I sat down and got all this info chatting with Alfred who had come here after demob from the last war. (No doubt there will shortly be a generation, if it hasn’t already arrived, for whom the term ‘the last war’ will mean no more than ‘the last war before the present one’ and each indistinguishable from any other.)

Alfred married Bettie and moved into Bettie’s family home because it was just off the Common and Bettie wasn’t moving because they’d never get anything as lovely. Bettie’s parents died within the decade and they had the place to themselves and their own family. Bettie knew a thing or two.

From Alfred I got the history—the Common, Richmond Park, Ham House, the ferry across the Thames, his family, other families, that house over there, the murder there, the plane crash. It was the warmest day of the year so far so sitting around was fine.

Magnolia, blooming in Ham
Photo: John Levett

When Alf took off so did I. Walking the back streets. You could make a forest from the number of magnolias in bloom. I often think that should I have space one day for one plant only then the magnolia it should be. I’ve never cared about the flowering season of anything I’ve ever planted (my rose garden has largely been and gone by high summer) and the lift to the spirit that magnolias bring is special.

I walked past Ham House towards the Thames and chose to walk the bank to Richmond. Not that there was much choice. My London means a bridge available whenever needed; not a walk of a mile or paying the ferryman.

One feature of the London A-Z is that it has no contours so I was surprised by Richmond Hill rising some couple of hundred metres from the Thames and a view straight through to the southern Weald. It’s not Table Mountain nor the view from Machu Picchu but I’d never seen it before; never seen this view of the Thames other than the one passing Charing Cross; never knew London was this tall; never felt the surprise of a city new to me. I may seem small beer but I thought once I knew it all. Then a few more pennies dropped. The habits of my early years I’d taken with me through decades. Always took the same route to school; always got off at the same bus stop, never one stage before or one after; strolled from this place to that, looked in the same store windows; it seemed to me that I still do. I realized it was the same with my cycle rides; anti-clockwise out of Cambridge whichever point of the compass I was aiming for hence I always get the same scenery at right and left.

View of the Thames from Richmond Hill
Photo: John Levett

It may seem strange that something that is someone else’s daily grind gives a heart a leap. But then it should; there should be wonder in small things; there should be daily discovery; there should be looking up; there should be a daily new horizon. Sitting on the top of Richmond Hill I hoped that the Richmondians took joy too as I do walking along the Backs. It’s often forgotten that people pay good money to visit what we see as our own back garden. Two days ago I found a small booklet on Cambridge architecture contemporary in 1960 on a market stall. I was struck by how much I’d never noticed; bold-for-its-moment design, bold-for-any-age innovation that had now been blended by its generic successors. Yesterday I started a walk wide-eyed and camera-laden looking for this stuff. The stuff I was looking for is not King’s College Chapel nor Wren’s Trinity Library which means it’s no doubt continually under threat; 1960s concrete is not beloved, hospital architecture disappears with changing demands, pupils outgrow schools, shopping arcades fall with the styles they sell. But there is a remarkable volume of seen-as-disposable building that I’d never noticed, never seen as more than purely functional (which maybe accounts for its success and continuation). It seems that in twenty-first century fashion I’d easily cast off easily-acquired, soon-too-familiar views. I’ve begun to rethink, review two favourite cities. Fun for all the family.

Tuesday, April 08, 2008

Garden Bloggers Cross-Pollinate

A weekend in Austin, Texas, pitches three dozen garden writers together: let the hybridizing begin!

Writers ooh, ahh, click over the ‘Embroidery Garden’
at James David and Gary Peese’s home in Austin
Photo: Human Flower Project

Writing is solitary, whether it goes on in an ivory tower or a partitionless newsroom with a hundred jangling phones. So the Garden Bloggers Spring Fling that took place in Austin over the weekend felt strange and delightful – like an orgy.

There were 38 of us, thereabouts, gathered in the sunshine without so much as a paragraph to stretch over our private identities. Bloggers from Illinois, Louisiana, Maryland, Wisconsin, Tennessee, Idaho, New York, Indiana, Oklahoma, Georgia, and all over Texas (yes, even North AND South Austin) spent a humming two days together. We visited a public garden for $8, and several private ones for free. We hung out at a local nursery, listened to an inspiring talk over fajita lunch, let our hair down at organizer Pam Penick’s house and garden, and gorged on a family-style barbecue dinner.

Carol of May Dreams Garden discusses garden blogging at Pam Penick’s house during the Garden Bloggers Spring Fling, April 5, 2008
Photo: Human Flower Project

After all that we’re not exactly “family,” but we surely cross-pollinated in ways that only our subsequent writing, thinking and photography will bear out.

There are already loads of interesting accounts of the event on the web, with a compilation to come on Pam’s site, Digging. Here’s some pollen we picked up, from bloggers and others throughout the weekend, delivered orgy-style:

There is such a thing as too-good drainage: Frances, who gardens on a slope in East Tennessee, swears that’s so.

People aren’t making money off their gardening weblogs – or if they are, they were mighty quiet about it.

The term “live oak” is fiercely contested; we witnessed a spirited discussion between a transplanted Texan and a transplanted Georgian, both natives of England and so, by birthright, experts in such matters.

Wordpress seems the blogging software of choice, though there were lots of grumblings about it. Kathy Purdy, who has her own blogging advice site, gave a tutorial on Pam’s porch and brought along the telltale Wordpress for Dummies.

Snow Melt, iris hybridized by M. Sutton at the Natural Gardener
Photo: Human Flower Project

Bearded iris really can grow in Austin. Really. We met a volunteer from the local iris society who was weeding a bed of 800+ varieties at the Natural Gardener. And the American Iris Society will actually hold its national meeting here in a week.

Several of the most enchanting garden writers we met are also historians, deep in to genealogy and regional research. We especially hope that Mary Ann Newcomer follows through on her study of Polly Bemis, a Chinese-American pioneer whose Idaho garden grows on.

From poolside, gardens of James David and Gary Peese in West Austin
Photo: Human Flower Project

REVOLUTIONARY PARADIGM SHIFT: Better listeners told us that James David and Gary Peese, whose imperial gardens we visited Saturday afternoon, are not so sweet on spring. Their favorite season is late summer/early fall. Let’s say that again, another way: Their gardening year revolves around the Texas summer because it’s the one reliable season here. As in, 112 degrees. As in, hasn’t rained for four months. This is samurai gardening!! Rather than dreading, moaning, and if possible running like hell from the facts of August, they face up, figure out, and work to make that time splendid. Honestly, just the idea sounds impossible—even nauseating—to us, but the thought has been planted. And our “endure” or “cut and run” approach hasn’t even been character building.

The way to pronounce “clematis” is klem-e-tis. One of the aforementioned English experts confirmed this—as gratifying an episode as we could imagine (since that’s how we’ve always said it).

Lucinda Hutson’s purple house and wonder garden, Austin
Photo: Human Flower Project

The Virgin of Guadalupe smiles on gardens, as proven by Lucinda Hutson. Her serendipitous invitation was the icing on the orgy Sunday morning. About a dozen of us wandered around waist high snapdragons, chard and poppies, sniffing leaves from her allspice tree as images of Our Lady—in stone, paint, tile, wood and beadwork—blessed our every step.

That plant we have tried unsuccessfully to kill for nine years is actually a treasured “native” – Twisted leaf yucca (Yucca rupicola) – on display at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center. Terrific – antipathy has turned to pride, and there’s one less thing on our garden hit list.

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do

with your one wild and precious life?”

The famous last line of Mary Oliver’s poem now has a context, thanks to Tom Spencer.

Fearless leader and ace-pollinator, Pam Penick
Photo: Human Flower Project

And despite the bluster, everything is NOT bigger in Texas. One out-of-stater looking over a patch of bluebonnets Saturday morning quietly confessed: “I thought they would be much taller.”

To Pam Penick, the prime pollinator of this whole event, thank you. We’re also grateful to organizers MSS (Zanthan Gardens), Diana (Sharing Nature’s Garden) and Bonnie (Kiss of Sun) for all the behind the scenes work. You all make orgy-hosting tasteful and heavy lifting look easy. 

Sunday, April 06, 2008

Gardenias on the Left—Lady Day

With vocal improvisations to beat the band—and white flowers behind her ear—Eleanora Fagan became Billie Holiday.

Billie Holiday with her dog “Mister,” 1946
Photo: William Gottlieb, via Library of Congress

Athena had her helmet and Spanky McFarland his two-tone beanie. Where would The Cat in the Hat be today except for that teetering stovepipe with the stripes? Curled in obscurity.  Headgear makes for legend. Ask Monica Lewinsky.

Flowers have been accessories to myth, too. We’re thinking of Billie Holiday, born April 7, 1915. Do you even know what she looked like? Maybe not, but you know that grainy, supple voice and recognize her beautiful attribute: the white flower she wore next to her face. Like most flower emblems, it richly suggests – sensuality, glamour, fragility – without ever pinning much down. Pins are for taxonomy, not myth.

In anticipation of “Lady’s Day’s” birthday, we hunted for the story behind her floral signature and found several. The most convincing, in its specificity and chronology, is biographer Bud Kliment’s account of the early 1940s:

“Holiday’s success at the 52nd Street clubs (New York City) was partly due to her becoming a torch singer. Many people identified with her songs about loneliness and lost love, especially at a time when the horrors of World War II were affecting everyone’s life. ‘In some ways,’ noted (historian Arnold) Shaw, ‘Billie’s tortured style, the sense of hurt and longing, may have been a perfect expression of what servicemen and their loved ones were feeling.’

Billie Holiday with fresh gardenia
Photo: via Maryland Civil Rights

“During Holiday’s tenure at Kelly’s Stable, Sylvia Sims, a fellow jazz singer, furnished Holiday with an accessory that was to become a lasting part of her image. One night before a performance, Holiday burned her hair with a curling iron. Sims, who was in the room with her, promptly went to a club down the street, where the coat check girls were selling flowers. Sims bought a big white gardenia and gave it to Holiday, who wore it that night to cover the burned section of her hair. She liked wearing the flower so much that she began to put a gardenia in her hair before every performance.”

As human-flowers so often manage to be, Billie’s gardenia was at once an attraction and a distraction. A come on and a cover up. “Look at me,” it says, “but don’t look at me.”

Could this picture, taken when she was only two, also have inspired her to adopt the white flower as a personal accessory?

Holiday usually chose gardenias but not always (Here’s quite an amazing orchid). Sometimes the blossoms were real, though she wore fabric flowers, too—either up front, above her brow, or most often cascading along the left side of her face. After the hair-burning episode (gardenia of expediency), was this a kind of code? We believe that among Polynesian cultures, a woman’s wearing a flower over her left ear means something quite different from a bloom on the right. But does a lefty flower say ”Let me take you down” or “I’m taken, buzz off”? Interpretations we’ve found devolve into a hilarious snarl. In any case, Billie Holiday’s audiences were not Polynesians. They were jazz buffs and curiosity seekers, or just lonely people looking for great music that sexuality and exoticism could enhance.

Certainly, Billie’s gardenias were only one element of her mythology. Her singing was the soul of it, and stories of rape and prostitution, her heroin habit and incarceration, though perhaps not so news-worthy these days, shocked her contemporaries and underscored her credentials as a haunted princess of the dark, jaded world called jazz. There’s been considerable doubt cast on some the details of her impoverished and violent childhood, but assuming only a tenth of them are true, she was brutalized. And in adulthood she turned to the self-degradation, first so mellow, of drugs and alcohol. She died in New York City of cirrhosis of the liver, age 44.

Billie Holiday, still from New Orleans (1947)
Photo: via youtube

Here, with flowers, she lip synchs The Blues Are Brewing with Louis Armstrong’s orchestra, from the movie New Orleans (1947)

And here, without flowers but a group of jazz all-stars, is Fine and Mellow, 1957.

Monday, March 31, 2008

Why Callas Must Moan: Jay Yan

With callas that sigh, a California artist combines digital media and fresh flowers with his art world savvy to entice an international audience.

A gallery goer bends down to attend Jay Yan’s Whisper
Photo: Jay Yan

A few fundamentals. Flowers contain the sex organs of plants—it’s true. And yes, art is a form of exhibitionism.

A delightful young artist from Los Angeles, Jiacong (Jay) Yan, has turned these basics into interactive works designed to allure and startle. In these times, artists who allure only tend to be dismissed as frivolous. (A shame, we say. How many Watteaus have turned to truck driving?)

What drew us to Jay were the flowers in his piece Whisper. In a dark room, nine white calla lilies stand illuminated from above, and as you approach them, you hear each flower moaning tenderly. If there’s an auditory equivalent of “voyeurism,” here it is, sighing in a public gallery. Since it’s just flowers, not a writhing woman, listening is socially acceptable, sort of; but calling it “art” is the real kiss of guilt-freedom.

Jay, born 1983 in Shanghai, moved to the U.S. in 1990 and now lives in Los Angeles. “I am born Chinese, raised American, and now because Chinese art is so hot, Chinese once more,” he states in an online bio. We enjoy how Jay both plays along with many rules of the art world and breaks the big one—disclosing that there ARE rules everyone plays by. He very generously wrote to us about the evolution of Whisper, an intriguing story, we think, as it illustrates some of the pressures—social, conceptual, financial, political—that are molding contemporary artists and what they make.

Jay Yan

”Whisper came to me when I was kicking a ball around with a friend. Like anything worth making, it came inexplicably,” Jay writes. “I said to myself, ‘If flowers could talk, what would they say?’ We explored romantic notions, agricultural notions, environmental complaints, and then realized, ‘Wait, all these notions are placed on flowers by society.’ Like my professor Jennifer Steinkamp once said, ‘Flowers are innocent. Flowers do not represent love, charity, sorrow, friendship —if society was not around. What do flowers do if we really abstract it enough?’ Well, that’s obvious, right? sex.”

All the classroom philosophizing, considerations of social constructedness and the like, land back at square one. Nonetheless, most “serious” contemporary artists feel obligated to engage in such a conceptual workout.

Back to Jay: “Again, idea of sex and flowers—not new. Georgia O’Keefe explored it extensively through her paintings, and Robert Mapplethorpe did through his photography. I wanted to reference both in Whisper. (Also, I found a company in Japan that makes flowers talk! Too bad they’re out of business now, haha. The talking flower didn’t prove to be that popular; I think I was their only customer).” We wrote a bit about that product, Jay, right here. Good to hear from one person—as you say, maybe the only one—who bought it.

He goes on: “So the piece consists of 9 flowers, each of them calla lilies. Calla lilies being not only the best flower for talking but also Georgia O’Keefe and Mapplethorpe both used it extensively in their works. The sexualization of calla lilies is quite explored in art history. I included a very strong spot light from above the piece to give it the shadows Mapplethorpe uses so well.”

Exploring the precedents for his subject, Jay fulfills another another artistic obligation. The point is not to imitate what’s come before but to advance past it somehow—either slaying your forebears or, more benignly, standing on their shoulders. Noting that many an art historian has written about human sexuality and callas, Jay mentions only art celebrities of the recent past—O’Keefe and Mapplethorpe— maybe because their popularity serves as a kind of cultural shorthand.

Jay Yan’s Whisper during its exhibition in Shanghai
Callas must not have been available; these look like Easter lilies (Lilium longiflorum)
Photo: Jay Yan

“The flowers each moan softly like during intimacy, and it’s a female voice,” Jay writes. “I know, sounds very sexist. Let me tell you another story....

“So at first, I had each flower whisper prepared text by my friends who all gave me their favorite lines they like to whisper to someone’s ear during intimacy. Then I recorded both male and female voice actor tracks. Oh boy, was that hard. First off, I auditioned 120 people. Here is one typical result from an actor:

“The funny part was, his girlfriend was next to him, so I gave her a quick glance like, ‘Does he talk to you like this normally?’

“Then I got criticized by a curator at the Getty about the choice of words (well ‘criticized’ is a strong word— more like, he was interested in buying it, then he asked about the text, and when I told him, he stopped becoming interested). This coupled with each flower having a different voice proved not that interesting after a while, and the electronics for making each flower having a different voice becoming expensive and hard to find. I decided they should all be the same.” Maybe if a few gladioli, pansies and snapdragons had been mixed in, different “texts” would have been warranted.

But, Jay, how rare it is for artists to admit that the wrinkled nose of a museum official or gallery owner or some other arbiter changed their creative course! As heliotropic flowers turn their faces to the sun, artists intent on growing their careers do heed the responses of authorities. It happens all the time!  And of course there are feasibilities to consider. Media artists can dream beyond their technical capacities, and their finances. Let’s be real.

“The reduction of audible words to a moan came about because Art is international these days. Hell, 100% of all my shows are all overseas in non-English speaking countries. How can they understand the sexualities of the piece if they don’t speak English? So to the dismay of many of my female friends, but support of all my female friends that make art (funny how making art changed your opinions) I auditioned for moans.”

What used to be called art’s “universality” is now a feature of art world globalism. And Jay neatly avoided what might have been a linguistic barrier, by nixing words.

Listening with happiness to Whisper
Photo: Jay Yan

“That was another 60 horrible auditions. But I finally came up with one that was great. I liked her because just listening to her can invoke the feeling of eroticism instantly in any language. I like the idea of people at an art museum or gallery in public and putting their ear to the piece and hearing it and getting turned on because it’s such a socially inappropriate thing, thus taboo. And taboo is the basis of eroticism (so it’s like a loop!).” See above.

Though Whisper’s blooms and sighs both travel easily across international boundaries, Jay points out how variously the piece has been received.

“In China, since sex in art is taboo enough to get you banned, I had a show and when the censors came to inspect the show, I unplugged the work so they just thought it was a nice looking sculpture. During the opening, a famous curator commented that he was amazed I got away with such a piece in China. The censors came back the next day apparently, but I think a janitor accidentally unplugged the piece! haha.

“In Asia, men love the piece. Many women like it, but are apprehensive about it. I suspect it could be like a Confucius thing (like how it is only appropriate for Chinese women to associate with men in church). This might be a bias, but it’s my observation from hanging around Chinese churches at a young age. Sex is still soooooo taboo in China.

“The opposite is found in, say, Europe where women all love the piece. They openly tell me and some have offered me drugs because they appreciated the experience with the piece so much.” Not exactly “fame, money, and beautiful lovers,” but, hey, there’s a recession going on.

“As opposed to men in Europe, who are very restrained about their contact with the piece. An observer said to me at a show, ‘The piece is so sensual, it’s surprising a man made it.’ I think this is the interesting part, I think the sensuality turns men off in Europe because they might fear losing their manhood in public by being near the piece. They loved the