Human Flower Project
Coronas for Cavazos
Wreaths of flowers were delivered to a funeral home in Santiago, Mexico, August 19 – for the wake of the city’s mayor Edelmiro Cavazos. The 39 year old mayor was abducted from his home early August 16. His body was discovered two days later on a road nearby. Santiago is 20 miles from Monterey, in Northern Mexico.
Six of the town’s police officers have since been arrested for their roles in the murder. Authorities say the killing was related to the ongoing turf war among rival drug cartels in Nuevo Leon and other parts of Mexico.
Time reports that since December 2006, when Mexico’s current president Felipe Calderón took office, “there have been an incredible 28,000 drug-related killings.”
Funeral wreaths in memory of mayor Edelmiro Cavazos are arrayed outside the funeral home where his wake was held August 19. Cavazos allegedly was killed by members of a drug cartel working in collusion with local police.
Photo: Reuters
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Twice Named, Once Copied, Twice Stolen
“Poppy Flowers” (a.k.a. “Vase with Flowers”)
by Vincent Van Gogh, c. 1887
A Van Gogh floral still life known as “Poppy Flowers” and/or “Vase with Flowers” (since some decidedly non-poppy yellow blossoms crowd the few poppies aside here) has been the pride of Cairo’s Mahmoud Khali Museum, and its embarrassment. Saturday, the painting was stolen from the museum for the second time.
According to aolnews “Egypt’s minister of culture announced that the $50 million work of art had been ‘cut from its frame’ while on show…. He added that police were now studying security camera footage and questioning employees.” The investigation could get tough since “according to one security official, interviewed by Agence France-Presse, both the museum’s cameras and its alarms have been out of action for ‘a long time.’”
Several sources say that this work was one of many homages Van Gogh made to Adolphe Monticelli, a prolific flower painter whom Van Gogh admired. Here’s an interesting site, in French, with more details of Van Gogh’s efforts to imitate the elder painter (especially nice hollyhocks).
The painting, reportedly worth $50 million today, was stolen in 1978 and recovered two years later in Kuwait. “However, a duplicate was sold for $43 million a year later, sparking speculation that the returned painting was a fake.” Early Sunday, a story circulated that “Poppy Flowers” had been found and two Italian suspects detained, but that news has now been retracted by Egyptian authorities. The painting is still unaccounted for—and those yellow flowers are still unidentified.
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Scents and Sensibilities of Pamela Price
When it comes to social networking, Pamela Price of San Antonio qualifies as a power station – fueled with goodwill and idealism. Her Red, White and Grew is reviving and renewing the Victory Garden for 21st Centurians. Her twitter site is crackling with action.
And Dig for Texas, another brainchild, is gathering petitions for a vegetable garden to be planted at the Texas Governor’s mansion – part of a bigger push toward sustainable food production and homegrown edibles statewide.
Yesterday we had the pleasure of meeting Pamela in person, and generously she brought us some Goodwin Creek lavender harvested from her own yard. We’d call it heavenly, Pamela, except we know better. This beautiful herb came right out of the Texas soil. We’ve poured it into a bag and now have a sachet that will freshen a car ridden in too many times by too many nervous people and panting dogs.
Thank you, Pamela. Till we meet again….
Writer, gardener, and dynamo Pamela Price, from Leon Springs, Texas, after a macrobiotic lunch at Casa de Luz in Austin
Photo: Human Flower Project
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I Love You, But…
Love the trampler but hate the trampling. Thus champion dahlia grower Ken Stock copes with the two great loves of his life: his garden and his great-grandchildren.
“I am very passionate about them,” he says – speaking of the 600 varieties of dahlias he’s grown in Bournemouth, Dorset, England.
Stock admits he’s “filled with pride at this time of year. Whenever I am out in my front garden, which is a lot, passersby will stop, look at my dahlias and compliment me and ask me questions about them.”
This fine, well illustrated article from the Daily Mail answers quite a lot of those questions. And it will inform the ordinary person why s/he doesn’t have a yard like Ken’s. It’s not unusual for him to be working with his dahlias 11 months out of the year: from February, when he first transfers the tubers from the garage-storage to his greenhouse, through to the first frost, sometimes as late as December.
But this is glory time.
“I am very selfish with them and do most of the work myself,” Stock says. He’s named many of the varieties he’s created after family members, yet he admits, “I get a little nervous when the great-grandchildren come round as they like to run about in the garden.”
Ken Stock’s great-granddaughter Amy Chesterman has a dahlia named for her,
and she’d better play with care in his dazzling garden.
Photo: Daily Mail
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How Much for Floral Fairyland?
“…divine chandeliers, real glass windows, fabric-draped ceilings and walls, flower-festooned support poles and 40 or 50 beautifully dressed, set and decorated tables…” It’s all pretty vague, but Annie Groer at least took at stab at describing the Chelsea Clinton/Marc Mezvinsky wedding. The longtime sweethearts were married Saturday evening at the Astor estate in Rhinebeck, New York.
From what we’ve been able to gather, rumored florist for the event “Jeff Leatham—artistic director of the Four Seasons George V Hotel in Paris,” was in fact the florist. Other speculations had been that Winston Flowers of Boston would be taking a hand—even the floral lead—in the event. But Winston, perhaps because its designers don’t have their own cable TV show, seems to have been dropped from the 2nd and 3rd hand accounts we’ve discovered thus far.
Hard to say who did much of what from looking at the few photos available. The former first daughter carried “a bouquet of white moth orchids” (one of the few times when the Latin name Phalaenopsis might have been preferable – after all Chelsea’s only 30!). Groer doesn’t venture a guess in any language at what variety that was overhanging the ceremony: “They stood under an arch of twigs and vines and the palest of flowers, in a nod to the Jewish chuppah.”
Looks like pink and white roses from here but it’s hard to tell from where we stand, one low rez photo and half a continent away.
Estimates of the Clintons’ flower budget (we assume Mom and Dad paid for the event and party) began about 10 days ago, at $250,000; the New York Daily News squeezed a guess of double that amount from one source.
“Rory Pierpont, head designer at Castle & Pierpont in SoHo, says that high-end choices, like flown-in orchids or Casablanca lilies, hit the half-a-mil mark. Even midrange blooms like hydrangeas, garden roses and perennials are a cool $250,000.” Rory, we wonder what such a high ball will do for your own wedding business! Aren’t ALL flowers “flown in” to Manhattan, by the way—or are they still coming by wagon from Rochester?
The bouquet and chuppah “nod,” while lovely, don’t strike us as half million dollar items. But if Leatham indeed “tranformed a massive white weather-proof tent into a spectacular fairyland,” it could have bumped the tab up considerably (unless of course they hired the thrifty stage designer who handled Spinal Tap’s Stonehenge tour).
“And oh how they danced – the little people of Stone’enge!”
Update: Jeff Leatham shooed away the moth orchid report: “The bride’s bouquet was a beautiful, clean, simple ball of Gardenias. The men had Freesia boutonnières,”
Marc Mezvinsky and Chelsea Clinton exchanged wedding vows under a canopy of vines and flowers, 7/31/10
Photo: Manjo Photography
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“The Flower” Decriminalized
Building up to California’s vote this November on legalization of marijuana use, artist Haik Hoisington’s cartoon “The Flower” is really getting around.
Wordless, until its final slogan, the 3-minute piece is intriguing no matter where you stand on the pot issue. It might refer to any number of controversial and delightful things (though the sunflowery-looking species here doesn’t have the same effect on all sniffers).
In case there were any doubt, though, Hoisington offered a gloss: “The Flower contrasts a utopian society that freely farms and consumes a pleasure giving flower with a society where the same flower is illegal and its consumption is prohibited. The animation is a meditation on the social and economic costs of marijuana prohibition.”
According to the L.A. Examiner, a new poll shows strong voter support for Proposition 19, which would make it legal for adults to use marijuana in “small quantities…for any reason.” Public Policy Polling shows 52% of California voters favor the measure, 36% oppose it.
In titling his pro-pot video “The Flower,” Hoisington immediately tips the scale in favor of legal cannabis, emphasizing that it’s “natural” and suggesting, that, like a sunflower, it’s simply a cheery picker-upper.
A “flower” lounge, depicted in Haik Hoisington’s cartoon about marijuana and its criminalization.
Image: “The Flower,” by Haik Hoisington
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Alaska’s Peony Window
Twenty-two hour days could be a marketing niche for Alaskans, one to grow on.
A recent workshop in Fairbanks focused on helping the state’s flower farms capitalize on their potential for summer peonies. Elsewhere, the beautiful blossoms, which sell for $5 and more per stem, are usually played out by June.
Jeff Richardson writes for the Daily News Miner that Alaska’s peonies “bloom from late June to September, when the flowers are dormant in the rest of the world.”
Pat Holloway, a horticulturist at University of Alaska Fairbanks, has been growing the flowers at the Georgeson Botanical Garden for a decade and sees more and more peony farms cropping up. Already, Richardson writes, “there are 41 peony producers from Fairbanks to Homer.”
One, LilyVale farm, is in North Pole, Alaska, where “winters get down to -65F and summer days are 22 hours long.” Apparently, peonies don’t do well in greenhouses, so climate chasing is in order. And for peonies, buyers around the world will definitely stretch a leg.
LilyVale’s co-owner Marjorie Illingsworth told the Fairbanks newspaper, “We had to turn people away.”
Horticulturist Pat Holloway addresses a
gathering of growers and marketers in Fairbanks,
Alaska, explaining the state’s unique potential
as a supplier of summer peonies.
Photo: Fairbanks Daily News Miner
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Flower Pots Smashed in Protest
Uproar in the legislative assembly of Bihar, a state in Eastern India, has been simmering all week over allegations of financial corruption at the top. Wednesday, demands for the resignation of chief minister Nitish Kumar and his deputy escalated into physical demonstration.
“The slogan-shouting RJD (Rashtriya Janata Dal) leaders refused to relent and went on a rampage,” according to India News.
When the speaker suspended 64 legislators “and asked the marshals to evict them, the scene took a dramatic turn.” Several of the suspended lawmakers lay down and were dragged from the building. And Jyoti Singh was moved to make a human flower project of it all. One of the aggrieved – and ejected – member of the assembly, she began grabbing flower pots (quite large ones) that were decorating the exit of the assembly office, waving them over her head at police and smashing them down. A short time earlier, some less vigorous legislator had “flung a slipper” toward the speaker.
The ejected members of the legislative assembly included members of four different political parties “and two independents.”
“We will not lift the agitation till this corrupt government resigns,” said RJD deputy leader in the Assembly Shakeel Ahmad Khan.
Jyoti Singh, a member of the legislature in Bihar, India, took
matters into her own hands July 21 after being ejected, along with
66 others, from the state assembly. Singh and others claim that
Bihar’s chief minister has been guilty of corruption.
Photo: AFP
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Callaloo Grows in Brooklyn
Nursery-owners may be as attuned to immigration patterns as demographers are, since customers always want plants from “home.”
Thank you, Georgia Silvera Seamans (Local Ecologist) for forwarding this post about Joe Merola’s Kings County Nurseries in Brooklyn. NYT reporter Sam Dolnick writes,
“By the 1970s, the neighborhood had changed…. Lilting Caribbean accents had replaced the staccato of Italian. The smell of spicy homemade stews overpowered the Sunday afternoon tomato sauce. And customers were asking for items that Mr. Merola had never heard of, like Scotch bonnet peppers.
“Bring me a pepper, Mr. Merola said; I’ll grow it for you — and he did, by breaking it open, removing the fiery seeds and burying them in his soil.”
Merola has succeeded in keeping up with the shifting tastes in his locale. East of Houston, however, we’ve seen that Vietnamese nurserymen have found a niche, growing and selling plants like bong mai (especially in demand around the New Year) in an azalea-loving city that never heard of such varieties before.
Another twist that immigration brings to the nursery trade, not mentioned in Dolnick’s article, is the intriguing variation in nomenclature (why botanists and serious gardeners insist on Latin names). When we arrived in Austin, Texas, 11 years ago, we went looking for “Angel’s trumpet” at a local nursery.
“I may have it,” said a fellow at The Great Outdoors. “Depends on what you mean by angel’s trumpet.”
Brooklyn’s Prospect-Lefferts Gardens has seen residential wave after wave, people of many ethnicities bringing their taste buds and floral memories with them. Here, Violet Thom shops for plants at Kings County Nurseries.
Photo: Yana Paskova, for the New York Times
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Never-Never Flowers
What might have been, florally?
Three scholars, working from the World Checklist of Selected Plant Families at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, have calculated a new and much larger estimate of the varieties of plant life on Earth, “between 10 to 20 percent more undiscovered flowering plant species than previously estimated.”
Lucas Joppa of Microsoft Research in Cambridge, England, David Roberts and Stuart Pimm of Duke University collaborated on the study, published in the July Proceedings of the Royal Society B (here’s the abstract).
David Robert of the Durrell Institute of Conservation and Ecology, University of Kent, said that adding “the number of species that are currently known to be threatened with those yet discovered means ‘we can estimate that between 27 percent and 33 percent of all flowering plants will be threatened with extinction.’”
Get the message? It’s not so much the fact of abundance as the urgent need for conservation. These “new” plants that cutting-edge ecological mathematicians can reasonably claim are out there are now disappearing.
The authors write, “The as-yet-unknown species are probably similar to those taxonomists have described recently—overwhelmingly rare and local, and disproportionately in biodiversity hotspots, where there are high levels of habitat destruction.”
Millions of plant species will certainly vanish from the Earth before people ever “discover” them. Climate change and habitat loss are two of the major forces that are killing off flowering plants and other forms of life.
To underscore these findings, we look again at the marvelous and prophetic drawings of Tokyo-based artist Beatriz Inglessis. Her “Botanical Compositions” of imaginary plants are reminders of what was, is now, and might have been.
Botanical Composition
By Beatriz Inglessis