Human Flower Project
A Bold Stroke
Arthur Williams, AIFD
in full regalia
Photo: Courtesy of Arthur Williams
Any change of heart / mind / behavior before Ground Hog Day (Candlemas) counts as a New Year’s Resolution, so we’re happy to pass along our favorite florist’s rite.
Arthur Williams of Babylon Floral in Denver, Colorado, begins the New Year thus:
“On New Years 1998 while on my mission to make my house spotless and beautiful to symbolically ring in the new year I stopped at a flower shop on my way home. They were hiring…...
“I had no formal floral design experience, just a background in art and gardening…...
“I applied, and my floral career began. I’ve come a long way!! So as I do every year I organize and clean and fill my house with flowers so at the stroke of midnight my world is how I wish it to be for the following year.
“Happy New Year Year! Thank you everyone for making this our best year yet!!! Bring on Valentine’s!!”
Congratulations, Arthur. And may 2012 be brighter and bolder than them all.
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Lovely Rita
Rita Hayworth out-glamming a huge orchid corsage (c. 1950)
It takes full on radiance to compete with a corsage of this scale (we’re guessing this shot dates from about 1950). Even a cluster of orchids the size of crock pot can’t outdo Rita Hayworth.
We watched Gilda for the first time last night. Hayworth had already made over 40 movies by 1946 and been the fount of a thousand fantasies as the pin-up girl of World War II. Her rumba, strapless gowns, long curls and slap-around scenes with Glenn Ford in Gilda still have the power to shock more than six decades later. She truly was a bombshell and, unlike Marilyn Monroe, conveys an electric mean streak that we find more exciting than Monroe’s faux-innocent dopey-dom.
This picture has inspired us to hunt for maximized corsages. If you like, send us examples of your own. Our guess is that accessory flowers of this size began shrinking about 1960 (Texas football mums, the exception).
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Year of the Dragon: Booming with Babies
For Tet, the Lunar New Year in Vietnam, to begin auspiciously, there must be healthy plants. Several varieties are believed to bring good luck: in the North, flowering peach and fruiting kumquat are favored, and in the South, narcissus and bong mai (Ochna itegerrima).
The Year of the Dragon began January 23, the most powerful and positive of all twelve signs in Chinese astrology. One interesting article says expectant mothers and maternity wards in Hong Kong are bracing for an influx of patients from the mainland, as many couples try to time conception so children will be born this year.
Kumquat trees have been pruned into dragons for the lunar new year, Tet, in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. The “luckiest” plants are covered, like these, with both green and ripe orange fruit.
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Who’ll Deliver Flowers to an Atheist?
Does it really take a police escort to deliver flowers?
Possibly so, in Cranston, Rhode Island. Four shop owners there declined to deliver flowers to Jessica Ahlquist, a teenager whose challenge to a religious banner in her high school was upheld by a District Court.
The Freedom from Religion Foundation called several florists in Cranston hoping to send congratulatory flowers to the student of Cranston High School West. According to Raymond Santilli, owner of Flowers by Santilli, the organization’s representative said that a police escort might be necessary in that Ahlquist has received threats for her lawsuit.
“If I send flowers there, somebody may get upset with us and retaliate to us,” Santilli told a local news station.
We understand that though four florists turned away the order, a fifth – unnamed – accepted.
Raymond Santilli said he declined a flower order so as not to involve his shop in a controversy over school prayer.
Photo: KSDK
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Elbowed by Arugula
The National Gardening Association finds that flower growing in the U.S. has declined for the third year in a row. We’re not surprised. Some of the finest former rose gardeners in our neighborhood have tossed out their shrubs and been concentrating on arugula,okra and peppers. The New York Times, reporting on NGA’s research, notes that “food-garden spending climbed 20 percent” in this same period.
The Times article features three flower experts who recommend varieties well suited to their home regions: Bronx, NY, Los Angeles, CA, and Birmingham, AL. We’ve got our eye on Charlie Thigpen’s suggestions already, as they include orange sulfur cosmos, which, thanks to the original passalong from Becky Bingman, has been a big success in our yard (though cleome, which Thigpen also recommends, has been a flop).
How about in your neighborhood? Are vegetable gardens replacing flowers, iPhones supplanting sunflowers?
Genevieve Arnold of the Theodore Payne Foundation
nursery in Los Angeles is one of three flower experts
tapped to recommend new—and old—varieties.
Photo: New York Times
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Flowers Efface the Line of Racism
An intensely personal human flower project was born out of deprivation and racism during World War II. Chris Vaughan of the Ft. Worth Star-Telegram reported the story last month: Ken Cooper of Ft. Worth was stationed in Hawaii as a mess sergeant for the Army after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Struggling to feed the troops, he relied on a Japanese-American farmer Shigeru Mukai for fresh carrots, pineapple, lettuce and potatoes. Despite animosity among many Americans toward those of Japanese ancestry, the two formed a friendship that outlasted the war. Mukai began sending flowers to the Cooper family each Christmas in 1945 and since his death, his daughters have carried the tradition on—66 years.
This year they sent bright anthuriums to Ken Cooper, age 94.
“I suspect that one of the greatest reasons he felt gratitude to Mr. Cooper was because he befriended my parents when the Japanese were so hated because they started the war,” Laura Ota said of her father. “The fact that Mr. Cooper would cross that line for them ... I can see why my parents were so indebted to him.”
Anthuriums sent by the daughters of Shigeru Mukai to WWII veteran Ken Cooper of Ft. Worth, in remembrance for ‘crossing the line.’
Photo: Ron Jenkins/Star-Telegram
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Medieval Fortress v. Fertilizer
We are not much for castles, still we wouldn’t wish what’s happening to Belgrade’s fortress even on our neighbor’s blue behemoth. “A black crust” has been forming on the sides of this ancient structure and may turn out to be a greater threat than the Huns or Ottomans.
French and Serbian conservationists have learned that the corrosion is due to “large amounts of syngenite, a double sulfate of potassium and calcium.”
Their investigation turned up “an abnormal concentration of potassium in the soil, near the rampart walls”—in flowerbeds, in fact, “where potassium-rich fertilizers are used.” Further experimentation showed that water impregnated with these potassium-rich fertilizers “triggered” the formation of this black crust on limestone.
Are the same fertilizers that are damaging a medieval fortress encroaching on your own “castle” and its inhabitants or trickling into a nearby creek?
Details of the Serbian study are forthcoming in the Journal of Cultural Heritage.
Mass planting of annuals outside Belgrade’s fortress: Heavy fertilization of flower beds is now damaging the limestone gate.
Photo: Skyscraper City
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Poppy Trotting in New South Wales
Papaver somniferum, growing wild in Goulburn, New South Wales, Australia
Photo: Tony Rodd
Emily’s Dance, a trotting horse on Australia’s racing scene, flunked a urine test in September after a race in Canberra. Officials found traces of morphine in the animal.
A subsequent investigation of the farm where the horse was stabled discovered “a purple poppy” growing in and around the paddock, and analysis of the flower “found morphine, codeine and papaverine.”
While there’s not much botanical information in the story, we’re assuming that this was Papaver somniferum, as other sources confirm that this plant has indeed been naturalized and grows wild in parts of New South Wales.
The upshot? “Stewards took no action against Mr Waite as in their opinion based on the evidence, the horse Emily Dance ingested the substance morphine through eating of the purple poppy flowers. Mr Waite was however cautioned that he must take all reasonable measures in the future to ensure that his horses cannot be contaminated.”
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Beyond Botany and Aesthetics
Several years ago Arittha Wikramanayake, a corporate lawyer, joined forces with daughter Ariesha to produce a field guide to Sri Lanka’s butterflies. “Butterflies really open your eyes to nature in every possible way,” he said. “You learn about trees, about food plants, about host plants, it takes you all over the country, it tells you about the weather…and that’s the best thing about it – that it opens your eyes and shows you what’s around you.”
Ariesha Wikramanayake trains her camera on a subject for the book on Sri Lanka’s butterflies she co-authored with her father.
Photo: via Sunday Times
Wikramanayake has taken a similar approach with his newest book Wild Flowers of Sri Lanka.
“Every flower has a story,” Wikramanayake says. The guide features scans of plant specimens, field photos, and principally his research into floral mythology and ethnobotany. He notes that most people interested in wildflowers take either a purely scientific or a purely aesthetic approach.
Here’s to you, Arittha, for such curious impurity, otherwise known as a human flower project.
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Efficiency v. Floral Heritage
Suparna Bhalla has written an excellent editorial for Business Standard on the decision to move all of New Delhi’s huge city flower markets to one facility at the edge of the city—right near the major garbage dump. The same kinds of changes are taking place in the U.S., whisking glorious urban oases away in the name of practicality and surveillance (though in the U.S., we think that downtown real estate prices have been the primary force displacing the flower sellers’ stalls).
Bhalla writes, “The agriculture ministry’s move is easily understood in the corporate context of ‘consolidating’ what it sees as a business with annual returns of over Rs 100 crore from what is touted as Asia’s largest flower market. Put all under one roof, it is easy to monitor, issue licenses and then collect taxes. Lured by better transport and connectivity, the flower vendors were shifted to isolated Ghazipur where the promise of cold storage facilities and even a shelter of a building are yet to be met.
“Can hypothetical efficiency and cold practicality displace urban heritage? These flower bazaars are the essence of Delhi’s pride as a city of flowers.”
Bhalla explains that these old markets were as rooted, as much a part of their city districts, as any temple or royal tomb. The writer takes care to explain the longstanding cultural connections between one market, Mehrauli, and the spring festival Phoolwaalon ki Sair.
During the spring festival, “The dargah and temple in Meharauli see simultaneous floral offerings at the culmination of a procession adorned with flowers. Why couldn’t the mandi [market] be re-created within the gardens amidst the flowing waters of poetic Hauz-i-Shamsi, the erstwhile and now ruined Mughal gardens? Thus integrating history, space and use in a memorable manner. How much does it take to sensitively build vending tenements and storage facilities that combine commerce and heritage?”
Many thanks to Suparna Bahlla for the strongest and most thoughtful commentary we’ve yet seen on this international phenomenon.
A flower seller at New Delhi’s Mehrauli market, one of three longstanding flower centers that will be shunted to the outskirts of the city in the name of efficiency.
Photo: Harshaz