Human Flower Project

Saturday, January 15, 2005

Pride & Joy

Welcome to our new visitors from Barbados, first encountered through their national flower.

The easternmost of the Caribbean Islands chose for its national flower a plant that, satisfying the gardener’s greedy dream, blooms year round, in its native habitat anyway.

Pride of Barbados lives up to its name: everblooming, big, and so showy it’s also known as “Peacock flower.” It appears alongside a fig tree between a dolphin and a pelican on the island nation’s coat-of-arms.

Poinciana pulcherrima, Syn. Caesalpinia pulcherrima, is native to the West Indies and Mexico (with cousins in Madagascar, Myanmar, and Sri Lanka). Here are close ups of its stalks, beans, leaves, and flowers. And here’s a textual close-up of the latter:

“Each flower is about 1 inch across with five sepals. The ten stamens are long and the pistils project from the centre of the flower. The fifth petal is far smaller than the other four. The stamens have coloured filaments with anthers at the tips however, the eleventh filament bears a stigma and is the style.” (In India the plant is known as “Krishna Chura,” since the pyramidal shape of the blooms resembles Krisha’s headgear.)

I confess never having looked so closely at its blossoms before. My encounter with the plant was a “burning bush” experience at the height of a Texas summer. A 100+ degree afternoon when the grass and garden HAD burnt, my humor with them—here was an orange and yellow firecracker of a flower exploding in my neighbor Lisa Orr’s front yard.  What the....?  “That’s Pride of Barbados,” Lisa told me. It’s not just that anything is possible; everything is possible and, in fact, happening.

A real horticulturist will have to explain to you how this flower defies August in Zone 8 and why butterflies love it. I’m with them.

(Here’s one website, with historical overview, about the island itself)