Human Flower Project
Stella d’Oro and Cellar Door
The Midwestern landscape is covered with knockout roses and one variety of daylily. Is this pragmatism, consensus, aesthetics, cost, conformity…other?
Cellar door in Audia, Neamţ County, Romania
Photo: Andrei Stroe, via wiki
Our most trusted source in Louisville, Kentucky, reports that the whole city is doing the floral two-step. “Knockout roses and stella d’oro daylilies – they’re everywhere!” says Anne Ardery. We hope that she or another Falls City reader will snap a photo of this bulletproof combo and send it along; meanwhile, the mind’s eye is squinting—just the thought of all that gold and pink, the humid days and weeks ahead of gold and pink…
These two workhorses lack the nobility of mules. Most gardeners turn their noses up at them, or, like Carol at May Dreams Gardens, apologise for not purging them entirely from the yard. Even so, at least on the landscape side of the landscaping/gardening line, knockouts and stella d’oro predominate and go loudly along all through June.
Daylilies—Stella d’Oro
Photo: Water Plants for Ponds
Kurt Fromherz, horticulturist and marketer, boils the appeal of knockouts and stella d’oro down to a sizzling acronym. WIFS- whatever’s in flower sells. His interesting article appeared two summers ago, the height of stella d’oro’s popularity, with knockouts galloping up on the horizon. (He poses a pretty good good argument for bright mass plantings around business establishments.)
Cellar Door
Photo: Diane Hanna
Of greater interest to us is Mother’s observation, that stella d’oro may have grown popular as much for its name as its appearance. She reminded us that the phrase widely considered most beautiful in all the English language is “cellar door” – and stella d’oro is certainly its echo.
Linguist Geoff Nunberg writes, that cellar door “at once brings to mind a word from one of those warm-blooded languages English speakers invest with musical beauty, spare in clusters and full of liquids, nasals, and open syllables with cardinal vowel nuclei — the languages of the Mediterranean or Polynesia, or the sentimentalized Celtic that Lewis and Tolkien turned into a staple of fantasy fiction.”
(Among many other aspirants to liquid and nasal beauty, the undergraduate literary magazine at University of North Carolina is called Cellar Door.)
Are there other echoes? “Melba Moore,” “Telaflora,” “parador,” and “paramour” come close, as does “Tipper Gore.” But none of these quite matches stella d’oro and cellar door. Say both of them…stella d’oro…cellar door…and feel your face do two pliés.
Still, for there to be consensus about which phrase is the loveliest in all English strikes us as very, very strange—proof of how powerfully conformist we are. As if, with knockout roses and stella d’oro lilies everywhere in sight, we needed more proof.
Comments
Dear Victor,
You made my day. Thank you. And how’s Durham. I lived there for a year, on Summit St., between wonderful neighbors. Ed Rogers grew a big vegetable garden and would share. After Hurricane Fran came through and power went off, we sat out in lawn chairs with Mabel O’Briant and ate dinner out of coolers, hers and ours. The life!
Julie
Another “aspirant” was the long gone small nightclub The Cellar Door at 35th and M in Washington D.C. It was there in the late 60’s that I saw Neil Young solo acoutic, the Muddy Waters Band, the Paul Butterfield Band, and Miles Davis among others. That was all a type of undeniable beauty experienced in a place where with any luck at all one could talk with the performers not only between sets, but between songs.
Fabulous addition, John. Thank you. I never had the pleasure but a favorite LP was/is Seldom Scene’s Live at the Cellar Door. Must have been a magic place.
i love this blog….never ever ever would you find this gem in the weekend fishwraps..*sigh*