Human Flower Project

Saturday, January 17, 2009

Oops a Daisy ~ Plant Idioms

Georgia Silvera Seamans takes us down the primrose path, into a thicket of botanical phrases. Let’s pile on the plant idioms, old chestnuts and new hybrids.

“Raking the Hayfield”
a.k.a. “Making Hay” (with Cherokee roses)
Painting:  Walt Curlee

By Georgia Silvera Seamans

Make hay while the sun shines.  Well, I don’t have a grass field so I cannot make hay, but I can take advantage of the sunlight and warm weather in Berkeley, California.  With all that brightness, how could I hit the hay?! 

As I write, it’s the third January day in a row of high-60 degree weather, clear skies, and sunshine.  I spent Saturday helping to create a bird garden, a grassroots project, in the Mission District of San Francisco and Sunday walking some of Berkeley’s paths.  You could say I’m a rolling stone; I gathered no moss this weekend.  I did not want to let the grass grow under my feet.  There are always fun volunteer opportunities in the Bay Area.  For example, today, as part of the MLK Service Weekend, I will be participating in the California Indigenous Habitat Activists/ Ohlone Greenway restoration project.  Next Monday, I will be planting fruit trees in Preservation Park in Berkeley.  Volunteering in the Bay Area is not like finding a needle in a haystack.  One could say it’s a bowl of cherries—even a bed of roses.  (Though Portland, Oregon, is known as the City of Roses, I observe so many yards of roses in Berkeley.  There is also the famous Rose Garden in Berkeley, and one in Oakland, too.)

“Mighty Oaks from Little Acorns Grow”
Image: Centre for Research on Innovation and Competition

I mentioned earlier that I am writing this in January 2009—the New Year.  And like a lot of people, I am turning over a new leaf or several leaves.  What leaves?  Well, for one thing, not thinking that the grass is greener on the other side.  It might be greener because the homeowner uses herbicides and pesticides (yikes!) or too much water (we are in a drought!), or maybe it’s faux grass.  I’ll try to be less of a shrinking violet.  And I’ll sow the seeds, literally, to grow a sidewalk garden.  One must be careful with resolutions of course.

Do these old chestnuts might bore you?  Last December I found $20 on the street (oops a daisy).  Maybe this year I will win the lottery: great seed money for my tea shop/ book shop.  But you know what they say: mighty oaks from little acorns grow.

In addition to personal resolutions, I have an academic goal: collect and analyze the relevant paper-based data for my dissertation project this spring (and if necessary, this summer).  Knock on wood.  I am excited about my current research idea.  In the past, I have barked up the wrong tree. I had another not too promising idea and was slow to nip it in the bud.  I couldn’t see the forest for the trees. 

Bed of Roses
Photo: My Flower Depot

Three plant idioms in a row!— and 19 total in this essay.  What idioms do you use frequently? What are the most common idioms in your culture/ country? 

I was born in Jamaica.  I remember (I think) hearing “make hay while the sun shines” and “the grass is not always greener on the other side” quite often.  Why?  In the case of the first, Jamaica was a British colony and Britain is a meritocracy that promotes one’s own best effort.  As for the second idiom, Jamaicans are fairly God-fearing and one of the Ten Commandments is “Thou shalt not covet.”

Editor’s Note: Many thanks, Georgia, for this thicket of plant idioms. We’ve heard that in Australia folks who criticize people of distinction are accused of “cutting down the tall poppies.” And in Japan they say ”Iwanu ga hana”—The flower doesn’t speak. It’s English version might be “Silence is golden.”

Please let us know of others. We welcome familiar expressions, like “steel magnolias” or “gilding the lily.” But feel free to invent some floralisms of your own. How about “Pass the nasturtiums!” to say you’re daring. Or a ‘black iris”—for someone who takes pride in being gloomy.

Thursday, January 15, 2009

Urmas Laansoo: Let’s Moss Crawl

Allen Bush introduces us to an Estonian plantsman who specializes in lichens and pillowcases. Thank you, Allen.

Hallan Kivisaar’s sculpture garden, Estonia
Photo: Allen Bush

By Allen Bush

I traveled to Austria and Italy with The Ratzeputz Gang in September 1991 to visit nurseries and gardens. My favorite memory is a leisurely luncheon on nurseryman Lorenzo Crescini’s hillside near Brescia (Italian plant hunting requires eight-course nourishment and Barbaresco wine). Before heading back to North Carolina, where I had my own nursery at the time, I left my horticultural running mates and flew to England, making a beeline to Cambridgeshire. It was dark by the time I arrived at Joe Sharman’s home - too dark to look around for new perennials at Sharman’s Monksilver Nursery, a few miles down the road.

It was dinnertime. Sharman’s’ business partner, Alan Leslie, was there. He works full-time as a botanist at the Royal Horticultural Society garden at Wisley in Surrey and comes-up on weekends to tend to nursery chores. Joe’s mother prepared a nice meal for a table of gardeners and guests.  It felt like a tiny arena. Hundreds of books were stacked high like bleachers around the edges of the dimly lighted room. There was plenty of jostling Latin binomial nomenclature at ringside.

Urmas Laansoo, lichen and pillowcase expert
Monksilver Nursery, Cottenham, Cambridge England 1991
Photo: Allen Bush

At the opposite end of the table was an unidentified man. I guessed he could be Sharman’s brother. No one introduced him; no one spoke to him – perhaps for familial good reason. I wasn’t sure. He didn’t say a word. Finally, late in the dinner, Alan Leslie presented the quiet one—a visitor from the Tallinn Botanic Garden. I’d never met anyone from Estonia. Urmas Laansoo surprised me and said he’d never met anyone from the United States. For better or worse, I had presumed that everyone had met an American.

(Ten years later, in 2001, a few days following September 11, I was in Pong Bu, a little western Sichuan village. Before then it had seldom occurred to me what the privilege and responsibility of being an American could mean. My plant collecting party surprised a school full of young Tibetan kids who crowded around, staring at odd people they had never seen before. I worried hairy Caucasian arms would be my legacy. These sweet children followed us part way up the mountainside – bright-eyed and curious – unaware of what was going on in the next village, much less the other side of the world.)

The Russians kept a stranglehold on Estonia for nearly fifty years, but the empire collapsed in August 1991 and Estonia declared its independence. Estonians were free to travel. Urmas had high-tailed it to England. He wanted a glimpse of what was going on in the gardening world. The Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew overwhelmed him. It was “like heaven, just fabulous … we had empty shops at home and food-shortages…you were allowed to buy sugar and milk, soap and matches in a very limited way…I felt too full of plants, visiting Kew Gardens, just too much of new plants for the first time visit!”

Urmas and I chatted a bit that evening and picked-up the conversation the next day while wandering around Monksilver’s fascinating collection of rare perennials. We’ve kept in touch since. I look forward to his holiday greetings.

At this time of year, his countryside is dark and usually snow covered. Mine is gray and sodden. It’s a good time for Urmas to get away, and the Indian Ocean has its appeal. Here and only here is his favorite tree: Mathurina penduliflora, endemic to the Mascarene archipelago. Urmas explains, “There are only 30 individuals left. It’s critically endangered in the wild. It grows only on Rodrigues Island in Indian Ocean. We have named this tree in Estonian language as “Tree of Cheerful Tears”! As I met the tree the first time on Mauritius Garden of Pamplemousses (Sir Seewoosagur Ramgoolam Botanical Garden), I started to cry, it was so beautiful and unique! And still is!”

Staff of the Tallinn Botanic Garden - (from left) Mari Seidelberg, Krista Kaur, Urmas Laansoo, Taimi Puusepp - in the garden of plant Estonian collector, Sulev Savisaar. In front is the rare Chinese Jack-in-the Pulpit, Arisaema ciliatum var. liubanense
Photo: Siiri Liiv

Urmas started work at the Tallinn Botanic Gardens as a schoolboy in 1978 but traces his gardening roots to February 1966, in the village of Kohila. He was the tender age of four. With the nudge of his grandfather, he started cucumber seeds, on a windowsill. He still lives – and gardens – at the same childhood home. Today Urmas is a botanist on the education staff at the Tallinn Botanic Gardens, author of books, and television presenter of nature programs, leading excursions in Estonian, Russian, Finnish, and English.  There’s no hint that he is ever bored.

In late May 2003 I made a two-day visit to see Urmas with Ratzeputzers Klaus Jelitto and Steve Still. After a few days in St. Petersburg, Russia, we arrived in Tallinn after a day-long bus ride driving past small towns and birch forests carpeted with ferns. (Air travel between the two cities wasn’t possible due to a lingering political feud between the two countries.) From occasional communications over the previous eight years, I supposed that Laansoo was probably a pretty competent plantsman, but I had no idea what to expect. Plantspeople can be peculiarly one-dimensional and sometimes as obsessive – and boring—as stamp collectors.  Rare in this breed is the outlier who can keep a couple of balls in the air at once. Normalcy and obsession are at odds. Urmas is interested in history, music and literature and is thoroughly entertaining – and normal.

Hallan Kivisaar’s sculpture garden, Estonia: ideal for a moss crawl
Photo: Allen Bush

We crawled around in these woods looking at mosses and lichens.Urmas showed us the impressive collections at the Botanic Garden. There were particularly large accessions of Peonies and Iris. And Phlox species and cultivars were on his radar screen for new acquisitions. But Urmas, though crazy about plants, skipped the chest-thumping so common among collectors. He’s as modest as he is brilliant. The rock garden included some alpine gems that he had been able to collect in the Pamirs of Tajikistan, near the Afghanistan border, and Tian Shans in Kazakhstan.  The glass houses and Palm House are filled with tender species – some from collecting trips to Tenerife, Gran Canaria and La Gomera islands.

For bragging rights plantspeople will talk sometimes about how many rare things of this and that they’ve got tucked away. (Urmas doesn’t brag about plants but mentions he collects pillow cases and Christmas lights.) Some of the more interesting gardening characters have a working knowledge of the native species that grow in nearby woods and meadows. Precious few know much about mosses and lichens.
And endangered, I’m afraid, is the gifted natural educator, like Urmas, who can get you on your hands and knees crawling around in the woods looking at mosses and lichens as he spins a dazzling botanic yarn that makes your head revolve. You feel like an idiot when you get-up; you don’t know diddly. But your senses have been jolted, because you never imagined “this-is-fun” value in lower life forms.

Urmas also gave us a peek at a Baltic Bronze Age cemetery, and we visited a few very interesting local nurseries and gardens. I wouldn’t know a Benjamin Franklin Z Grill postage stamp if I saw one. But thanks to Urmas I know a little about mosses and lichens. Hang around long enough and I might get a bug for pillow cases and Christmas lights.

Monday, January 12, 2009

Don’t Forget to Check the Swamp

Stumbling upon a strange new variety of garlands at the flower market, Sandy Ao starts clicking and minds start bending. Clue: this plant is also a salt slaker.

What is it? A discovery at the Mullickghat flower market
Kolkata, India
Photo: Sandy Ao

A red mystery’s been brewing here at HFP… ever since photographer Sandy Ao celebrated the New Year with a trip to the Mullickghat flower market in Kolkata and returned with a novelty to share. The Mullickghat vendors this day were selling long garlands of plants (or plant parts?) the likes of which she had never come across before.

“At one glance, these garlands look so plastic. But they are not!” Sandy wrote.  “I have not seen the real flower; again it is a flower pod, like the woodrose,” a plant she introduced to us back in 2007.  “I was informed that this pod contains lots of honey… and bees love it,” she wrote, adding, “They do smell very honey!”

But what are these honeyed spiders?

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Thursday, January 08, 2009

About Winter

Slanting light and bare branches electrify memory and switch on the gardener’s nerve. Thank you, John.

Pollarded willows near Fen Causeway
by the River Cam— Cambridge, England
Photo: John Levett

By John Levett

Winter suits some places and not others. Winter suits Berlin. I’ve never seen it in any other season; walk in the right places and everything’s grey. Then again, there’s Winter light that catches memories for me that no other season does. Catching the mid-afternoon sun off a clock face by Great St. Mary’s opposite King’s College and back to a Friday afternoon in 1970 walking up Liverpool’s Edge Hill to the Metropolitan cathedral to sit in warmth under stained glass in a small side chapel after a teaching week of memorable despair; walking across Fen Causeway at dusk and thence to 1963 and student efforts to film King Lear (after seeing Scofield’s at the Aldwych) on a football pitch in South London (the closest we could get to a heath that day).

Winter’s useful for garden planning too. Everything that went into the wrong hole last year; right hole, wrong depth; right hole, right depth, no sun; hole, depth, sun, no space; wrong plan; right plan, wrong continent. Bared.

In 1980 I had a plan that worked, more-or-less. The right plants in the right number for the plot I’d got. Plants in the garden, plants in the greenhouse, plants in the conservatory (the lean-to nailed onto the back wall). Cuttings taken each year, potted up, planted out. Seeds sown, bulbs trowelled, alpines troughed, delphiniums unclumped, clematis trailed. Readied for traditional deckchairs, lemonade, fruit salad, straw hats, fine novels and Sunday morning newspapers in not-too-many-months time. Winter promised it. It was the Golden Age of my gardening. In my dreams.

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