Olfactory Confusion

I bought some store-branded liquid hand-soap a short while back. On the label, it said 'Chamomile'. I washed my hands with it. I thought to myself, Passionfruit.

I had the sudden urge to run outside and sniff everything in my garden. Fortunately, I suppressed that urge, or my nose would probably be twice the (admittedly large) size it already is.

A Thousand Flowers

And there they were, all in bloom, a garden full of exotic plants; a thousand plants, a thousand flowers. In these days of financial shenanigans and difficulties, liquidity is king.

If you were to take a walk past the garden of my father's house, you would see what a few hundred denarii could buy in terms of labour and consequent beauty. In that garden, my brother is attempting to make hybrids of a rich dark bluish tinge, balanced by golden hues and a small amount of deep red. He says they will be 'the real thing'.

The other day I walked into the house to find more flasks and sealed bags. There were more flasks in the house than in my old lab. I asked him what was happening. He grinned (white teeth in a sun-darkened face, startling in the gloom) and said, "Crosses."

I had this vision of a huge cemetery. But of course, it was the other way round. Each of those crosses held the magnificent potential of new life; each was a plant that perhaps the world had never seen before.

They only need watering twice a day, and no hothousing.

One Day

One day, I will not have to water the strange hybrids that my brother has planted ever again. On that day, I will feel regret as well as relief. For they are indeed strange, and yet they are beautiful. It is as if one gazes upon something rare which does not quite fit in one's experience, but which is not ugly; one is drawn to it to verify or to falsify one's strange attraction, but one is able to do neither, and so one repeats the attempt. And again. And again.

It was the Hierophant who made me think of it. In H G Wells's The Strange Orchid or in Arthur Clarke's The Reluctant Orchid, the ghastly tropisms and odd consciousnesses of the plants in question have that sort of attraction. Orchids are the rare and terrifying keynote in the seminar of the plant kingdom.

I have one day more to go. If I never post again, you can refer to Wells (1894) or Clarke (1956) for clues. Good day.

Orchiditis

There I was, sitting in the farther road from the Hill of Tin. And I was hearing a truly peculiar story involving a hybrid orchid, the man who ran off with its name, and the myriad (in the literal sense of ten thousand) clones that the local Methodist church council intended to make of that orchid. All in the name of charity, I heard.

It was an interesting tale. I remember the dreams we had of an orchid hybridisation programme. My brother, fortunately, knows all about it and is able to provide me with access to the insider secrets of the dog-eat-dog (?!) world of the orchid.

Just one last factoid: you do know, don't you, that 'orchid' comes from the Greek orchis which means 'testicle', right?