Horticulture

Dorothy Parker once infamously quipped, "You can bring a horticulture but you can't make her think." It's interesting to hear stories from old uncles in the Family.

I've mentioned this before, but here it is again, because I keep hearing it. Apparently some people who didn't actually do an orchid cross got hold of samples of someone else's orchid cross and registered that with the Royal Horticultural Society. The aggrieved person keeps mentioning it, but he's too nice to do anything about it. He said he was a man, he'd just take it on the chin. My brother replied that this was what came of not checking.

Ah, the flagrant dishonesty. I'm sure there's something deeply unethical about a supposed orchid hybridisation programme which doesn't quite produce what it's meant to produce and has to fake the results. This same uncle said, "You know that one which they hastily named after the Wyverns? Well, the bugger won't flower, look I have a whole field of pots of the stuff and I can't get more than a few to bloom. Lousy thing."

Meanwhile, my parents' backyard is full of the stuff, which my brother decided to grow as a challenge. In the meantime, he's been successfully hybridising his own. He's got a few that look a lot more like Wyvern colours, and are a lot more profuse in their flowering. He hopes to produce one with my mother's initials.

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.

Anonymous Seeds

In my recounting of the days, I realise that I cannot merely number them off as if they were racehorses. Rather, I must insert, here and there, like the raisins in a pudding, a few nuggets of immortal factuality. And so, here is one such.

The plants that I nurture, that I cultivate crudely in lieu of my missing sibling, are most peculiar in their reproductive process. The Orchidaceae (or 'plants that look like testicles') are particular in this respect; they spawn uncountable numbers of minuscule seeds, spore-like in appearance and almost spore-like in their proclivities.

But unlike the spore, that merely seeks water, the seed of the orchid seeks a fungus. Not just any fungus, but one into which in can enter into some sort of carnal connection. For the juxtaposition of orchid seed with mycorrhizal basidiomyceteous fungus will produce a plant, where the seed alone will not.

You see, Nature has played the poor orchid a sad little trick. The seeds of the testiculiform Orchidaceae do not contain endosperm, and hence have no fuel for their green fuse. And, as that bard of Wales once wrote:

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer...

The sad orchid must perforce draw upon the vitality of the gross fungus to fuel its future endeavours and its incipient beauty. It is a partnership that one might think is forged in Hell, but no, no, it is forged in Nature, which is (I assure you most seriously) probably worse.

So what can we do to help the orchid along? Why, we can provide artificially natural seed-cultivating media. All it takes is an agar matrix, in which we suspend the sterile (oh, what irony) but tasty extracts of some fleshy sugar-fruit (papaya perhaps, or coconut, or banana, or peach), and voila, we have created that in which the seed can grow!

Poor anonymous seeds! But now, with the medium provided by the deaths of their distant relatives, they can thrive and blossom! And who knows, perhaps some day they too will have their own names, and their own faces...

Three Days

Well, wielding a mighty five-litre watering can or two does wonders for the musculature in theory, but is hell on the aging citizen in practice. Not to mention the hose that I am sure has the resilient obstinacy of a boa constrictor minus the homicidal tendencies, this gardening business gives me an idea why Eden might not have been Paradise (actually, it wasn't anyway).

Last night's convos were alarming and wonderful. It was interesting to see people thinking about truth as an artifact rather than as an axiomatic and undeniable baseline for our existence. It was even more interesting to see the ways in which reality was being manipulated. As I incautiously let out, this group is one of the finest, most interesting and entertaining bunches of young people I have ever had the honour to teach.

I think in all my life, groups of four to five students have been plentiful, and I am grateful for that. But once in a while comes a group that, by some odd quirk of chemistry or biology or history or something, will forever etch themselves into your memory. You know who you are, I will not name names here. *grin*

Anyway, I've done five rounds of watering so far, with one more to come this evening. I hope the dendrobia and vandas and the lone oncidium in the corner and phaelanopses and all the others are happy. If anything, speaking to them (what am I doing, have I gone mad) is doing wonders for my Latin and some of my Greek.

Four Days

This is going to be an odd period for me. I am going to have to take care of horticultural duties for four days while my parents and my brother swan off to some distant corner of the world where the fauna and flora (by all accounts) are completely different from anywhere else in the world. Apparently, you can see what's left of the aurora australis there.

What duties are these?

Well, there's a complicated regimen involving automatic sprayers, manual spraying, about fifty varieties of orchids (some rare and some unique) — and it all takes place twice a day. In between, I shall sit around using my laptop and ordering my library. It's so true, that part about humans needing to believe that they can glimpse order in the chaos of events... something that I have had pounded into my brain by one particular young lady over the last few days... *grin*

So this morning, off I go with about 50 kg of books and assorted reading material to my home in the west and the home of my parents. Then I shall run around a lot and lose a lot of weight while madly spraying water all over the roots of orchids. May a thousand flowers bloom.

And if they don't, it's not going to be a pretty sight. Bwahahahahaha!