The Floral Dispatch #2: Petals as Portals
Dear reader,
I’ve been wandering the valleys of Himachal Pradesh, constantly on the lookout for wildflowers. Thanks to the monsoons, the mountains are a source of sheer delight. Here’s a glimpse of my foraging adventures yesterday:
During my travels, I’ve also been meeting fellow wildflower lovers. Mansie, the host of Jedi Greens in Naggar, sent me two fabulous e-books, both illustrated and equally gorgeous:
1. Wildflowers Of India by Nimret Handa
2. Illustrations of Himalayan plants: chiefly selected from drawings made for the late J.F. Cathcart
The drawings remind me a bit of Swiss naturalist Maria Sibylla Merian’s botanical illustrations.
As author Kim Todd wrote in her book Chrysalis: Maria Sibylla Merian and the Secrets of Metamorphosis:
“Artists who painted natural curiosities found themselves documenting a world emerging and disappearing at the same time, a brief encounter as species heading for extinction and humans crossed paths.”
Floral art for the soul
Floral Self-portraits by @thelazy.pal
Azuma Makoto’s Floral Blooming Time Lapse
Azuma Makoto is an artist and botanical sculptor known for his breathtakingly beautiful and daring floral arrangements. His work focuses on “life and death” and “time” as complementary elements and concepts. The life cycle of a flower, as is seen in this video, is brief and ephemeral and its beauty continually morphing: from sprout to bud to stem and flower, until it all withers away. Yet each moment is unique, beautiful and precious in its process of becoming.
Harold Feinstein’s Sky Flowers photography series
“During the production of my first book, One Hundred Flowers, I became so absorbed by the flowers that I would awake at night and write short poems inspired by them. This soon became my collection I call, A Garden of Psalms. Here is one of them:
You would not contain yourself!
All that light
All that love.
In a sun,
In a galaxy,
In a flower.
Some call it the big bang.”
-Harold Feinstein
The Joys of Plant Music
First, an enquiry: Does Music Affect Plant Growth? According to the article, “The best scientific theory as to how music helps plants grow is through how the vibration of the sound waves affects the plant. Plants transport nutrients, proteins and organelles in their fluids (cytoplasm) through a process called cytoplasmic streaming. The vibration of certain types of music and sound may help stimulate this process – in nature, the plants may grow advantageously around bird song or areas with strong breezes.”
Regardless of whether science has proof to this or not, the flower lovers at Hoovu would like to believe that singing (and talking) to plants does have a soothing effect. :)
A few favorite records to play for your plants (and yourself, of course):
What we’re reading
Emily Dickinson’s Blossom of the Brain
“With her abiding passion for gardening, poet Emily Dickinson was able to create her own little Eden. At least a third of her poems and nearly half of her letters allude to flowers. She called her poems “Blossoms of the Brain” and associated people she held in high esteem with select blooms. She often included pressed flowers in her letters, or gifted friends with handpicked nosegays, into which she’d tuck winsome verses.”
-Jama Rattigan in her wonderful blog Jama's Alphabet Soup
Photographing Flowers by Priyanka Sacheti
“I started to spend my mornings taking walks in the neighborhood, acquainting myself with all the trees that grew there. I picked up all the fallen flowers I had found on my walks and nested them inside bowls in my home. Once Delhi’s spring gradually began transitioning into its blisteringly hot summer, new trees sprang into performance, each one seemingly intent on out-blooming the other. I saw a jacaranda tree in bloom for the first time in a tiny pocket of a garden, its canopy appearing like an enchanted mauve cloud silhouetted against a rosy dusk sky. A yellow trumpet tree grove brightened up an otherwise nondescript garden, its audacious yellow blooms competing with that of the sunlight. Now that I had started taking pictures of them, I could not stop. I had never known that blooming trees would bring me so much joy, peace even; I now wondered how I had lived without them all this time.”
A Field Guide to Roadside Wildflowers At Full Speed by Chris Helzer
A Field Guide to Roadside Wildflowers At Full Speed is a freely downloadable ebook in PDF format by Chris Helzer, the Director of Science for The Nature Conservancy in Nebraska. It’s a comedic take on the many nature books you find that aren’t particularly useful when you’re driving cross-country at speed, and close examination of flora is impossible.
Everything about this is just so beautiful!
A parting flower from space
This is one of the first flowers ever grown in space. It’s a blossoming orange zinnia flower grown in NASA’s veggie chamber aboard the International Space Station. How beautiful is that?
Read more about how astronauts are turning into gardeners in space here.
The title of this newsletter, Petals as Portals, is a nod to the fact that flowers have been opening up the door into myself, into a world of beauty and a feeling of abundance.
As American conservationist and writer John Muir correctly put it:
“I only went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.”
Wishing you a September full of floral delight,
Rohini
Wow! Just discovered your fabulous publication and I'm sending it on to my plant-loving friends : )