[ Lost in the Landscape ]

music for the eyes

Here’s a fun one: My local community/university orches­tra will be pre­mier­ing a new piece this week­end. Stan­ford Uni­ver­sity com­poser Mark Apple­baum has com­posed a work for orches­tra with a spe­cial, unusual soloist: a florist.

The Con­certo for Florist and Orches­tra riffs on the tra­di­tional notion of a con­certo, where one or more vir­tu­oso solists duke it out musi­cally with an accom­pa­ny­ing ensem­ble. In the new work, the orches­tra will play and the florist will…presumably array flow­ers and leaves vir­tu­os­ti­cally all over the stage. Some musi­cal con­certo soloists have rep­u­ta­tions for being high-strung indi­vid­u­als, and to my mind the new piece also riffs on the idea of florists some­times hav­ing a rep­u­ta­tion for being just as high-strung.

The work’s soloist will be James Del­Prince, Asso­ciate Pro­fes­sor of Plant and Soil Sci­ences with a spe­cial­iza­tion in Flo­ral Design and Inte­rior Plantscap­ing Design at Mis­sis­sippi State Uni­ver­sity. On his cam­pus biog­ra­phy page Del­Prince writes, “The aes­thet­ics of hor­ti­cul­ture involve recog­ni­tion of the intrin­sic beauty of plants and flow­ers along with the prac­ticed skill of flo­ral design and inte­rior plant place­ment. I enjoy and value the oppor­tu­nity to bring under­stand­ing and appre­ci­a­tion of flo­ral and plant design to peo­ple.” And this weekend’s performance–the sec­ond time Del­Prince has worked flo­ral magic with Mark Applebaum’s music to accom­pany him–seems like a great way to bring some of that appre­ci­a­tion to a dif­fer­ent sort of audi­ence than peo­ple look­ing for some­thing to dec­o­rate their wedding.

If you want more tra­di­tional fare, the all-concerto con­cert opens with Prokofiev’s Sec­ond Vio­lin Con­certo, with Han­nah Cho, win­ner of the orchestra’s 2009 Youth Artist Com­pe­ti­tion. Clos­ing the evening will be another “con­cep­tual con­certo,” Béla Bartók’s Con­certo for Orches­tra, a con­certo with no soloists at all other than mem­bers of the orches­tra, all of whom will have to work pretty hard to play the score.

One of my music profs from many years ago, Robert Erick­son, was famous for shut­ting his eyes when lis­ten­ing to per­for­mances. He wasn’t bored; he just didn’t want the visu­als to get in the way of truly hear­ing the music. You won’t want to shut your eyese for Saturday’s and Sunday’s performances.

The La Jolla Sym­phony per­forms. Steven Schick conducts.

March 10 2011 | Categories: art • gardening | Tags: concertos • cut flowers • florists • music | 9 Comments »

almost red white and blue natives

We had some peo­ple over to view the local fire­works yes­ter­day. To mark the occa­sion I threw together some of the bloom­ing natives from the gar­den for a pas­tel ren­di­tion of the red, white and blue theme of the day.

White was the easy color. Sev­eral white buck­wheats were bloom­ing, and I picked some stems of the flat-top buck­wheat, Eri­o­gonum fas­ci­c­u­la­tum. Its broad, open umbels also look a bit like fireworks.

For red, the dark rose col­ors of San Miguel Island buck­wheat (Eri­o­gonum grande var. rub­sescens) pro­vided a rea­son­able stand-in. If I had some Del­phinium car­di­nale in the gar­den, it would have really pro­vided a bright scar­let kick. Maybe next year…

For blue, the pick­ings got pretty slim. The blue-violet whorls of Cleve­land sage (Salvia cleve­landii ‘Win­nifred Gilman’) were the clos­est I could come up with. As with the white buck­wheat, the struc­ture of the stems seemed a bit like fire­works, with whorls of lit­tle tubu­lar flow­ers explod­ing out from the stem.

The result was a lot less sub­tle than flo­ral fire­works, but I liked how it marked the occa­sion and cel­e­brated a South­ern Cal­i­for­nia sense of place.

Many of the peo­ple who showed up knew I was a plant nut, so two of the host­ess gifts were col­or­ful florist bou­quets. One of them marked the occa­sion by includ­ing red, white and blue flow­ers. But even florists with all their inter­na­tional resources some­times have prob­lems with the color blue. This florist’s solu­tion? Why not dye white flow­ers blue? The results don’t look much like any­thing in my Cal­i­for­nia gar­den so the gift flow­ers and the local posies weren’t inter­mixed, and the dif­fer­ent bou­quets have their own places around the house.

I hope you all had a great fourth!

July 05 2010 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: cut flowers • dyed flowers • Independence Day • July 4 • native plants | 9 Comments »

it came from the florist

Not long ago one of John’s friends, a florist, stopped by the house for a visit. She brought with her a sin­gle long-stemmed red rose in a tall vase. When I came home there was the flower, huge, red, per­fect and scent­less, sit­ting on the counter.

As you might guess from my title, there’s a good chance I might have an uncom­fort­able rela­tion­ship with flow­ers from a florist. If you go to someone’s house and want to give them some­thing spe­cial, do you stop by the gro­cery and pick up a pound of toma­toes as a host or host­ess gift? Of course not. You’d pick some from your gar­den and share some­thing spe­cial, some­thing sea­sonal, some­thing that gives of your­self and your gar­den. For me a store tomato has always shared some­thing with a florist’s rose. What you hold in your hands might be cos­met­i­cally stun­ning, but it leaves me with a question…what is this thing, any­way? Is it botan­i­cal? Or maybe some indus­trial product?

It just so hap­pened that a cou­ple nights before I’d fin­ished read­ing Amy Stewart’s 2007 book, Flower Con­fi­den­tial. If you don’t know her as an author of books, you might know her as the woman behind the blog, Dirt. And if you don’t know the book, it’s basi­cally a look inside the cut-flower indus­try and reveals it to be just that: an indus­try. The three big sec­tions of the book, “Breed­ing,” “Grow­ing” and “Sell­ing” may well explode any warm and fuzzies you might have about the florist trade, and show it to be pos­si­bly worse for the envi­ron­ment, work­ers and pub­lic health than the part of big agribusi­ness ded­i­cated to food crops.

Here are just a few snippets:

[U]nlike imported fruits and veg­eta­bles, flow­ers are not tested for ille­gal pes­ti­cide residue. After all, they’re not going to be eaten. That cre­ates a sit­u­a­tion in which grow­ers have an incen­tive to use the max­i­mum amount of pes­ti­cides to elim­i­nate the pos­si­bil­ity of a sin­gle gnat turn­ing up in a box.

The com­plaints about labor and envi­ron­men­tal prob­lems have been part of the flower industry’s legacy for as long as it has been in Latin Amer­ica. Although the sit­u­a­tion has been thor­oughly reported by inves­tiga­tive jour­nal­ists, it doesn’t appear to have changed American’s buy­ing habits. Every year, a greater share of flow­ers sold in the United States come from Latin Amer­ica. Over the last decade, sales of domes­ti­cally grown roses have dropped from almost 500 mil­lion to just under 100 mil­lion. Mean­while, imports of cut roses have increased to over 1.3 bil­lion stems a year.

At the gro­cery store, I can buy organic wine, fair-trade choco­late, and hormone-free milk from a local cream­ery. But the flow­ers in buck­ets by the cash reg­is­ter are unla­beled, unmarked, entirely undif­fer­en­ti­ated. There’s no basis on which to com­pare and choose, except for price… The anonymity of cut flow­ers has made it impos­si­ble for cus­tomers to demand any­thing different.

There’s a lot more to the book than rants against the trade, and it’s a worth­while read if you’d like to know more about what you find at the store.

Sev­eral days after the per­fect florist’s rose finally passed on to the next plane in the way that florist’s roses do–without open­ing up, with­out show­ing the sta­mens and pis­tils that are a flower’s very rea­son for existing–Linda showed up at the house with a bou­quet of roses from her gar­den. Even before I saw them I knew there were roses in her hands. There was a breeze com­ing in the front door, and there was scent of roses col­or­ing the air.

Over the next days the roses pro­ceeded to do what roses do. They opened. They con­tin­ued to release their scents. And in a cou­ple more days they’ll start to drop their petals and fade. They par­tic­i­pate in a nat­ural process in a way that their more primped runner-up in a beauty pageant rel­a­tive does not, and I appre­ci­ate them for that.

June 30 2009 | Categories: gardening | Tags: books • cut flowers | 4 Comments »

all stems

Speak­ing of cut flow­ers, I often think that the most beau­ti­ful part of what’s in the vase isn’t nec­es­sar­ily the blooms. Pho­tog­ra­pher Lee Fried­lan­der, whose work often exhibits a droll-to-bratty icon­o­clas­tic bent, did a book just a few years ago that was titled Stems. (The Photo-Eye online book­store uses the Book­Tease fea­ture that lets you take a look at some of the images in the book.)

As you might guess from the title, it’s almost exclu­sively pho­tos of plants in vases where the flow­ers have been cropped out of the pic­ture. It’s a lit­tle will­ful, for sure, but I think many of the images are really beau­ti­ful. See what you think…

June 23 2008 | Categories: art • photography | Tags: cut flowers • Lee Friedlander | No Comments »

sage as a cut flower

In the past I’ve occa­sion­ally cut flow­ers from the gar­den, only to have them wilt imme­di­ately and dis­in­te­grate into a pile of organic mat­ter on top of a table I wanted to look nice for com­pany. Last week­end I was trim­ming back the ivy-leaved sage, Salvia cacali­ae­fo­lia. At first the stems went into the greens recy­cling can. But they looked too pretty there and I won­dered how well they’d do as cut flow­ers. So into the house they came, mak­ing a big, infor­mal bouquet/science exper­i­ment for the din­ing table.

The ver­dict? The flow­ers looked great through day three, with only the occa­sional flower falling off the stem. Then after that the ends of the stems where the flow­ers live started to droop. By day five, although the leaves still looked per­fectly pre­sentable, the flower ends were totally wilted, blooms had dropped off the stems, and there was a dry, black, gran­u­lar some­thing or another (pollen? seeds?) lit­ter­ing the table sur­face. Time for the greens recy­cle bin.

That was no worse than the lifes­pan of many of the more clas­sic cut flow­ers, so I’ll be treat­ing myself to vase-fulls of ivy-leaved sage the next time I cut it back.

June 22 2008 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: Add new tag • cut flowers • ivy-leaved sage • Salvia cacaliaefolia | 4 Comments »