One of the advantages/disadvantages to reading the Los Angeles Times is their focus on Hollywood and their idea of what constitutes a major news story. Page 24 of the front section of this morning’s paper features an interview with UC Riverside botanist Jodie Holt on the consulting work she did for the current James Cameron science fiction film, Avatar. In addition to helping shape the look of the plants in the film, her plant descriptions and taxonomies form a chapter of the fan book, Avatar: A Confidential Report on the Biological and Social History of Pandora.
Edit [January 10]: I finally made it to see Avatar. While it’s not the sort of film I usually take myself to I had a great 2 hours and 42 minutes of escapism.
Some of the most striking botanical things seem to be the filmmaker’s borrowings from what earth’s marine life forms do already: plants with spectacular nighttime bioluminescence, seeds that float (while glowing) like marine jellyfish, or plants that glow when stepped on like certain marine algae. Actually I was surprised by how many plants I recognized already: ferny things, banana-leaved-looking things, tree-like things, grassy things. (Maybe that was botanist Jodie Holt’s influence?)
It made it look like Earth and Pandora were seeded with many of the same primordial spawn, which might be the case since humans were able to travel to Pandora in just a few years. If any filmmaker wants to option this compelling other story of divergent evolution on Earth and a distant planet’s moon, just e-mail me.
It’s a dangerous time out there for California garden bloggers. One of them just had a run-in of a thumb and a chipper-shredder, though fortunately with an outcome way short of what you’d see towards the end of Fargo. (If you don’t know Fargo, here’s the snowglobe that came with the deluxe collector’s letterboxed edition VHS tape which mirrors the tone of the film perfectly. It memorializes the infamous chipper-shredder scene where Trooper Marge Gunderson comes upon the criminal trying to dispose of his latest victim. When shaken, the snow in the globe is tainted with little red flakes. Magical…)
Another blogger broke her arm, taking her away from posting for a while.
Not to be left out, a little over a month ago, while working on my house repair project, I ended up stepping into a pile of scrap wood that happened to have a big spikey nail that was pointing straight up out of one of the boards. My work shoes—some battered old Skecher tennies that were hip in the late 1990s—were no match for the nail and…you know the rest. I’m perfectly fine now, but two days of painkillers and the week of crutches were no fun.
I really should have better shoes for working outside, I thought after the little accident. And this weekend I finally got around to replacing my unsafe and ugly tennies.
So here they are: some industrial Timberland workboots with steel toes and puncture-resistant soles. They weigh as much as a small sack of potatoes but are surprisingly comfortable.
So was this overkill for working outside and around the garden? They should be great for forcing a shovel into the patches of the garden where the earth is seriously hardpan clay. But they’re definitely nothing to wear when trying to weave gingerly through a bed of new seedlings. I haven’t had a chance to plant anything over the last couple of days, and I haven’t had a need to finesse my way around tiny little plants. But I think I’ll like them and that I’ll actually wear them gardening.
Whatever the verdict, one member of the household is already happy. Here’s Scooter, who doesn’t give a hoot about my new boots. But every new pair of shoes that enters the house means that there’ll be a shoebox accompanying them. The cat approves.
Last July I did a post on the documentaryA Man Named Pearl, and at point asked a question about what films there were about gardening. Leslie made the recommendation of Greenfingers, a Y2K British production starring Clive Owen and Helen Mirrin. Based loosely on a true story, it told of incarcerated gardeners in England that had a rehabilitation program involving gardening. In real life the prisoners eventually went on to design award winning garden exhibits at the Hampton Court and Chelsea Flower Shows.
My Netflix queue is pretty long, but by last week I’d worked through a few dozen films and the red envelope containing Greenfingers arrived in the mail. I won’t give away the end any more than I have—It’s based only loosely on the facts I’ve mentioned above. But if you haven’t seen it already it’s definitely a worthy movie rental—Warm, funny and romantic, it’s a great film for these long winter nights.
Now if only the film didn’t use so many plastic plants, including a red hibiscus that features prominently in the plot. We’re gardeners, people! We can tell!
The BBC is at it again. In 1981 they did a TV serialization of John Wyndham’s novel, The Day of the Triffids, a book featuring mutant carnivorous plants that develop a taste for the species that invented herbicides and lawnmowers. [ image source ]
According to a thought-piece on the BBC News Magazine site, the BBC is producing another treatment of this 1951 cold-war sci-fi novel. The piece muses how the first treatments of the novel came out of the same Cold-War hysteria that produced a spate of monster and end-of-the-world films. But the author, Finlo Rohrer, talks about how the plot might resonate differently in these days of global warming, where worries about destruction come less through war than through our wanton abuse of the earth through the release of greenhouse gases and genetic engineering.
“The idea of malevolent plant life has a certain appeal now, in a time where some people are increasingly concerned about the idea of genetically modified organisms,” Rohrer writes.
Several times in the piece he quotes Dr Barry Langford, senior lecturer in film and television at Royal Holloway, University of London. Lanford: “The triffids are perhaps to us a more potent threat than even in Wyndham’s time.”
All that’s well and good, but will this be a great show to watch with a bowl of popcorn and the lights turned down low? A nice disaster pic with lots of wonderfully cheesy BBC special effects? You might want to put your houseplants in another room. Wouldn’t want to give them any ideas…
Check out the Wikipedia entry for more information on triffids, including the other sequels and adaptations the book has seen (including the 1963 theatrical film).
Opening last Friday in theaters in Los Angeles (and just a few other places) was A Man Named Pearl. The Pearl of the film is South Carolina master topiarist Pearl Fryar. The documentary doesn’t open here in San Diego until August 22 but the film is on my list. How often is it that you have a film about a gardener? (Let’s see…there was Peter Sellers in Being There…and then…any others? Would The Constant Gardener or Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil really qualify beyond having gardens and gardeners in their titles?)
The film’s site has show dates and a trailer that gives you the best overview of his work. That trailer forms the opening part of the first of the clips below, and afterwards it goes into a forum featuring Fryar talking about his work in front of an audience. The second clip is a more extended talk and includes a demonstration with him firing up his electric hedge clippers…
The BBC is at it again. In 1981 they did a 
