I’m posting this oldie on the blogsite because I looked it up to quote from in the Radio-Free Robin I’m writing and noticed it wasn’t already on here. It’s really not my best work but I’m putting it up for a couple of reasons.
First, after the Dade board of ed’s decision to commence banning books being taught by its English teachers, I got interested in profanity and sexual content in literature, and I was going to use the opening paragraph to prove that even a garden column can be objectionable if you try hard enough.
Second, the guy with the ski poles I mentioned toward the end of this column as being a man I knew slightly later became a better friend. Some local readers may recognize him. I thought it was interesting that I was dead wrong about the antiaphrodisiacal effect of the trekkers. He does all right in that department ...
A LITTLE LIGHT FLOWER FICTION
By Robin Ford Wallace
It was a happening kind of night at the Heliotrope, a working-class dive where angiosperms stopped to vegetate an hour or two after a hard day down at the plant. Herb walked into the bar wilted from a 12-hour shift photosynthesizing, but when he saw Iris sipping a mimosa at the bar he suddenly felt fresh as a daisy. As he considered the lily, his stamens became turgid. Whoa! This babe was in full bloom!
“Hey, sweet pea,” said Herb, planting himself on the stool beside her. “How’s about a little cross-pollination?”
This is the beginning of a story I started some years ago, for reasons that I now forget. Perhaps it was to take advantage of the literary market’s glaring paucity of racy fiction about plants; or perhaps I simply misunderstood the meaning of the term “garden writer.” In fact, I’m not sure I’ve got it right even now.
Regular readers of this feature, if any, have no doubt figured out by now that it’s not a normal gardening column. One reason for that is your narrator’s dislike of much mainstream garden writing, which, if you take out the merchandising plugs and the fantastically boring quotes from interviewees, often boils down to something like: Flowers are pretty and you ought to grow some.
So perhaps I go too far in the other direction, telling fantastically boring stories about my relations and making up tawdry little tales of horticultural romance. But I am hardly the first to think of stories starring plants. Folklore is full of them.
In Greek mythology, Narcissus was a handsome young man the nymphs were all crazy for, but he spurned their affections and instead fell in love with the best-looking thing he’d ever seen, his own reflection in a pool. The reflection appeared to feel exactly the same way, but as a practical matter consummation was not in the cards, so the young man pined away and the gods turned him into the narcissus flower.
I probably would have turned him into something rather worse, but the reasoning of the Greek gods was always oblique. Grant them amorous favors, for example, and you are likely to get turned into a white cow, when really you would have preferred jewelry or a new car.
Sweet William and Black-Eyed Susan were apparently a hot item in another story, which confused me because I thought Sweet William was the one who died for love of Barbara Allen. Well, maybe old Bill flitted, as it were, from flower to flower.
Forget-me-nots, I read, were named when a medieval German knight, going to the banks of the Danube to gather the small blue flowers for his lady love, was carried off by a flash flood. As he was borne off by the torrent, he tossed the bouquet to his squeeze and shouted, “Forget me not!”
I was leery of this legend. For one thing, a more practical exclamation would have been, “Help!” And secondly, whatever he said, it stands to reason it would have been in German.
I’m sensitive on such issues, having believed until rather late in life that Napoleon’s last words were “Able was I ere I saw Elba.” Finally it struck me that if you were going to squander the last moments of life composing a palindrome, you would probably do it in a language you could actually speak. But I looked it up, and the word for forget-me-not in German is Vergissmeinnicht, which means the same thing.
I read a charming French story in which the main characters were a bluebell and a poppy. It involved shepherd lads they wanted to marry, evil rich men who wanted to marry them, and very little that had much to do with them being a poppy and a bluebell, a fact which, if dwelled upon, would certainly limit their romantic possibilities.
I completely understand this human compulsion to make up ridiculous stories about flowers. There is so little else we can do with them. They are so wildly attractive we want to eat them, or something, but that would be counterproductive and so we instead spin tales.
And flowers do lend themselves to anthropomorphism. Zinnias look to me like tall, friendly country girls who wear too much makeup and call everyone “hon.” Pansies would be those small, mean women who smile sweetly and then say terrible things behind your back, and roses impossible prima donnas who are allergic to everything and are always demanding that you turn the thermostat up.
At this time of year, my favorite flowers are wildflowers, and at any season my favorite stories are ones that embarrass people I know, so I will conclude by telling a flower story of my own.
A couple of weeks ago I was at my favorite wildflower spot when I met a man I know slightly. With him was a woman he was courting, and I thought how clever he was to bring a date to this place where bluebells and poppies bloomed riotously among lush white bloodroot, reducing your narrator, and indeed most women, to girlish shrieks and swoons of admiration. The sly dog.
But in his hands were those ski poles that hikers use to hike really fast, and instead of dallying among the flowers with his lady, he took off up the mountain at 90 mph, leaving her to follow as best she could, eating his dust. Perhaps he sought to impress her with his speed, but if I’d been in her shoes I don’t think he’d have made much time. Among poppies and bluebells, ski poles distinctly limit romantic possibilities.
Well, I seem to have wasted some serious column inches here telling flower stories without imparting much useful information. I had better close with something pithy. How about:
Flowers are pretty. You should grow some.
Robin Ford Wallace lives in Deerhead Cove, where she plays quietly in the dirt, disturbing no one.
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