Oldie: A Little Light Flower Fiction

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.

CORN: A MARVELOUS STRANGE PLANT

     Yes!  I know it’s been roughly 200 years since I wrote a new Bob!  That’s why I keep dishin’ up these leftovers.  Here’s one about corn, which I’ve got a lot of nerve writing because I never grow it anymore.  It’s all that crap you read about having to pick it the minute it’s ripe, then eat it as soon as it’s picked.  I couldn’t stand the stress. 

CORN:  A MARVELOUS STRANGE PLANT

By Robin Ford Wallace

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            There is something about corn that drives people crazy.

            I noticed it the first time I raised corn, when I was a young sharecropper in Atlanta.  I’ve already told the story in this space, but I’ll repeat that my friend Mary Hart and I were helping a couple in their 80s grow a garden.  They had a post-juvenile-delinquent son named Jimmy who was 60-odd and still lived at home.  He had always been peculiar but it was the corn that drove him over the edge.  He fussed over it and brooded over it and guarded it like a dog, and finally he began accusing us of stealing it.

But what stands out in my memory is planting the corn that spring.  It was close to sunset.  Mary Hart and I walked down the furrows as the dew began to fall, dropping in the seed corn.  Jimmy followed close behind us, breathing noisily and pouring fertilizer on top.  I couldn’t put my finger on it, but there was something intrinsically nasty about the whole thing.

Now I’ve been reading the most interesting book, The Story of Corn, by Betty Fussell, and I’ve learned that that sort of thing has been going on for 10,000 years.

American Indians were crazy about corn.  They ate it green, ripe, dried, roasted, fried, ground and pickled.  Girls made a powder of it for their faces.  Timekeeping methods developed around its growing season.

Indian religions evolved around the great central fact that it was corn that kept people alive.  The Taino word “mahiz,” from which “maize” and the scientific name for corn, Zea mays, were derived, means “life-giver.” 

So there were corn gods and corn goddesses.  Peaceful North American Indians had their Green Corn Dance, and cannibalistic South American tribes ritually snarfed their enemies with a sacred side of corn.  “Corn maidens” and “corn kings” participated in what were presumably fertility rites, but after the thing with Jimmy I skimmed over that chapter. 

Anyway, that’s nothing.  The Maya were so crazy about corn they used human sacrifices as their preferred organic plant food.  In the book there is a particularly gruesome Mayan drawing of a prisoner tied to the altar, his stomach cut open, out of it growing a stylized stalk of guess what. 

            When the Europeans arrived in the New World, they had never seen anything like corn.  In his 1619 A New Herbal, Henry Lyte wrote:  “This Corne is a marvelous strange plant, nothing resembling any other kind of grayne, for it bringeth forth his seede cleane contrarie from the place where the Floures grow.”

Actually, corn has the peculiar arrangement of  two sets of flowers, one male and one female, separated as starkly on the plant as anything you will find in the Arab world.  The “Floures” Lyte was referring to were the male set, located in tassels on top of the plant.  These produce pollen.  The female flowers are found along incipient cobs about halfway down the stalk, and they mature into kernels after receiving pollen from the males.

Every kernel-to-be is fertilized separately, and this occurs by means of one individual filament, or silk, each sends up through the thick sheath that encloses them to catch a grain of pollen.  So each kernel is a separate fruit and may have a different daddy from its neighbor on the cob, which explains how corn ears may contain different-colored kernels in the same row. 

And that daddy might well be from another variety of corn.  The corn silk filament is a tiny target to aim for, and the male flowers make up for it via the shotgun approach, producing about 20,000 times as much pollen as needed to fertilize each kernel.  This pollen travels on the wind, and is eager to get there, so when you plant two kinds of corn anywhere near each other and expect them to produce true to kind, it is like landing a shipful of lonely sailors on a Polynesian isle populated by maidens with blue-black hair and coconut bras, and expecting them to exchange nothing but recipes.

Ironically, though corn is so good at pollinating itself, it can’t grow at all without human intervention.  The kernels are too solidly sheathed in the husk to germinate.

Well, it’s a crazy kind of plant.

            Anyway, the wheat-eating European settlers arrived to find ancient America built largely on corn, thought for a minute, and then built modern America entirely on corn.  You will now find corn products in mayonnaise, soap, paint, insecticide, shaving cream, embalming fluid and beer.  

            There is a quote I read somewhere by beat poet Allen Ginsberg in which he dismissed any notion of the loftiness of human communication with:  “We’re just meat talkin’ to meat.”  The book points out that meat is corn, too

            There are corn products in the car you drive to the grocery store, the cart you push through it, the store building itself and every product you buy there with the possible exception of fresh fish.  Which means that we’re corn, too – with the possible exception of those of us who live exclusively on fresh fish.

            Well.  We seem to have very little room left to discuss actually growing corn, which is fine because I don’t.  Everything you read about corn says you have to pick it at the exact moment it’s ready, then race it to a pot of water you already have boiling, or else the sugar starts turning to starch and it’s ruined.  So when I’ve grown corn, that’s what I’ve tried to do.

            It made me crazy.

            But if you like corn, by all mean go ahead and plant it.  Ignore the experts who give you the crap about sprinting to the boiling pot, and ignore me raving about the sacredness and smarminess of corn.  What do we know?

            We’re just corn talkin’ to corn.  

     Robin Ford Wallace lives in Deerhead Cove, where she plays quietly in the dirt, disturbing no one.

I Celebrate Myself and Sing Myself In Dirt

          This is one I wrote a couple of years ago, just when I was beginning to make a sort of religion of dirt and, coincidentally, the first year my brother Frank started getting into gardening at all.  I was regrettably dismissive of his maiden efforts; but in fact he took to it with a convert’s zeal and grew some mighty tomatoes, naming each of his plants and ministering to their needs like Clara Barton.  One type he grew was the heirloom Black Krim, and I saved the seeds of one he gave me and from that had a plant in my next year’s garden, which I expect made it doubly an heirloom.  I named the plant Frank and used to go down to the garden and insult it in the afternoons when I got bored writing.      

I Celebrate Myself and Sing Myself in Dirt

By Robin Ford Wallace

“What is the grass?”

Yes, Dear Reader, we are quoting Walt Whitman today.  We cannot mow our lawn without thinking of “Leaves of Grass,” in which Walt purports to be present in every blade, a concept that makes us pause behind our Troy-Bilt from time to time, examining the bottoms of our shoes contemplatively.

“Tenderly will I use you, curling grass,” he wrote and frankly, we do no such thing.  In summer our little acre is a jungle and to survive we go into commando mode. Put us behind the mower and we commence to cuss, drink beer and burn villages.   It is the way of the world, and not our fault.  This ain’t our war.

But grass is our enemy, and as we sweat and spit and ravage the countryside, we wonder why, in celebrating the wonder of life, dear Walt chose to stop at lawn level and not go that essential step deeper, asking:

What is the dirt?

As the reader may intuit, we dislike grass, whereas we have doted on dirt since our mud pie days and continue in our maturity to wallow in it happily, finding in dirt our milieu both as gardener and journalist.

But dirt gets little respect from others.   Consider the language:  Unscrupulous behavior is referred to as “playing dirty,” and if you engage in it you will “soil” your reputation, causing people to say that you have “feet of clay.”  Dirt, with water, is the base of the food chain and thus feeds the planet, but do people appreciate it?  No!  They “treat it like dirt.” 

How did this come about?  Perhaps it is because there is so much of it.  It is “as common as dirt.” 

Or perhaps it is the fact that ours is a nation that wishes to forget its agricultural past.  To the pavement-treading urbanite, dirt is something that the despised older generation with its baggy clothes and bad grammar slouched toothlessly around in, on equal terms with the hogs.   

But the supreme irony is that when such people become interested in the now trendy subject of organic gardening, they go out and spend serious money on sacks of – guess what?  The stuff that comes from the store must be this miraculous substance they’ve read so much about, whereas the stuff they wipe off their Guccis is just dirt.

And when we say “such people,” we are, of course, referring to our brother Frank.  This spring, Frank for the first time was bitten by the gardening bug.  Knowing nothing about gardening, and quite a lot about building upscale hotels, Frank began his maiden voyage into horticulture by constructing a luxury condo for his plants in the back yard of his primary girlfriend’s house. 

The gleaming wooden structure that contained Frank’s tiny raised bed, with a bottom to prevent weeds, tall sides to retard erosion and a top beam to support hanging baskets, bore glowing witness to his carpentry skills; though the precisely ruled nine inches he had allowed between tomato plants was equally eloquent testimony to a somewhat less perfect grasp of agriculture.  And of course Frank then spent $300 to fill his Tomato Hilton with store-bought soil. 

When we suggested, gently, that Frank’s tomatoes might fare better out in the yard, with more room between them, he was incredulous.  The yard was “just dirt.”

“Just dirt” indeed!  Dirt is an amazing substance.  It takes thousands of years to make dirt when conditions are perfect, and in some places it never forms at all.

Dirt starts when wind and water slowly, slowly chip away at rock, breaking it down into smaller particles.  That is the beginning, but before dirt can support life, air has to mix minerals into it, plants and animals have to decay in it, and worms have to digest it for generations. 

Then dirt starts moving around.  Dirt is always on the go.  If it is carried by water and deposited somewhere, it is called alluvium; if by a glacier, till; if by wind, loess

There are lots of different textures of dirt, with sand one of the coarser and clay one of the finer.  In our area we have a lot of clay, and it is true that clay is not a perfect dirt.  Its tiny particles bind together tightly, preventing air from reaching plant roots, and making for dense clods when wet and a hoe-breaking hardness when dry. 

But you go into gardening with the dirt you’ve got, and in any case, as has been said about other things, when dirt is good it’s fantastic and when it’s bad it’s still pretty good.  Clay has plenty of nutrients, and mixing in rotting organic material, called humus in dirt lingo, not only adds more but also corrects the gloppy texture. 

So you don’t need plant food, you don’t need $300, and you certainly don’t need a Tomato Hilton.  Because of the miracle of dirt, if you have raw red clay, and a thick layer of spoiled hay, you have pretty much all you need to grow anything you like.

Unlike poor Frank.  Frank’s primary girlfriend found out about his secondary and tertiary girlfriends, so baldly this time as to compromise her willing suspension of disbelief beyond even Frank’s prodigious fiction skills, and she tossed him out, thus separating him from his pretty garden.

But don’t mourn for him, Gentle Reader.  The tomatoes were planted too closely to come to anything, and the romantic upheaval is something that happens to Frank at least once a year, reliably supplying the family with conversational fodder for Thanksgiving.

It  is what we treasure about him.  As mentioned above, there is nothing we celebrate as much as:

Dirt.

END

            Robin Ford Wallace lives in Deerhead Cove, where she plays quietly in the dirt, disturbing no one.