While the kids were at the neighborhood Halloween bonfire party tonight, my husband and I snuck away for a quick bite of Vietnamese food just a few minutes away. While we savored our marinated beef vermicelli bowl (him) and charcoal grilled marinated chicken over rice (me), Vietnamese music videos were running on the restaurant's big screen TV. The music was completely inaudible, but the setting for one of the videos really caught my attention. The singer was walking through a formal garden, laid out in quadrants typical for, say, a rose garden, but the whole thing was planted in nothing but gloriously blooming cleomes in pinks, salmons and white. Sure, they're not the type of flower you sink your face into, given their musky (or skunky, some would say) odor, but the smell never bothered me. I like how a single plant can get six feet tall and three feet wide, if it's not crowded too much, and bloom incessantly from midsummer to frost. I would fail any pop quiz calling on me to name the elements of this plant's complicated and fascinating anatomy, but perhaps one day I'll use the elegant complexity of the spider flower as a starting point for teaching myself a little elementary botany. Cleome is reported to be native to South America, but it sure looked happy there in Southeast Asia too. I don't have a bed to give over to nothing but cleome (although if I don't vigorously "edit" the self-sown seedlings from the very successful clump in my back perennial border, I may be proved wrong), but I gotta tell you—this Vietnamese cleome garden looked extraordinarily beautiful.
It is funny how, once you become familiar with certain plants, you can spot them in the oddest places. You can also spot the impostors. I have amused myself identifying all the flowers on, say, a box of tissues. And my children are very familiar with my pet peeve of generically drawn flowers in children's books, flowers that are no real flower but a mish-mash of botanical parts. You know the type: daisy flowers with tulip leaves, etc. Almost as bad is when they draw botanically correct flowers that would never bloom together at the same time, daffodils blooming with poppies and dahlias. But even mail-order catalogs selling plants for an entire bed as a "plan" commit this sin.
Posted by: Kathy | October 28, 2004 at 07:50 AM
That reminds me of a print I have of a 19th century French painting of a gorgeous flower arrangement. Even though the painting is called "Roses" or something like that, the flower that steals the show is a big fat bombe-type peony...with the leaves of a hydrangea. Frankenflower!
Posted by: Chan S. | October 28, 2004 at 09:03 PM