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April 16, 2005
Botanical Gardens
I had a little extra time a couple of weeks ago, so I got together for a visit with my mother.
We had a nice little lunch together. We spoke of her travel plans for the summer — she and my dad are taking a trip to Bali this summer as part of their work with a Christian ministry. They are getting lots of shots, updating their passports, equipping themselves with malaria pills. I talked about work, which is, of course, such a convenient subject — what do family members talk about with each other if they aren't talking about work?
Then we went into the Atlanta Botanical Gardens. They were having an "Hypnotic Exotics" exhibit. It had been ten years since either of us had been to the gardens.
Things at the Gardens started off quietly. It was still March, and lots of flowers were not in full bloom yet. The helleboris were up, with their weirdly mournful nodding upside-down blooms. And there were giant beds of tulips and daffodils, and a few delicate flowering trees about to open up.
We headed toward the Orchid Center, the crown jewel of the gardens and site of the much-heralded Exotics exhibit.
Mom and I are both pretty into photography — she bought herself a Digital Rebel a couple of months ago after borrowing mine frequently enough to know that she was ready for the commitment. We stepped over the threshhold into the steamy interior of the Orchid Center, and were faced with an enormous display of perfect white and yellow orchids.
We did what any sane flower-lovers would do in this circumstance: we put on our macro lenses and started shooting.
There were some Asian tourists there, too, carrying some really serious photography equipment: tripods, braces, huge lenses. We were all in thrall of these flowers, setting up our shots, firing away.
These flowers are so startling. I don't know if I've never really looked at them before or if I looked at them and tried to deny what I saw happening there. I guess what I'm trying to say is that orchids have an incredibly erotic personality.
And apparently it's not just me, because Wikipedia tells me:
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Orchids get their name from the Greek orchis, meaning 'testicle', from the appearance of subterranean tuberoids in some terrestrial species... |
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Mom and I split up, meandering through the Orchid Center at our own pace, focusing and shooting, humming in awe over these marvelous plants. I wanted to go slowly.
Part of the Orchid Center is dedicated to tropical plants of the non-orchid variety — at one point as you are working through the winding paths of this enormous greenhouse, you are enveloped in mist and greenery. It feels like you're walking into the forgotten last chapter of Heart of Darkness. I was strolling through the lush jungle when I stumbled across this specimen:
Of course I could not help but feel a blush creep up from my collar. I felt like I was taking advantage of this lily by photographing it.
The greenhouse was filled with proper ladies from the garden club, doing what garden club ladies do, which apparently is to be proper and to politely ignore some of the more startling and explicit realities of these flowers.
Wikipedia continues with its lavish description:
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The basic orchid flower is composed of three sepals in the outer whorl, and three petals in the inner whorl. The medial petal is usually modified and enlarged (then called the labellum or lip), forming a platform for pollinators near the center of the corolla. Together, except the lip, they are called tepals. Sepals form the exterior of the bud. They are green in this stage. When the flower opens, the sepals become colored. |
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If that does not make your temperature rise just a little bit, then you may need to check your pulse.
This is the kind of thing that I don't know how to talk about here.
I thought for a while about how to respond to the orchids. (Am I overthinking things? Sometimes I think, golly, who except you sits and thinks about how to respond to orchids?) I felt like I was beginning to not see the flowers at all, despite the care I was spending in photographing them. All these years of human evolution, and I still feel like I don't know how to respond to the natural world around me. I cannot help but feel careless around it, because in that setting, I want to appreciate and notice everything — which, of course, is all but impossible. One cannot help but be at least a little careless in that setting. But there is so much that begs to be noticed. It feels criminal not to care.
I sometimes ask for insight in situations like this, when I'm sitting with a person or a feeling or a situation that initially feels very familiar. I sit with it and I try to take the blinkers off, to see it in as new a way as possible, to enter into it with a greater humanity and vulnerability than I have before. It's hard to do.
When it comes to flowers, or anything else in the physical world around me, sometimes the way to experience something more honestly is to put the camera down and close my eyes. Distill down to an even simpler experience. I am standing in a room filled with sex and flowers. I am in a place filled with almost unbearable beauty. How does that feel? What next? What am I not seeing that is asking to be seen now, maybe for the first and last time? e.e. cummings said he wanted to open "the eyes of [his] eyes," and that is what I want, too. The layer beneath the layer beneath the layer. The beauty beneath everything, the mystery that we can only guess at dimly, through vapor and green and the sound of birds chirping from a distant tree.
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