The Attraction of Flowers (I): Bulbs and Orchids

"We are more related to orchids than to apes" (P. Sloterdijk)

Flowers are liked because they are potential fruit: a promise of an eternity that is unconsciously longed for. The visual and olfactory display, the trap that nature sets to ensure its perpetuation (through pollination and subsequent fruiting, which in turn is a seed of the future). It is no coincidence that spring, the favorite season for chromatic explosion, coincides with the awakening of the senses and mating rituals in a large number of species, from which humans are only partly distinguished. For the irremediable emancipation from nature -transformed into "culture"- is never complete. The impulse remains with less intensity and often manifests itself sublimated, very symptomatically in the taste for flowers. Thus, celebrations of life and death incorporate them as a symbol of prosperity or as a form of consolation, but not for merely cosmetic purposes. Both in love, a full fusion of two beings -which ultimately engenders a new being- and in the trance of ceasing to be -a living part of nature- the secret and legitimate hope of continuity is harbored, whether understood in terms of procreation or eternal life. BULBS Bulbs are the flowers that best illustrate the rebirth of nature. The same plant, as new, returns to light after months of subterranean and silent existence. The cold and, above all, the scarcity of sunlight hours invites a regenerating rest, when the bulb remains in hibernation. The economy of resources will make flowering possible, after the first leaves sprout and gather energy during a few weeks that announce spring. Tulips, Daffodils, Freesias, Hyacinths or Lilies -to name the best known- update the miracle after a period of patient gestation. As in life itself, fructification brings surprises; from one year to the next, the bulbs may have multiplied, so that the semi-abandoned flowerbed or pot is populated with colors and scents. In intensity, Hyacinths and some species of Daffodils undoubtedly prevail. But the spicy freshness of the Freesia, familiar and enigmatic (variable according to color, red ones tend to be the most fragrant), finds no rival. Perhaps because it fixes in the emotional calendar those fluctuating weeks in temperature -with sensitivity on edge- around Easter, an essentially intense period, which for Christianity celebrates the end of time and the promise of a new and better life. It is the moment of a rebirth, if not spiritual, at least emotional, with the unconscious consciousness -intuition- that the propitious time for fructification is coming. ORCHIDS Exoticism by definition, in almost countless variations: there are between 25 and 30 thousand different species, not counting artificial hybridizations, which double the figure. Some species are still unknown today, discovered casually among the impenetrable thickness of tropical jungles, enriching the imaginary that accompanies these plants. The complexity of their flowers, and the specific needs required for their pollination, in each case, has been fantasized in a film as surprising as Adaptation, starring Nicholas Cage, in the dual role of screenwriter Charlie Kaufmann (who was also responsible for the screenplay of How to Be John Malkovich) and of his twin brother, non-existent in real life. The film narrates the relationship of an eccentric and egocentric orchid hunter with the journalist who writes a book about him (Meryl Streep), a book that in turn has to be transformed into a film script by Kaufman's fictional doubling. An intricate plot that unfolds masterfully, with strange naturalness despite its self-referentiality and self-conscious clichés in which it is incurred. Furthermore, in this example of fiction within fiction, the "ghost orchid" is not used as a mere claim (Polyrrhiza lindenii), of unknown and fantasized reality. The flowers are at the very center of the plot. The complex character of orchids, with unthinkable shapes and colors -they can imitate the nature of the animals that pollinate them, as if inviting some kind of sexual act, the protagonist of that film recalls-, is also reproduced in formal terms, in the superposition of discourses and characters that alternate reality and fiction. Giorgia O'Keeffe captured on her canvases what Marcel Proust had revealed in a not much more subtle way in the novella included in the first part of his Research, titled Swann's Way: the protagonists refer to the sexual relationship finely -or at least they pretend to- with the allusion to one of the best-known genres ("Faire cattleya"), which accompanies their encounters. Although the structure of orchids is similar, the omnipresent Phalaenopsis is not loaded with the same connotation, it is not in vain that it is given on the most disparate occasions. Without reaching the extreme of exoticism that Adaptation, nor to the performative demand of Cattleya, other orchids can brighten life for many years, if placed near windows without direct sun and moderate (to scarce) watering, such as those of the genus Dendrobium or the Oncidium. Without forgetting the Cambria, product of hybridization, which unlike other orchids are indeed fragrant.