The Resort Town
When the eye has tired of the human scenery of the resort town, and the body is weary of the town's repetitive entertainments, the visitor may finally notice the fury of alien plants. The misting systems at every resort, designed for cooling rows of prostrate bodies, also provide the right conditions for equatorial jungles. The resort had made the most of this opportunity. I started to feel the more patient offerings of botanical companionship. To greet these plants, though, I needed to know their names. For that, I would need a nursery, and only one was close enough to walk to.
From the front, it looked normal enough. I wandered in past the unattended outdoor register and into the usual towers of annual trays -- petunia, impatiens, salvia, and so on -- the same seventeen brief and predictable thrills that scream from annual-towers everywhere. Behind them, a small display of cactus, unlabeled but neat. Behind that, the beginnings of a jungle of larger containers. Along the side of the property, a large unkempt man drove in a golf cart with a tree in the seat beside him. The proprietor.
At once, I saw some of the plants that I had come to identify. I looked for their labels. There were none.
Glancing around, I realized that I hadn't seen a label anywhere. No prices. No identities. No instructions for planting and care.
No customers either. I moved alone through a containerized wilderness, all sights obscured by overgrown but anonymous vines, trees, shrubs. Finally, there, a label! A low, greyish shrub cowered in a hexagonal pot whose nursery tag still clung to its side. Making my own path through the sea of containers, I bent down to read. "Strelitzia," it said.
My mind flashed a picture of Strelitzia, the "bird of paradise," a soaring tropical plant with foot-long leaves and an audacious backward-leaning orange and blue flower that has always made me think of Marilyn Monroe reclining ever so slowly onto a great divan. Flashy and tender, Strelitzia was the perfect opposite of the tough and humble desert shrub that actually grew in this container. Well, I thought, at least they transplant things here.
Perhaps one pot in a hundred bore any label at all, and each label was not just wrong but perfectly so. A screaming red honeysuckle vine was labeled Opuntia -- prickly pear, the familiar cactus that grows in rounded flat pads.
Lehner, Ernst, and Johanna Lehner. Folklore and Symbolism of Flowers, Plants and Trees. New York: Tudor, 1960.
Literary devices are used by Sandra Cisneros throughout the vignette “The Monkey Garden”, to highlight the mood of the piece. For instance, Cisneros uses personification to encompass feelings of mysticality when she says things disappeared in the Garden, “as if the garden itself ate them.”(95) Personification was used by Cisneros to plant Esperanza’s humanlike description of the garden, while creating a sense of mystery and enchantment in the reader. Similarly, Cisneros describes how the tree Esperanza was near “wouldn’t mind if she lay down” (97). In this section, the tree is personified as a friend Esperanza can lay with. The fictional and humanlike style that the situation is described in further accentuates the mystical mood Cisneros is
On a Saturday afternoon in December, Barbara was sitting outside in her private sanctuary with her daughter Layla, since she had nothing to get ready for. Her private sanctuary was filled with exotic flowers, and trees with orchids of bright color hang...
First, Cancun has gorgeous hotels. The architecture of one representative hotel is fabulous. Walking into the entrance of the hotel is like walking through a breezeway because there are no doors. Upon entering, the visitor is mesmerized by the colossal tropical floral arrangement that’s so stunning and full of vibrant color that her mouth drops in awe. Soon, she realizes, after the initial shock, that she is walking on marble floors that look like mirrors reflecting rays of dancing light. Indoor waterfalls accompanied with lavish foliage engulf her; every sense is stimulated. Happily greeted and escorted to her hotel room, she is delighted to see that the hotel’s beauty continues throughout every part of it. Posh describes the room exactly. The bathroom floors, counters, and the shower walls are polished stone, native to Mexico. Surprised, she looks over the balcony to see the S-shaped pool with a floating bar and the bar’s roof covered in bamboo. Walking through the hotel lobby, through the fresh gardens, through the pathway to the pool are picture-perfect peacocks flaunting their beauty, and, indeed, they are very beautiful. Every minute detail of the Grand Hotel is designed to give her an unf...
Pollan, Michael. The Botany of Desire: a Plant's Eye View of the World. New York: Random House, 2001. Print.
Walker, Alice. (1974). “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens.” Ways of Reading. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, pp. 694-701.
“Somehow I guessed, before going to the window, that the room looked out upon the rhododendrons. Yes, there they were, blood-red and luscious, as I had seen them the evening before, great bushes of them, massed beneath the open window, encroaching onto the sweep of the drive itself. There was a little clearing too, between the bushes, like a miniature lawn...
Plants of the genus Strychnos have opposite leaves and bear cymes of white or yellowish flowers that have a four-lobed or five-lobed calyx, a four-parted or five-parted corolla, five stamens, a solitary pistil and bears fruit in the form of a berry. The seeds and bark of many plants in this genus contain the powerful poison (4 p.2). Strychnine is obtained commercially from the seeds of the Saint-ignatius's-bean and from the nux-vomica tree.
Imagine walking down an ancient path amidst a forest of tangled and twisted trees, some of which have existed since before a time even great grandparents can remember. The air echoes with sounds of life, and the fragrance is that of cedar or juniper… or something not quite either. The living things that dwell here, bridge a gap in time that many are totally unaware of and for the reasons about to be explained, may never become so. The beauty that surrounds this place is unexplainable in the tongue of man, yet its presence can be felt by all who choose to behold it. At least for now…
I have never seen myself as an art museum enthusiast, nor have I ever been able to actually appreciate art and the messages it expresses. But never before have I ever been so taken away by an artist's work. Through his unique, inventive use of technology, Robert Buelteman proves in his images of "Through the Green Fuse," the momentary beauty of plants and their visual metaphors for human life. Buelteman's "Cortaderia Selloana" meaning Pampas Grass, caught my eye as soon as I entered his gallery. The colors and form of the image are breathtaking and even furthermore, his process for the creation of this image is fascinating. His choices of exotic plants all of whose characteristics range from delicate to dramatic seem to have been so meticulously chosen and for this piece in particular, pampas grass was a perfect selection because of how sharp and defined each blade of grass is. Buelteman's true messages of these images are expressed not only through his inventive process but through the media he incorporates into the process.
New questions have arisen as to who these designers and weavers were who had such an intimate acquaintance with plants that they were able to reproduce details of leaf and flower with a perfection unparalleled in any other art form of the period . They even carefully placed the moisture-loving plants to the water’s edge, the correct forest trees together, and the plants of open spaces generally where they belonged in nature. They were evidently excellent ecologists.
As you walk right into the entrance you are suddenly transported to a world of paradise. The view is breathtaking as you walk through a path of flowers. Every flower you can imagine is in the garden. As I started walking I couldn't take my eyes of the different color of roses. Roses and lilies are my favorite flowers and they have their own fragrance to them. Every flower had their own features. The colorful patterns, the light colors, the dark colors each individual characteristic, enhanced the flower. I saw tulips, daffodils, lilies and many endless flowers. The lilies were color and bright, they looked magical in the shining sun. People were admiring the flowers and their color.
diversified after the rise of flowering plants. More than 12,500 of an estimated total of
In "Kew Gardens," the narrator follows different visitors to the gardens, giving the reader brief snapshots of their lives through small descriptions as they reach the same flowerbed. The story begins with a description of the oval-shaped flowerbed. The flowers are red, yellow, and blue. They have petals that are heart or tongue shaped. As the petals fall to the ground, they stain the earth with these colors for a moment. Petals from the flowers soar through the sky in the summer breeze. The flowers' colors flash in the air. On this July day, men, women, and children walk through the gardens. As the people move through the gardens, their movements resemble butterflies. They zigzag in all directions to get a better view of the flowers.
Corfield, Richard. "The Silent Landscape Chapter Six. Kelp and Cold Light." Richard Corfield. N.p., n.d. Web. 01 Mar. 2014. .