The Artist Date is a dream-child of Julia Cameron. We’ve discussed her book, The Artist’s Way, and highly recommend both the book and the weekly date. It can be life-changing. It can open your creativity like nothing else. This week, we’re drifting along with Laura Boggess, to the un-useful plant section of a conservatory. Un-useful, that is, unless you see the value of sudden play.
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West Virginia’s only plant conservatory is housed 25 miles from my home. Open since 1996, the C. Fred Edwards Conservatory is part of a local museum’s mission to “be a proponent for, and an interpreter of, nature.” The plants that live there fall into four general categories: orchids, agriculturally important, fragrant, and unusual.
I go to the conservatory to meet my muse and am greeted by the stillness of slow-growing things and the quiet sound of trickling water. The air is warm and moist and I enter through a doorway of gently swaying palm fronds and a small orchard of “agriculturally important” plants. These plants are categorized as such because we eat them or make use of their products. I am curious enough to stop and smell the berries on a coffee bush and rub my hand over the fruit of the chocolate tree. I also spy papaya, kumquat, and banana trees.
But I have not come to see these “useful” plants. I have come to see the orchids.
The conservatory boasts 400 varieties of orchids, rotated in and out of the collection as they bloom. I don’t know much about orchids—only that the way light filters through the delicate turn of their petals invites me to slow down and look deeper. Soon, I am lost in the symmetry of violets, and pinks, and yellows. The whites become my favorite—the clean, translucent lines snuffing out the noise inside me.
Searching for a name, I peek at a tiny wooden stake tucked down into the soil of the flower. But each orchid is only assigned a number. I give them names of my own making.
“Hello, Roger, ” I say, to a spider orchid variety. “It’s nice to meet you.”
Photos and post by Laura Boggess.
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Sandra Heska King says
Roger? I thought why not something more elegant? But as I keep looking, the name kind of grows on me.
I took a little artist’s date Saturday to color eggs with the girls. Grace insists that neither “Bob” nor “Sarah” (distinguished by their faces and “hair”) are to be eaten. They are to die together. There’s a third family member, too, but I’ve forgotten its name. Maybe I’ll call it “Roger.”
I think I’m going to like these linkups. 🙂
Sandra Heska King says
Cabby. Their boy-child’s name is Cabby. And we are to have a triple funeral.
laura says
Now. That is something :). Such imaginations, these kids.
Maureen Doallas says
All these years and I didn’t know there was an orchid conservatory near where you live. I will have to drive out there one weekend, Laura.
laura says
Oh, the egg coloring. I miss that. There is a little story behind “Roger”. Not much of one, but a little one. Another time, perhaps?
laura says
Maureen, they have over 400 varieties in their greenhouse, which they rotate in and out as they bloom. It’s small, but lovely.
L.L. Barkat says
I was so tickled by the end of this. You make me smile, Laura. I can just see you conversing with Roger the Spider Orchid. I think he probably liked that. 🙂
laura says
It was quite the intimate date. At one point, thought, the conservator caught me flat on my back taking pictures of palm fronds. He was so kind. Even told me the names of a few specimens 🙂
L.L. Barkat says
that really is some date 😉
Megan Willome says
I’ve never seen an orchid. But this is what I always think of when I see the word, and why I would name my orchid Sternwood. This exchange is from the movie “The Big Sleep.”
Sternwood: I seem to exist largely on heat, like a newborn spider. The orchids are an excuse for the heat. Do you like orchids?
Marlowe: Not particularly.
Sternwood: Nasty things! Their flesh is too much like the flesh of men, and their perfume has the rotten sweetness of corruption.
laura says
Do you know, I’ve never seen that movie? I simply must now, though. There is definitely something to what Sternwood said. Definitely.
Diana Trautwein says
You clearly have never met the orchids that smell like chocolate. Yes, they do. And they don’t look like other orchids, either. We grow them here in Santa Barbara County – hundreds and hundreds of them. I took some pictures of a warehouse about 10 minutes from me and posted them here: http://www.dianatrautwein.com/2013/01/quiet-for-the-weekend-january-25-27-2013/
laura says
Beautiful orchids, Diana! The ones I met did not smell like chocolate…more woodsy. But I didn’t find their odor unpleasant. I did like that chocolate tree though.
Elizabeth W. Marshall says
Oh how I love orchids. But alas it is a one-sided affair, as I cannot keep one alive. Laura, this is beautifully told. It is as if I am there. And oh how I wish West Virginia wasn’t so far away. I’d visit in a skinny minute. I love the name Roger, so whimsical in its appearance at the end. I look forward to the story about the name. The whites are my favorite too.
laura says
I asked the conservator, Elizabeth, if orchids were not hard to grow–because I had always heard as much. He said that in the tropics, they are climbers. So the trick is to start them wet but then let them become dry. Did you know that Vanilla is an orchid? He has a vanilla bean plant, but he said it hasn’t bloomed for a while. I love the whites. So delicate…
Monica Sharman says
Hey there, I just had to show you the origami orchids I folded a while back. 🙂 (When I did it, I had never before seen a real orchid, I think. Huh.)
Love seeing you here.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/monica-sharman/sets/72157629868561219/
laura says
*love*! Beautiful, Monica! It looks hard to do, though. You’ll have to show us how. Maybe make us a video!
Nancy Sturm says
How lovely! I can almost smell the orchids. In the midst of this beauty, I loved your sense of childlike play with “Roger.” 🙂
laura says
I’m so glad you stopped by, Nancy :). We are on Spring break this week so I took my boys to see the orchids. They seemed more impressed with the poisonous dart frog and the banana tree than my lovely, delicate orchids. Go figure 🙂
Lane Arnold says
With fog-frost coating every pine needle and a white-glazed lawn staring back at me, I gladly escaped alongside you on your orchid date. We move to Denver in two weeks so I’ll go check out Marnie’s Pavilion at the Botanical Gardens which houses orchids that are surely cousins to the ones you saw. Maybe I’ll find Roger’s kin there!
Upon reading about your date, I unearthed our prom date photo from 1970. My shoulder corsage was twin pale-as-dawn pink orchids, butterflies about to flutter along into a night still remembered. Who knew I’d marry that guy 38 years later? Maybe the orchids played a part?
laura says
Lane, I adore your love story :). I would love, love, love a peek at that photo! Facebook, perhaps?
Lane Arnold says
Just posted the picture on my Facebook page and sent you a comment so you’d be sure to see it.
How young we were.
laura says
I just saw it! Lane, what a beautiful young lady (and, of course, now a more mature one :)) you were. A precious picture. Prophetic?
Lane Arnold says
Prophetic indeed.
While packing journals into moving boxes, I ran across a poem I wrote Bob when we were dating in college, before we broke up. It is, of course, one I never sent to him. But when I read it, full of dreams of our future together, now decades later, it has all come true. We are together. Amazing how God brings surprises long after we expect them.
Linda says
Roger – and here I thought they were all so exotic and mysterious. Roger – I think I could grow an orchid with such a name.
Love this Laura!
laura says
Roger is a friendly name, isn’t it? LOL, Linda. I’ve never tried the growing. They see so delicate,and therein lies their beauty. I did get to meet the conservator, though. I think he would be happy to advise should I ever pursue growing orchids.
Dolly@Soulstops says
Your ending made me smile…Roger…like Mr. Rogers in the neighborhood with his cardigan…glad you were able to enjoy beautiful orchids, Laura 🙂
laura says
That is a sweet thought, Dolly. Mr. Rogers :). Maybe I’ll use that story 🙂
Lane Arnold says
We can all pitch in for a cardigan for you, Laura.