Artist Date: Orchid Conservatory

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Freckle Orchids Artist Date
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.

Spider Orchid Artist Date

Laura Boggess

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Comments

  1. 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. 🙂

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    • 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?

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      • Maureen, they have over 400 varieties in their greenhouse, which they rotate in and out as they bloom. It’s small, but lovely.

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  3. 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. 🙂

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  4. 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.

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  5. 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.

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    • 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…

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    • 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 🙂

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  8. 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?

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        • I just saw it! Lane, what a beautiful young lady (and, of course, now a more mature one :)) you were. A precious picture. Prophetic?

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          • 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.

  9. 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!

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    • 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.

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