the sourcerer: Small mysterious things.

Sunday, October 18, 2015

Small mysterious things.

I ended my last Churchaven post with these words:

At night we fell asleep to the hooting of the owls and the shirrr of something else, over and over again.

That shirrr mystified us so much that the tall man made a little field recording one night. It was a familiar sound to us both, a call and reply, but we couldn't place it - bird? frog?

I thought of a bird expert I had met at one of Marie's famous
lunches-under-the-tree, and sent him the recording.

The answer pinged back:

Bladder grasshopper. Males display in this way to females at night.

Aha! And there they were in the insect book.

For the past few weeks, every time we drive over the mountain pass nearby, we have seen a great number of fantastic pink flowers - they came up like fat asparagus and now look almost snapdragon-ish, but big and fleshy. Yesterday I took myself to the African Orchid Show at Kirstenbosch - the large botanical gardens. As I drove over the pass I looked at the spikes of pink flowers again and thought... I wonder if...

And lo and behold, there they were. Satyrium.

"The African species of the genus grow in fynbos, grassland and miombo woodland, and can sometimes be found in extensive and dense colonies of thousands of individuals, particularly in the year after a veld fire." Another aha moment.

There were orchids huge and tiny - one so small that it was hanging in a birdcage - the flowers smaller than peppercorns.

In the very seductive sales area, I thought I'd buy yet another cattleya, but fell hard for a brassia.

I often wonder how different my life would have been if I'd studied botany - as I had been planning to for years, but then ended up - rather rashly, studying art. It's a love affair anyway.

I liked this quote pasted up at the till, as I paid for my

spider orchid:

You can get off alcohol, drugs, women, food and cars, but once you're hooked on orchids, you're finished. You never get off orchids... never.

- Joe Kunish

Commercial orchid grower

Rochester, New York

5 comments:

dinahmow said...: I'm beginning to understand that quote! A few weeks ago, I went to a big orchid show and bought an endangered native swamp orchid.Right now, in the first of the summer rains,I bet it's happy! (But I might have to rescue 2 Phalaenopsis...); October 18, 2015 at 9:35 PM
the sourcerer said...: oooh. swamp orchid! sounds intriguing...; October 19, 2015 at 9:07 AM
Rosie said...: LOVE. Those Satyriums bring me joy every morning in OKW traffic. Plus, I love how unashamedly phallic they are. I'm a pollination biologist by training and I recall sitting in a conference hearing someone say 'people who study flowers are like Masters & Johnson. They're just interested in plant sex, not human sex'.; October 20, 2015 at 5:30 PM
Marie said...: How nice - was it Dave? No, Callum?

Gorgeous orchid, the Satyrium - I can't imagine seeing lots of them. I have a love of the indigenous ones, less for the lush tropicals, ek weet nie hoekom nie. It was so exciting to go hiking and to stumble upon them, in September.

Ek beny jou Churchaven. Sjoe.; October 21, 2015 at 4:13 AM
the sourcerer said...: Ha ha, Rosie! You were next on my list to ask about the mysterious pink spikes... I remember seeing a plant documentary in the early 90's (The Secret Life of Plants?) and realising for the first time just how sexy they were!

Marie, yes it was Callum. I dislike the commercial orchids - anything that needs staking. But the rest excite me no end. There was also a stall selling carnivorous plants - the pitchers were flowering... fascinating.; October 21, 2015 at 10:37 AM

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You could tend a garden at night, only at night, pouring dark water onto leaves, and into the earth, like pouring midnight onto midnight. You could hold your soil-stained hands up to the moon. The stars would gleam on the bottom of the shovel. It would smell the same as a daytime garden - it would smell green, violet, red, white. But come back, in daylight. Come back, to see the colours without closing your eyes.
- Sean Michaels. Accompaniment to the song "Immune" by LOW. Said the Gramophone

Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. And don't bother concealing your thievery - celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: "It's not where you take things from - it's where you take them to."
Jim Jarmusch (1953- )

You got very hungry when you did not eat enough in Paris because all the bakery shops had such good things in the windows and people ate outside at tables on the sidewalk so that you saw and smelled the food. When you had given up journalism and were writing nothing that anyone in America would buy, explaining at home that you were lunching out with someone, the best place to go was the Luxembourg gardens where you smelled and saw nothing to eat all the way from the Place de l'Observatoire to the rue de Vaugirard. There you could always go into the Luxembourg museum and all the paintings were sharpened and clearer and more beautiful if you were belly-empty, hollow-hungry. I learned to understand Cézanne much better and to see truly how he made landscapes when I was hungry. I used to wonder if he were hungry too when he painted; but I thought possibly it was only that he had forgotten to eat. It was one of those unsound but illuminating thoughts you have when you have been sleepless or hungry. Later I thought that Cézanne was probably hungry in a different way.
Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) - from A Moveable Feast.