18 - 24 January 2001
Issue No.517
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 18 - 24 January 2001 Issue No.517 |
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Stripping the symbols
The crop of florists that began to spring up almost a decade ago, occupying aluminium and glass cubes and seemingly beneath every exhaust fume-filled underpass, furnish the city streets with a fleeting pastoral aspect. You pass by quickly, in a car, eyes registering a multi-coloured flash, wondering who on earth buys all these flowers.
On closer inspection, the stock tends towards the predictable: bucket upon bucket of gladioli, in increasingly virulent shades, including -- and these are a relatively recent innovation -- monstrous green and purple hybrids, doing their psychedelic best to disrupt the laws of nature from their perch behind the less virulently coloured, but nonetheless vivid blooms of their less hybridised cousins. The gladioli has always seemed to me an unfortunate failure of natural selection: it seldom looks at home in a vase, which in a city that boasts as few gardens as Cairo is a far from insignificant failing, and is perhaps best reserved for those floral arrangements crammed into baskets that cross town in an endless procession on the back of bicycles. Certainly, the tinkering of breeders has hardly helped the poor flower, which is clambering to hitherto unreached heights of vulgarity.
The sudden profusion of florists might, on the surface at least, suggest an industry that is growing. There must, indeed, be a healthy demand, or at least a demand sufficient to support so many outlets. But what is strange is that the more shops that appear, the narrower the choice seems to become.
True, there are now lots of imported flowers, shipped from Holland, lilies in various sizes and colours, and any number of chrysanthemums, from large, volleyball sized individual blooms in various coppery shades that remain redolent of autumn but which, like so much else these days, are available all the time, to those spiky yellow sprays that have an unfortunate tendency to last and last, demanding endless changes of water and refusing to wilt for what can seem like weeks on end. Which rather defeats the point given that one of the most appealing aspects of flowers indoors is their transitory nature. You buy them, place them in water, and for a few days they do that flowery thing, opening buds, pushing out stamens, dropping a little pollen dust on your tables, and then they fade. They are the perfect anti-depressant, without any harmful side effects, staying around just long enough to cheer you out of the doldrums and then, task accomplished, dropping leaves and petals.
The last thing in the world that anyone wants are flowers that stay around long enough to require dusting. Yet this is precisely what the huge horticultural businesses seem to be aiming at: the everlasting fresh flower, irradiated, perhaps, to ensure a fabulously long shelf life. It is an attempt to turn the real thing into plastic.
What is surprising though, is that despite the plethora of expensive imports, locally grown flowers are less and less in evidence. In less than ten years whole varieties have all but disappeared. Last year it was almost impossible to find larkspur, which for three or four weeks used to be a staple of the florist shop. For a few pounds you used to be able to buy armfuls of the pink, white and blue spikes which would last a perfectly judged three or four days before dropping their flowers into a multicoloured carpet around the base of the vase. Before larkspur came into season, perennial white lilies with long, trumpet shaped blooms, would occupy buckets on street corners. Their season was, if anything, shorter than the larkspur. Alas, for the last couple of years, they have been all but unavailable. Fluffy pink balls of clover once made a fleeting appearance in most florists but they, too, appear to have been banished from the kiosks in favour of more ostentatious things. Even twigs of apricot blossom, which once signalled the beginning of spring, are increasingly hard to find.
The vicious looking bird of paradise, admittedly, is still everywhere, and while I sporadically give it a whirl, convincing myself of the merits of a sculptural arrangement, it never really satisfies. Indeed, I've always harboured the suspicion that if you get close to the pointy flowers they might well spit at you. They are the furies of the flower world, heads thrown back, snarling. And of course they too last a little bit too long.
Thankfully the local rose has also survived, the scented pink blossoms holding out well against the imported, scent free, longer lasting and much more highly priced competition, and sunflowers have now become a feature in most florists.
What, I wonder, would those painters from Holland who specialised in the floral still life make of the products their descendants now export across the globe? Certainly the longevity of latter-day blooms puts paid to several of their iconographic ploys. The rose, these days, is hardly ever sick, selective breeding, pesticides, chemically balanced feeding agents having eradicated any suggestion of corruption in the perfect, scentless bud that is held, just ready to open, without ever actually doing so, for weeks and weeks and weeks. Those meticulously rendered insects that often buzz around the painted vases of flowers have no place in the modern, sanitised home, and the tiny beetles that embark on a painstaking progression across the petals of selected flowers will have been chemically dissolved in some earlier, larval stage. No place for them in the modern flower.
For a century flowers, in vases, in interiors, furnished Dutch painters with the raw material for the most complex pictorial allegories, just as fruit and vegetables had furnished their earlier, Italian counterparts with objects that might be imbued with the most complex of symbolisms. One is unlikely, though, to find a latter day Crivelli perusing the plastic wrapped produce of the supermarket shelves looking for the perfect gourd of love, or the pumpkin of fidelity. And the floral still life has become the almost exclusive province of the Sunday painter. What else, after all, can be done with those perfectly manufactured, sanitised, antiseptic imports?
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