7 - 13 February 2002
Issue No.572
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 7 - 13 February 2002 Issue No.572 |
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The orange violet
Violets are blue, dilly dally, or at least they used to approximate to a shade of blue. But somewhere in the world someone is probably working very hard to produce a green violet, or an orange violet, genetically modifying the poor shrinking bloom into something sufficiently garish and brazen to attract the attention of customers in the 21st century florist shop. Not that this is a post- millennium phenomena: throughout the last two decades of the previous century a startling array of new blooms appeared. Indeed, as early as the 17th century the Dutch -- a nation, one suspects, that has a great deal to answer for in the field of perversely coloured flowers as well as absolutely tasteless but perfectly formed vegetables with a fabulously long shelf-life -- were subjecting one another to all sorts of foul crimes in the race to breed the first black tulip. But it is a trend that one had hoped, somewhat forlornly as it turns out, to have reached its apotheosis in that monstrous bit of misplaced hybridisation, the green gladioli. Yet still stranger creations continue to appear.
That the agribusiness should devote massive sums of money on researching and developing such odd creations has always seemed a phenomenal waste of time and resources. With foodstuffs, perhaps, one can understand the impetus, though it operates almost exclusively in the interests of the homogenised hypermarket retailers that dominate the sector in the industrialised west. Yet inroads have been made in Egypt over the past decade and a half so now you, too, can enjoy the dubious pleasure of buying black plums from Chile at LE29 a kilo in the sure knowledge that, having been placed in the fridge, they will continue to look perfect for nigh on two months. Quite how they taste after this period is something I cannot vouch for though I suspect it will be very similar to the way they taste the day after purchase, which is largely of nothing with, perhaps, just a hint of polystyrene. But even in the world of fruits and vegetables hybridisation has tended to stop at a few half-hearted crossings of citrus fruits, half grapefruit half tangerine combinations constituting the limit of new breeds. So far as I know no one is seriously contemplating the possible commercial value of the scarlet banana, or the blue tomato. But flowers? Here, it seems, anything goes.
Gone are the days when you knew what to expect from your local florist, the aluminium containers full of gladioli, red, white, sometimes yellow, tuber roses, in fatty creams, and buckets of roses, pink, red, and sometimes yellow, with fleeting, seasonal appearances made by apricot blossoms, white day lilies and balls of pink clover. Now everything is available, all the time, in any colour, imported from who knows where, except, inevitably, the things you really want. All of which might seem a clear cut argument for giving the florist a wide berth. But there are occasions when a visit cannot be avoided, when flowers are expected and nothing else will do.
Few are the people who actually relish the hospital visit, and the sicker the patient, the more necessary the visit, then the more forbidding it will become. Yet still, through an habitual association, it remains one of those occasions that continue to demand flowers. And so it was that I found myself standing in an otherwise deserted flower shop close to the Italian hospital in Abbasiya. It was, mercifully, an old- fashioned establishment, one of those places owned and staffed by people harbouring a not very secret and, in all probability, a longstanding, grudge against the items they are forced to sell. It was, whatever the case, not a place that spoke of job satisfaction. Gladioli, red, white, a few yellow, no green, crammed unceremoniously into buckets; roses, mostly pink, a few red, some yellow, squashed into pails; a heap of rubber plant leaves, spray- painted a dull silver, waiting to be pinned into one of those improbably large, target-like affairs that stand on tripods and are probably Egypt's most distinctive contribution to the world of flower arrangements: such was the extent of the stock. Not a basket in sight, not a white lily with magenta sepals, no twigs twisted into tortured shapes, no silver coloured eucalyptus leaves or bits of bark and driftwood to be tastefully arranged. All I had to do was ask for a bunch of roses, two dozen, yellow. But then I was given a seat.
It was not with loving care that the two dozen flowers were extracted from the pail. And there seemed even less tenderness in the way that each stem was systematically stripped of every leaf until only a twig remained with a puss-yellow swelling at the end. The operation was time consuming, conducted by two men, each with a sharp little knife. Leaves stripped, the twigs were set to one side until a pile of 24 had been formed; they were then bound, each at an angle to the other, to create a vaguely spherical bouquet.
The methodical, relentless defoliation of the flowers rendered the subsequent offer of "green" redundant: why obscure all that effort? Which left only the choice of wrapping for the gift. Crepe paper, in shocking pink or else yellow, with a floppy, serrated and unpleasantly pseudo-organic edge reminiscent of the more obscure bits of offal that one sees occasionally hanging up in butchers shops, appeared less than appropriate for a hospital visit. Declined, they were replaced by clear cellophane. After the studied denaturing of the rose, however, it would have been too much to expect simple, industrial cellophane. So once the flowers -- which in truth no longer looked much like flowers -- were wrapped the end of the cellophane was cut into a series of triangular shapes, each of which was then carefully folded outwards so that it might vaguely resemble a petal.
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