Arnold Zwicky's Blog

A bulletin from Coral Gables FL, with penis pepper mills in gorgeous hand-turned wood; and a patriotic phallic (salt/pepper) shaker, standing tall for US Veterans Day (today). Photos under the fold (so the phallically averse among you can avoid engaging with these simulacra)…

From Sim Aberson on Facebook today:

One of the highlights of the big annual festival at Fairchild [Tropical Botanical Garden in Coral Gables FL] (called The Ramble) is the display and sale by the wood spinners. They get lots of beautiful local woods, and some of the works that they have are extraordinary. This year, one of the spinners was selling these pepper mills. When I took these photos, a urologist was buying himself one.

(#1)

And back here in Palo Alto, waving the flag for America in a domestic spathiphyllum forest, a vintage 1930s bakelite salt or pepper shaker (a present to me some years back from Steven Levine):

(#2)

More story from Florida. About #1. Information on the South Florida Woodturners Guild on their website. With a display of some of the woods they use:

(#3)

The Guild doesn’t sell anything, but one of its members was selling his work at the Fairchild event.

On the Fairchild Tropical Botanical Garden in Coral Gables FL, from their site:

(#4)  Palms and bromeliads — one small corner of this enormous garden

Our Mission: We save tropical plant diversity by exploring, explaining and conserving the world of tropical plants; fundamental to this task is inspiring a greater knowledge and love for plants and gardening so that all can enjoy the beauty and bounty of the tropical world.

Our History: Fairchild gets its name from one of the most famous plant explorers in history, David Fairchild (1869-1954). Dr. Fairchild was known for traveling the world in search of useful plants, but he was also an educator and a renowned scientist. At the age of 22, he created the Section of Foreign Seed and Plant Introduction of the United States Department of Agriculture, and for the next 37 years, he traveled the world in search of plants of potential use to the American people. Fairchild visited every continent in the world (except Antarctica) and brought back hundreds of important plants, including mangos, alfalfa, nectarines, dates, cotton, soybeans, bamboos and the flowering cherry trees that grace Washington D.C.

Dr. Fairchild retired to Miami in 1935 and joined a group of passionate plant collectors and horticulturists, including retired accountant Col. Robert H. Montgomery (1872-1953), environmentalist Marjory Stoneman Douglas, County Commissioner Charles Crandon and landscape architect William Lyman Phillips. This core group worked tirelessly to bring the idea of a one of a kind botanic garden to life, and in 1938, Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden opened its 83 acres to the public for the first time.

Sim regularly posts photos of amazing plants from the place.

A personal note. I’m a great fan of gardens and conservatories, large and small. An inventory of some of the large ones I’ve enjoyed in my life, from my childhood in the 1940s to this century, as I moved from place to place:

Longwood Gardens in Kennett Square PA (link)

Arnold Arboretum of Harvard Univ., in Boston (link)

Franklin Park Conservatory and Botanical Gardens in Columbus OH (link)

San Francisco Botanical Garden at Strybing Arboretum (in Golden Gate Park) (link)

Conservatory of Flowers (also in Golden Gate Park) (link)

More patriotic story. The image in #2 is a patriotic elaboration of the vintage bakelite salt/pepper shaker from Steven Levine that I posted about on 11/16/10, in “Phallicity: the salt/pepper shaker”:

(#5) Lapin Bakelite being admired by the penguins Willie and Millie (also vintage shakers, pepper and salt, respectively)

What more natural a pairing than penguises, um, penguins and penises?

The American flag in #2 is a tiny national symbol on a toothpick, a souvenir from Dan Gordon’s restaurant in Palo Alto, where the flagged oothpick serves as an everyday sandwich anchor. (You can buy US flags on toothpicks for spearing cocktail ingredients, or hors d’oeuvres, or whatever.)

In my country, almost any occasion can apparently be improved by a display of vexillogical patriotism. We’re always waving flags and dissing people who aren’t. Overflowing fannish enthusiasm, bullying, evangelical indoctrination, anxious display of insecurity, all of the above?

This entry was posted on November 12, 2018 at 9:15 pm and is filed under Holidays, Language and plants, My life, Phallicity, Signs and symbols. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.