White Party: my name for the white-flower bouquet that León Hernández Alvarez gave me last Thursday for my birthday, which I trimmed and rearranged yesterday. It sits on my worktable, giving me great pleasure.
White roses are symbols of purity — sorry, not my game at all — and loyalty, which I think suits me pretty well. But then the shock yesterday when I saw that the white rose was actually a very pale pink (symbolizing gentleness, sweetness, and of course femininity, so also — yay for the boys with pretty pink pom-poms — gayness).
The name alludes to the White Party in Palm Springs (this year it was March 29-31), the circuit party that bills itself as “the largest gay dance festival in the world” (there are of course other White Parties elsewhere around the world; there’s some discussion of circuit parties — and for a bonus, shapenote singing — in my 6/22/10 posting “Rivers of Babylon”). Never felt bold enough or hot enough to go to one, and now both my dancing days and my traveling days are long over. But the name comes with sexy vibes, so I’m going with it.
But now about the flowers.
The bouquet: white chrysanthemums, white alstoemeria (aka Peruvian lily, though not a lily), a white (actually, very pale pink) rose, silver-leaved artemesia (aka wormwood or mugwort) for its silvery foliage, and some intensely glossy green-leaved plant for contrast. I have photographed the bouquet with my cute little camera, but have been unable to upload it to my computer, to show it to you. (The cute little camera has lots of tiny buttons that allow it to do a great many things, and as a result using it is fabulously complex. Sigh.)
The central plant. That rose. Here’s a pale pink rose of similar appearance:
(#1) A beauty from Fresh Market Bloomsfully
The alstroemerias. A favorite plant of mine in our Columbus OH garden, but I didn’t have any of the wonderful white varieties there:
(#2) Showy white alstroemeria flowers (from Bunches Direct USA)
The chrysanthemums. A traditional late-summer flower in the garden, and a reliable cut flower, coming in many forms and colors. The ones in León’s bouquet are the simplest of ray flowers, as here:
(#3) A spray of white chrysanthemums (from Kadiyam Nursery)
The silvery leaves. Artemesias are favorite plants of mine, with a wonderful scent to their feathery leaves (due to the volatile compounds, distilled, that give us absinthe):
(#4) Wormwood leaves (from an old saved image in my files)
Glossy green leaves. Probably some variety of Ruscus foliage, widely used in floral displays, as here:
(#5) Ruscus leaves (from Tropical Roses)
Welcome to the White Party.
September 12, 2024 at 5:49 pm |
León, on his visit today, was stunned to see that his bouquet from a week ago was not only still flourishing, but seemed even more beautiful than it did then. Especially the rose.
So we spent some time looking at the photos above and talking about the plants, and he got to smell the wormwood. Somehow being able to share the pleasure of each of the plants made his gift even sweeter.
September 15, 2024 at 6:17 pm |
And then today, 9/15, sudden plant death: everything except the glossy greenery wilted and fell apart, so it’s all been chopped up and has gone to the garden as compost. But it had a great run.