Day 227 & 248- Unusual Desert Plants

A long, long time ago, there was a great warrior Emperor known by all  as the Desert King.  An all powerful ruler governing the largest region of desert land, his kingdom stretched  from the Rajasthani Thar to the Great Sahara. 

In the great kingdom of this emperor, hid a well-kept secret known only to two men, the King himself and his Chief Gardener. This was a secret  so guarded that the King could only reveal it once in his lifetime, to his successor, at his deathbed and upon his last breath. Legend  has it that this was how the final conversation between the King and his son went .....

My dear son, 

 Now that you are going to be King,

I can finally reveal to you,

The Mysteries of The Secret Garden.

  

To the farthest north of our Kingdom is a secret garden where the rarest and most splendid plants are kept. Collected by Desert Kings before you since time immemorial,  all these plants share a common trait. They are all makers of mystical legends.

Like the Yellow Desert Windflower for instance, she was also called Anemone by the Greeks. Anemone was a nymph cursed with a beauty only a jealous Goddess could hate. When Chloris, the Goddess of Flowers found out that both Zephyr, the gentle Spring wind, and Borea, the god of the West Wind had fallen in love with Anemone, she had vengefully turned  the nymph into a flower which was to wither by the time Zephyr arrived. Strangely though, as if in defiance, windflowers now bloom only when the first Spring wind blows, as if to herald his coming with  open mouths ready for cool kisses. 

And then we have the blue crocus or desert saffron which open like little yellow suns in full bloom. When Valentinus, a 3rd century Roman physician and Christian priest was arrested and sentenced to death, he administered his last treatment by handing to the jailor a note for his blind daughter. In the note, was a yellow crocus and the source of one of his healing herbs, saffron. When the blind girl opened the note, her sight was immediately restored and the first flower she saw was the yellow crocus which rivaled the sun in its brightness. The physician had signed off in the note what was  soon to become legendary words ~From your Valentine~. Those words were to be the physician's last but the world's first valentine's day message. That day was February 14, 270 AD.

 The Pink Cactus is really a hybrid of a pair of  young Indian lovers called  Pasancana and Quehualliu who  had run away into the mountains when they found out that Pasancana's father was going to marry her off to another. When the father and his men came looking for them, they both prayed to the Goddess of the Mountain to protect them. The Goddess thus turned Quehualliu into a hardy cactus and Pasancana into the pink flower that grew on it and that was how the pair of lovers stayed together forever.

Finally, we have the most fantastic and wondrous of them all, the prickly pear cactus. Legend has it that the Aztecs wandered throughout Mexico in search of a divine sign that would indicate the precise spot upon which they were to build their capital. The divine sign was an eagle devouring a snake, perched atop a cactus. After two hundred years of wandering, they finally found the promised sign. The Aztecs had found their home at last. As the people gathered and stared in wonder, the cactus grew into an island which the Aztec named Tenochtitlan or "the Place of the Prickly Pear Cactus".

And that, my son is the mystery revealed.

And as the new king watched what he thought was the old King drawing his last breath, the latter suddenly sat up with a jerk and started gibbering like a mad man , scaring the hell out of his son..

Arghhhhh, the old King seemed to say, *mumble mumble.. the ripened green bananas...*grumble grumble..10 years hard work *rumble rumble.. a way of cultivating banana plants in desert, you must ..But before the old King could finish his sentence, he fell on his bed  in a frenzied fit and died. And the new king never knew how his father grew the first bananas in the Secret Garden. 

Nonetheless, this episode did spark off a new mystical legend concerning the old king's  fruits of labour. The term "going bananas" was coined by the new king to refer to someone turning  mysteriously crazy or acting in an inexplicably strange manner and this term is commonly used to this day.


Having continued the tradition of making legends, the green banana's place in the Secret Garden was thus assured and they all propagate happily ever after. Amen..I mean, The End. 

Postscript

 Materials used for unusual desert plants.

I spent last weekend repainting the 4 pots of desert plants and the ripened green bananas. For some of my old friends, they may remember that I did the bunches of bananas almost exactly a year ago.

As for the plants, I have bashed these 4 pots 4 times. They started life as  original clay flowers in clay pots. 2 years ago, they morphed into ugly cotton flowers  which  then became unruly cotton flowers. In 2010, they were reconstructed into ordinary house plants. Today, they stand before you as unusual desert plants. As you can see, they look nothing like what they purport to be in the story so who knows, maybe in 2012, they may be turned into plants from Mars.

There was however a rather gratifying moment last night when I photographed my mystical, unusual, desert plants. Look up at the right hand corner of this picture. Can you see her, my little Charlotte? 

Charlotte, my Golden Spider  crawling to the middle

Charlotte played around in the pink cactus for a while and then she whispered to me : I think this place is perfect for Charlotte's Web. 

I told myself, if it is good enough for her, it is good enough for me. At least for now.