My Friend's Advice

My friend said, "Remember  to do the little things and fix yourself something nice and hot to drink and make a bouquet for the room you're in the most." 

What a lovely friend, and how about that bouquet? 

ECVA Portraits Of The Self

The ECVA exhibition, Portraits of the Self, just launched.  Check it out.

For Pity's Sake

"I am sure that if the devil existed, he would want us to feel very sorry for him."

~ From "The Sociopath Next Door", by Martha Stout, Ph.D.

I have never cared much for people who want me to feel sorry for them.   I want them to buck up, grow up and accept the fact that no one in life gets all they want or feel like they deserve.  You know the type.  They never got a fair shake, and they seek out the kind hearted like heat seeking missiles.

Ms. Stout knows the lure of the sociopath (aka the psychopath) and hopes to educate the rest of us to protect ourselves.  There are many characteristics one might see, but the best clue that you are dealing with a person with no conscience is a person seeking your pity:

"...the best clue is, of all things, the pity play.  The most reliable sign, the most universal behavior of unscrupulous people is not directed, as one might imagine, at our fearfulness.  It is, perversely, an appeal to our sympathy...More than admiration - more even than fear - pity from good people is carte blanche.  When we pity, we are, at least for the moment, defenseless..."

Until sociopaths come with warning labels, Ms. Stout recommends:

"When deciding whom to trust, bear in mind that the combination of consistently bad or egregiously inadequate behavior with frequent plays for your pity is as close to a warning mark on a conscienceless person's forehead as you will ever be given."

Elephant Art

You aren't going to believe this.  Elephants painting!  Really. 

The elephants at the National Elephant Institute, Thailand, have learned to paint, and their art gallery can be seen at the Elephant Art Gallery.  A video of the artists at work can be seen at Good Morning America (click the video and wait for the commercial to end). 

This is just way cool, and the art work is pretty good. 

A Woman's Work Is Never Done

Thanks to the Anonymous Guest Photographer for stopping by the studio to share this super cool nature shot.

Keeping Her Promise

The lady of the roses, rosa banksiae, is formidable as well as lovely.  This photo records the yellow roses on my Lady Banks growing like gangbusters on an arbor in my back yard.  The largest rose tree in the world, The Tomstone Rose, is a white Lady Banks located in Tombstone, Arizona.  It has a trunk circumference of over 13 feet and covers an area of 8000 square feet and comes with an enchanting story. 

In 1885 newlyweds, Mary and Henry Gee, came from Scotland to Tombstone where Henry worked as a mining engineer.  mary's family sent her a box of plants from home which included several cuttings from what they called"Old White Rose".  Mary gave her friend and former landlady, Amelia Anderson one of the cuttings, and the two planted the rose behind the boarding house.  That boarding house is now a hotel known as Rose Tea Inn where, in the 1930's that cutting planted by friends came to be called "The World's Largest Rose" by Robert Ripley.  The rose continues to hold that honor in the Guiness Book Of World Records.  There is a Tombstone Rose Festival every April to celebrate the blooming of this incredible rose.

While yellow Lady Banks has no scent, the white smells like violets.  So one has to ask if you want smell or color.  I opt for the color perferring the yellow, but that choice is due to the sentimental association I have with my Mama's yellow Lady Banks.  

Gifts to Aphrodite

"If you forget me, think
of our gifts to Aphrodite
and all the loveliness that we shared

"all the violet tiaras,
braided rosebuds, dill and
crocus twined around your young neck

"myrrh poured on your head
and on soft mats girls with
all that they most wished for beside them

"while no voices chanted
choruses without ours,
no woodlot bloomed in spring without song..."

Sappho --translated by Mary Barnard

Lady Banks' Promise

Ghost Flowers

In a NY Times article, Ghost Flowers, perfume critic Chandler Burr describes the development of the 1984 fragrance Antonia's Flowers by perfumer Bernard Chant at the request of New York florist Antonia Bellanca.  It seems that Antonia was mesmerized by freesia's allure and heralded the flower's scent above all others because it "knocked your socks off, like trumpets in an orchestra; everyone else sings backup, even the lilies."  To outshine a lily in fragrance?  Now that is some feat.   

Chant did develop the freesia inspired perfume, and Burr indicates that it became something of a  cult favorite with "its intensely green top note and its stratospheric quality, like jasmine at 48,000 feet, swimming in pure ozone."   But, as Paul Harvey might say, here's the rest of the story: the perfume contains no freesia at all, and Burr claims that there is no perfume in existence that contains freesia.

We might be disillusioned further with Burr's claim that numerous perfumes we love, often because they smell of our favorite flowers, contain not a trace of the actual flower.  Some flowers just have no scent, and distillation techniques have not been able to extract some scents, and in others, what is captured is negligible.  For instance, the violet will not give up its smell.  Neither will a host of others to include mimosa, lavender, jonquil, narcissus, geranium, hyacinth, lilac, lily, honeysuckle, peony, camellia, wisteria or lily of the valley.   

This concept fascinates me.  It makes me stop to ponder.  I suppose it would be hard to sell the quintessential lily of the valley perfume Diorissimo as the quintessential hydroxycitronellal, geraniol and phenyl ethyl alcohol perfume.  Still, it disturbs and prevokes vague feeling of betrayal to know that the allure of Diorissimo is an unholy ghost of sorts.  Our senses can be fooled, and we can appreciate with wild abandon some experience for qualities that do not exist therein.  What is this olfactory forgery like?  Phantom pain, mystery meat, a sensual metaphor, a pig in pearls, an artistic forgery?  Surely a sensual trickery requiring truth and beauty to part ways in order to keep the illusion alive.  

Whatever the case, I cannot live without my lavender-like scent, so I will continue to believe in ghosts.    

Lady Banks

I am partial to Lady Banks roses because they were playmates when I was a child.  Mama had a yellow Lady Banks next to the back door, and we would take the thorneless tiny yellow roses and make them into bouquets and wreaths to wear.   They are just coming into bloom this year, climbing, arching tendrils of delicate yellow frills.  Lovely as always.