Not Just Orchids

Airmails versus emails

2012-01-21T14:38:00.000-08:00

Mirka called from Belgrade just before New Year:"Hey you! Are you alive?"

"How much is this costing? Let me call you back!"

"Ha! Don't wo-r-r-y! Now! You don't answer my email, for your birthday, you don't answer for Christmas!"

Mirka goes on to remind me we are at that certain age, we could both be dead. Slumped over our fancy machines.

Mirka had written me a long email for my birthday back in September. And I should have pounded out that moment- "Hey! Great to hear from you! Glad all OK in BG!"

But this was from Belgrade. It demanded more, a sense of occasion. And somehow, time went on and each time I remembered, the idea of answering became longer and more detailed to make up for the time that was elapsing even as I thought about it.

Mirka's birthday wishes used to come in a flimsy envelope with PAR AVION on the front and a stamp with a profile of President Tito next to a stamp with a plane on it, and I would send an airmail back with a row of stamps with the queen's profile on them. Luckily back then there weren't stamps with pretty pictures because as I was to discover later when working in Yugoslavia, Yugoslav postal workers are avid stamp collectors. In fact, I think that's why they join the post office. Anyway, it was always about two letters a year, one for birthdays and one for Christmas or New Year and sometimes a flurry of brief ones back in the old days when I was going for the summer and needed a letter of invitation or Mirka would write "Please bring aspirin!" Though she usually asked for Vogue too.

Actually, this time I did have an excuse. The big old desk computer where I can pound away like it's my old Smith Corona, (that's a typewriter, my children) developed problems and as the rest of the family was OK with their laptops it stayed problematic for quite a while. And so no blogs either. But no-one has emailed me to ask if I were still alive. Hey guys! Wouldn't cost you! Not like it's from Belgrade or anything! Maybe everyone's like me-They really are waiting to do a really good job. Add how they miss my pungent wit and sharp analysis, lend that email a little sense of occasion.

NEW Frugalism for Christmas: See Oct.12!

2011-12-06T09:19:00.000-08:00

Frugalism For Christmas

Started in an off hand way: October 12th. ("New Blog!")

Revisited, finished, bright and shining December 6th. But apparently, the original date STANDS!

For Interested Parties, please travel back in time to the blog on October 12th for my Christmas special as I have NO idea how to reset it.

Everyone under the age of ?thirty-one is it now? roll your eyes and sigh.

Jane Austen and the Marines

2011-11-18T05:22:00.000-08:00

With Dr. Motes having been Dr. Motes at the World Orchid Conference and now hunting orchids in Borneo, left alone at home I've pretty much gone to the dogs. I not only watched Fast and Dangerous(Pt III or IV?)) but actually recorded it, as though it were the History of Prohibition. (Note: Ladies, it's fun and there's no torture.)

But then came Netflix with Jane Eyre and we were off on the Heritage trail, land of my fathers. The great house, the starched aprons: the Bronte sisters like Jane Austen, always hit the spot. Their heroines fascinate us, like the military does. Most are basically an army of one: Honor, Duty, Sacrifice, and, unlike the fate of many in the military, it all works out wonderfully in the end.

Back in the mists of time when I was at school, we all stood up, silent when a teacher came into the class room. We all stood up, silent, when the Head Girl came in. (One year, that was me - there's a blog right there.) If we were seen in the street without our hats or berets we served a detention. We wore uniforms and ties. In fact, when Duska and Mirka, my Yugoslav penpals, came one summer term and attended assembly, as they surveyed the uniforms, the po-faced ranks belting out martial hymns, they asked: "Then you learn like us first aid and the rifle?"

So I don't think we are glorifying the military, as some fear (though can't we get rid of that creepy word Homeland?) I think it's a nostalgia for the lost world of order and formality, the world of make your bed and shine your shoes, elbows off the table and, for goodness sake, child, stand up straight.

Orchid Wifery

2011-11-06T06:54:00.000-08:00

It seemed a good idea: three boxes under the blog: Did you find this: Interesting, Funny, Useful? Feed back! But they mostly remain empty. Apparently I am NOT Funny, NOT interesting and NOT useful. Oh really? Then you can all just blog off!

But that's not the mood that leads to Funny, Interesting or Useful blogs. "Vanda Motesiana -Who's your Daddy?" seemed popular. But that was a tricky one: Dr. Motes, orchid breeder/scholar, serious stuff. Problem is I want to be funny. Writing Orchid Territory was OK- Fiction! Though too many people seemed to think that I was hard-drinking, mean old Aunt Charlotte.

Right now, Dr. Motes is preparing to leave for Singapore, the next World Orchid Conference - invited speaker. So no joke material there, at least we hope not.

Maybe I could try a Do's and Don'ts of being an Orchid Wife? ( Note:These Don'ts in fact only apply to me.)

When accompanying the visiting speaker to San Diego, Chicago etc. DO NOT reveal as I once did that Dr. Motes' elegant suede jacket cost 50 cents at the Florida City Swap Meet. Ditto when complimented on one's necklace, silk shirt or Hermes silk scarf ("Only 25 cents but see? A little blurry. Obviously someone washed it in hot water!")

As Dr Motes reminds me, the whole point of bargains is that they don't LOOK like bargains:i e. they don't elicit the reaction: "Aha, that's a great fifty cents worth, right there on Dr Motes!"

(Though as I like to point out, especially to Dr. Motes, it was the 25 and 50 cent spending sprees of yore, that enabled Motes Orchids to spend hundreds of dollars on PVC pipe and other essentials. Back then, if that jacket had been two dollars I would probably have left it in the pile.)

DO NOT critique sleeping arrangements. These orchid-loving hosts open their houses, hearts and bedrooms to us and it is unseemly to exclaim: "Call THAT a double bed?" Once, trying to hold on to my side of a narrow, sloping mattress, I gave up and tiptoed into the neighboring room with a large crib set up for visiting grandchildren, big enough for me to curl up in desperate, 2 AM mode -but almost entangled myself in the warning device alerting parents to crib catastrophes. I pulled wires free in the dark but the next morning could not find out how to reset them. For a long time, quite a few days, I could see the next visiting grandchild getting their head caught unheeded in the bars....How could I explain why I de-activated a crib's early warning system? I didn't call. When I'm lined up outside the pearly gates that will definitely be one point I don't have a good answer for.

Of course, it's usually quite the opposite. Shown to a spacious bedroom with gleaming, antique furniture, door leading to own bathroom, fluffy towels... when the gracious hostess asks Will this do? DO NOT catch Dr. Motes' eye and laugh, while describing our little old wooden house with no AC. Just exclaim merrily, "No mint on the pillow so only three stars for you!"

Well, this may not be very Interesting, Useful or Funny, but go on, just this once, pretend.

Return of the Sixties

2011-10-16T13:42:00.000-07:00

The Sixties are back in Wall Street and everywhere, this time with lap tops. And the classic yell at marchers, especially young ones: "Why don't you get a job?" has lost its bite. Most of the young people protesting are protesting for a job.

And that means we are at last witnessing the gut-level engagement of the young not seen since the demonstrations against the draft during Vietnam. Because the ultimate nightmare of a young person growing up in the West is not being shot at by strangers but, with no job, having to go back and live at home.

Question for the Class:

Re demos, sit ins etc- Why is the statue of Martin Luther King in the Mall, so blindingly white?

Frugalism for Christmas

2011-10-12T06:20:00.000-07:00

How To Economize, Clothes:

This actually is an all-year hint: Work all day with something like orchids where you will wear old clothes and at the end of the day be too tired to want to change and go out.

If that doesn't work, there is Goodwill -but now that everyone's poor I think the prices have gone up and so for an extra four dollars you can get a brand new 9.99! from the clearance rail at Ross, Marshalls, etc. And don't forget sometimes Macys, for example, goes crazy breaking the 9.99 barrier and you'll get something brand new for 4.00.

OK, Christmas!

GIFTS: Goodwill and swap meets are perfect for under the Christmas tree surprises. (No-one can say I saw that china elephant in Dollar Tree) which brings us to this WARNING.

When buying vases, mugs, etc from Goodwill check first you can remove the price! Someone with a big black marker spends their day writing "1.00-" "50-" often right on the front and good luck with getting it off. Before purchase see if you can rub off the price with a bit of spit or peel off the sticker. Try not to do it where management can see you. -If apprehended state your position and the problem slowly and clearly and do not suddenly make for the door. It may only be a dollar to you but it's the whole retail price for them.

GIFTS Pt 11. Now go to Dollar Tree and check out their gift wrappings and gift bags. They have lovely stuff, all glitter and shine and only a dollar a go.

FOOD. Trying to economize? Then not just Christmas but year round, it's Cheap and Unhealthy for you.

But here's a tip from the Second World War! An English nutritionist, tasked with finding what could sustain the besieged British population when ships carrying decent food could not reach the plucky little island, tried existing for six months on a local diet providing all nutritional requirements.: You boil up potatoes, cabbage and onions.

Try that on your picky teenagers, especially at Christmas and maybe that will convince them that when you say We can't afford that! you really mean it.

And collect some really comforting quotes: one I love from an English advice column long ago:

Always get your hair done. Cut back on something less important, like the childrens' education.

The Help

2011-10-03T06:54:00.000-07:00

I've been in the States long enough to get awfully self-conscious about race, the whole black and white thing. So I tiptoed into The Help, having been told by the critics that it was a feel-good movie for white folks.

Actually, it seemed quite tough to me. Of course, almost all the white folks except for our heroine had to be vapid and mean, the black noble and stoic. But, my conservative friends, that's how it was in the good old days. If you weren't quietly noble and stoic while being black, you might well land up dead.

One thing struck me, right at the start. The first question our heroine asks the black maid, presented as the most poignant question, is: How does she feel spending her days looking after another's children, not her own?

Well, right now a multitude of mothers, Honduran, Philippine, Mexican and more, may not be looking after other folks' children, but are scrubbing their floors and cleaning their windows all to make a better life for their own children back home. Their dark-skinned, mostly pint-sized husbands and brothers are sweating away in our yards and fields, rattling along in another language, so handy for us, liberals with a conscience, because it does distance us from their problems.

If, as the comics say, Moslems are the new black, then you could say that these folk, who have been more like an accustomed grey in our lives but now face a growing anti-immigrant world, are definitely getting blacker all the time.

On the road

2011-09-19T14:01:00.000-07:00

We were in California, (Orange County Orchid Society, Newport Harbor Orchid Society and San Gabriel Valley Orchid Society) then home with new BFF's - then OMG! Hurricane Irene! False alarm but then it was tidy up and get ready for the trip to Atlanta (the Atlanta Orchid Society.)

I should have been all a twitter all the time because tweeting is perfect for snap judgements: San Bernadino- so sad and dusty! Or did we come in the wrong end? Pasadena- elegant! Riverside - neat! Dr. Motes told the Mong guy selling long green beans in the market the Latin name. He said he(the Mong man) had been selling them man and boy- and never knew. Though that's too long for a tweet.

Georgia-Great oak trees! May they never have a hurricane.

Spanish moss - so grey and wispy. Come to Motes Orchids for plump and green sort-(gets water and fertilizer all the time.)

Lovely old leafy small towns, the best lovely old houses, always the most beautiful, always taken over by the lawyers.

The most imposing old houses always on the corners of the street-commanding two roads. Obviously before the motor car, the automobile.

Must stick to tweets. My problem is I want to be funny and there's nothing funny about nice orchid society people opening their homes to us, taking us off for meals, hey- buying our orchids- and if there were, you certainly couldn't write it down.

Well, I did write Orchid Territory, but no nice orchid people or pets/animals were harmed in its production. That's why it's a novel.

Notes on the English Summer

2011-08-10T12:44:00.000-07:00

It seems a parody of the Arab Spring- not young people taking over the streets ready to die for freedom but English kids taking over the streets stealing and destroying stuff.

And not just kids. Is it still just education?

When I was eleven, I passed the Eleven plus exam. I went from an elementary school to a grammar school, the path to University. My brother didn't pass. He went to the school for the kids who failed. The eleven plus was finally denounced for dividing up England's kids into bright and dim at eleven years old. So what happened?

As a student I did a lot of odd jobs. I remember innocently asking a young man why he was just working in the hotel kitchen too. (I was always too timid to be a waitress.) "Why?" he said, very sarcastic, "'Cos I'm ignorent, en' I?"

Home from Yugoslavia, I taught for a while at a secondary school and immigrant center.

The racial tension arose between Asian boys and the black and white D stream who resented the Pakistani and Indian kids talking about the idea of becoming a lawyer or doctor or maybe owning their own shop.

The old constraints on English behavior are long gone, the old stuff about knowing your place. (See any old English movie.) The English have always been better at the dignity and discipline of civic rather than family life. (Who make the best queues, then?) And there was always the typical Anglo Saxon sneering at education. You went to Eton and Oxford or Cambridge, like the Prime Minister, for the connections. Long before Sarah Palin, the joke used to be that only in England would "-Oh, he's very clever," be an insult.

So far nothing has happened in Scotland or Wales. Scots and Welsh families, however poor, have always put a premium on education. Hard to be proud to be English -English now is what's left over when you take away Scotland, Wales and Ireland.

And now everyone has a chance at education. Now if you're down at the bottom you no longer have the consolation that it's the unfair world.It must be "because I'm ignorent- en' I?"

And brooding most about education means I'm a bloomin' liberal, en I?

The Future of Soap

2011-08-07T07:25:00.000-07:00

There was a time. my children, when we were told that in the Future (2K plus) there would be no more messy meals. We would start our brave new days with a pill marked"Breakfast" and go on from there to the more substantial ones labelled "Lunch" and "Dinner." Maybe the airlines would be interested, but for the rest of us now Food is bigger than ever.

I hope the same thing will happen with soap. Right now soap is disappearing, so messy! Turn it liquid and put it in a plastic pump instead! When my mother bought a bar of soap it didn't go in the bathroom it slid in between the sheets in the linen drawer. Her favorite was Yardleys Lavender. And she maintained that the bar hardened a little there, and so would last longer when used. Call me old-fashioned but sliding a cold plastic pump in among the pillow slips lacks something.

And even with soap, we are arriving at the state of No Fragrance! Some of the most expensive soaps now, do indeed take me back in time - to when my frugal grandmother cut up bricks of yellow household scrub-the-front-step soap for us to use. Apparently fragrance causes cancer - is that it? But like music and color and sunlight fragrance also creates delight and well-being and certainly an impulse to spend more than we should.

When my face cream smells like lard or olive oil it's a reminder to use olive oil. And for us who are buying pots labeled Revivify! Rejuvination! - by the time those evil fragrant fumes start to work on us, we'll be long gone. So keep the Fragrance Free for babies but let the rest of us enjoy. And no, I don't think spraying your sheets with something called Spring Delight or Pine Forest does the trick. You need the subtlety of a good soap - not the blast of public toilets.

Next: The return of the gilt-edged, leather-bound book.

The Noble Savage

2011-07-24T14:19:00.000-07:00

It was something like: "They treat us worse than Albanians" or "We might just as well be Albanians..." There they were, a couple sitting on the steps of their trailer, complaining to The Miami Herald a few years ago about being called "trailer trash." I remember the article not just because they said Albanian but because, strangely enough for ignorant trailer trash, they had their Balkan social history exactly right.

Whether it's for the Greeks, with their Grecian columns and all that stuff, or the Christian Serbs or even the Turks, fellow Moslems, Albanians have been the trailer trash of the Balkans, or worse. "Albanians? Very dirty!" That was the reaction I got when, on vacation from the Faculty of Philosophy, Pristina, I told people in Istanbul the interesting fact that I taught Albanians. I was suddenly less an English tourist than an Albanian-lover.

The irony in all this is, that of all the Balkan peoples, it is hardest to get a physical stereotype of the Albanian. Many Albanians are dark but many more look Irish or even Scots, tall and rangy with sandy hair and grey eyes. But maybe that brings us back to white trash again, to the poor whites of Appalachia who seem to have missed out on political correctness. I don't think any comedian or commentator has got fired for calling them 'inbred' or 'stupid.' I don't think they have the equivalent of the Jewish Defense League, or the NAACP. Maybe if they did, there would be less room for right wing groups of varying degrees of anger and resentment, to fill the gap.

The naming of dogs

2011-07-19T06:11:00.000-07:00

At Motes Orchids we spend as much time talking about our dogs and their names as we do about the orchids. We could pretend that obscure names are meant to baffle a would-be criminal: a random "Psst! Here Spot! Good boy!" won't get you anywhere with our dogs. Try Arabic or Albanian. And if you have to ask Why? then you are new to Motes Orchids -(Let me give you the sign up sheet for our news letter!) But those names? Sarah Palin would be right: we are elitist, arugula-eating liberals who think we're smart.

At the moment with our females we're on the Z series. There was our beautiful Azra,( "girl" or "maiden" in Arabic,) who died too young, then Zara. (I'd decided on Tanga till told that was the bottom half of a bikini.) Now we have Zanzi- which must mean something somewhere but I thought had a good growly sound to it. You can't have more than two syllables for a dog- "Bad Dog, Dorothy!" doesn't do it.

For our big male, we've a sharp, masculine sound: Skender! Skender is the Turkish form of Alexander and the name of the national hero of Albania, Skenderbeg. He fought off the Turkish armies so brilliantly, in admiration they called him Alexander the Great.

And speaking of the Turks, one of our dogs was named "Turkish Ambassador." Our son, when small, had a puppy he declared was to be called Turkish Ambassador. Because, he explained, he looked like the Turkish Ambassador. You could see what he meant. Puppies are mostly rather solemn. They have a lot to work out. Of course, if naming always followed that logic, most newborn babies would be called Winston Churchill.

By the way: Turkish Ambassador soon became Ambassador and then Basset. The two syllable rule.

Dear Diary

2011-06-29T13:24:00.000-07:00

Keeping a Diary

It's now after the Fourth of July and my first entry for 2011 is: "April 25th Mysore raspberries." I usually plod along till mid March with the daily "orchid house," the weekly, "Netflix, Open Sat."and then even that fades away. Well, V. S. Pritchett did say that the secret of happiness was "a pleasing monotony." Obviously the Mysore raspberries this year were a total disruption.

Every December when I buy calendars for Christmas I choose a diary for the New Year. Should I go for a real leather one with all the maps and international time zones? The one with the daisy on the front and This Diary Belongs To..? But of course you don't want your name there if you are actually going to write Dear Diary stuff. And being the trad English type, I don't go in for expressing deep thoughts though looking in the mirror, I think about old age and death quite a bit. That should remind me to keep a diary as memory fails because as Donald Rumsfeld said: stuff happens.

If we do something really big like going to India or North Carolina, then I take along an exercise book and it all goes in there right from the airport:"Buy NYT." But day by day? Well, until 2011, dear diary started on January 1st, with all the other resolutions; tea, skim milk, half grapefruit. That diet one was on its way out by Jan 2nd because of New Year's Day football: (wine, popcorn, chips.)

People coming and dogs needing shots go on the calendar with tax deadlines and Recycling days. Really big things get engulfed in their bigness. I don't remember sitting with my diary on the night Andrew or any other hurricane arrived. I do have one other entry for this year when our son got engaged and we all had dinner. Not even an exclamation mark but next to it, "fish and broccoli."

Hurricanes? Think Italian

2011-06-10T13:56:00.000-07:00

We have gas. A gas stove. If the power-lines go down, unlike most of our neighbors, we will enjoy hot tea and three meals a day. Bummer. When an advanced civilization collapses and we are back to foraging for food, that should be the good part, guilt-free survival on chips and cookies.

But, in fact, after Andrew we had so much stuff to eat out of the freezer, we were eating heartier than we had done for weeks. Slaving over a hot stove, even by candlelight, was not my idea of the aftermath of a hurricane.

Anyway, when the ice in the cooler finally melts, you need a plan. Basically, you return to pre-fridge days: think old gnarled peasants, their old gnarled garlic sausages hanging from sooty beams, with a string of onions. Add a can of tomatoes, red wine and good old happy-to-be in-a-cardboard-box pasta. Think Italian!

In fact, getting ready for a hurricane is just like preparing for our Fourth of July party- Not how many people do we estimate are coming? But how many days do we need to provide for? How many paper plates? napkins? chips? crackers? water? sodas? fruit juice? red wine? Get Jim Bean.- No one wants warm beer.

And then not dusting and polishing but fill water bottles, find hurricane lamps, nail plywood over windows and sit in front of the TV in the gloom, while there's still power, waiting for the big news. When is Andrew, Gustave, Pedro or Doris arriving - how far away. That's why, when the hurricane misses us, we are resentful. We did all this? For a no show, for a cancellation? Nothing but a few leaves and twigs on the ground! We gave a party and nobody came!

But now forecasting is sharper; no longer: "Tie down your trash cans and bring in the dogs! From Key West to Orlando!" On the other hand, things appear to be heating up and we may find in the future our quaintly named hurricanes are not so much expected guests as mindless party crashers.

Hurricanes and tornadoes

2011-05-25T14:57:00.000-07:00

We were the veterans, the year of '92, the big one until Katrina. After August 1992, whenever a TV reporter "in the eye of the storm" stood in a puddle with his collar turned up, we rolled our eyes. Whenever they recounted the terrors of the wind, against a backdrop of palm fronds and leafy boughs, we'd chant:

"Leaves on the trees! Ain't no hurri-cane!"

Hurricane Andrew gave us our standards and our bragging rights. But only about twenty-four people died. Five of them, a mile or so away, had been in a small apartment complex. The way the building had been tossed around it was said, meant "That had to be a tornado."

Joplin, Missouri looks now like Homestead and Redland in August 1992. Andrew also had winds of 200 miles an hour. But hurricanes are better than tornadoes, we say- you can prepare. You can buy bottled water and baked beans and nail plywood over windows. Andrew was strange though, came up suddenly, out of the blue. We were OK. No last minute hysteria at Home Depot. We already had plywood and double headed nails and an old house with wooden window frames you could hammer nails into. That's why our house held while most around us popped. Would plywood make that difference now?

Maybe this hurricane season we'll find out.

Redland Orchid Festival: Origins

2011-05-18T06:44:00.000-07:00

The last big orchid event of the year has come and gone and here I am mentioning it now: The Redland International Orchid Festival. Well, exactly, because now it's all over I have the time. But it's also hard to decide: What is a blog? Is it basically just to promote your stuff like a tupperware party? It seems tacky to write up events In Which We Have a Commercial and Monetary Interest. (So Republican!) On the other hand there is the Need To Put Food On the Table. (Another whiny Dem!)

Well, Redland is the Big One - biggest orchid happening in the US! And the Motes's should make something of it because it was Dr. Motes who invented it. And it was an invention. A new mind set.

The idea of putting on an orchid show in the middle of May, outdoors, in South Florida, was considered nuts. Too hot. The season is over and everyone who could (i e the sort of people who had money to buy orchids!) was out of here. As though Miami Dade was the backyard of Buckingham Palace and after the races at Ascot, all the toffs motored up to Scotland for the grouse shooting. Or colonial India when the Brits made for the hill country, leaving the peasants sweating in the plains. Well, that does still happen. Apparently you can't swing a cat in the hills of North Carolina in the summer without hitting a wussy South Floridian.

Anyway, the reaction to Dr. Motes' proposal was: No-one wants to be here in May and those who are, won't come (too hot) and You're nuts.

Dr. Motes' argument was: Precisely because there was nothing on- what a great time to have something on! And more importantly, it would give orchid lovers the chance to see and buy orchids blooming at that time of year- All the orchid shows were clustered in the cool season - October through March.

And surely orchid lovers were used to working up a bit of sweat, looking after...their orchids!

And talking of sweat - who needs big exhibits? Bring in your plants for sale, lay them out on the tables, someone opens the gates and stand back!

And that, my children, is what happened.

The Wedding PS

2011-04-29T18:25:00.000-07:00

I was too cynical about the BBC and the wedding- about the whole thing. I watched loads of it, actually starting out with Katy Couric on Channel Four whom (see I'm English!) I will always love because of Sarah Palin. (You had to have been there.) I was like some old cockney Gran, with bad teeth, interviewed at the Palace railings: "Wha' a loverly pair!"

"Oh the English organisation..."etc. And we go, Yeah, OK. But, when you think about it... Did anyone see sniffer dogs and black vans parked behind the trees, and cops with bullet proof vests talking into electronic devices? Well maybe that was the Household Guards with their shining breast plates..Somehow I feel if this had been in the great US we would have all been made aware of What Perils Are Lurking.

Well, I'm American, too. So God Bless America, but just this once, I think England really is tops. It was a loverly job.

Kate Middleton in Berkshire! Me too!

2011-04-26T08:36:00.000-07:00

Bucklebury!

This should really be a tweet. - I grew up in the same county as Kate Middleton! No wonder they call it the Royal County of Berkshire. There's Windsor at one end and Wallingford at the other where Saxon King Alfred had his HQ or something. - Anyway, he fought the Danes and there are lDanish broad swords in the Reading Museum; apparently they kept losing them overboard as they came up the Thames. And now there is Bucklebury - a rather posh Berkshire village where Kate Middleton grew up.

Many a time as a damp young thing in my school uniform, I have watched the big red double decker Thames Valley buses grind by, with BUCKLEBURY or more often, BUCKLEBURY COMMON on the front. Little did we know!

And Kate is so lovely - she has all those mandatory inches between bust and waist that make looking good so much easier. And she has that lovely dimple when she smiles. She's absolutely Bucklebury's Shirley Temple.

Can't wait! But watch out with BBC America. From what I've seen, they're ladling out the treacle so thick I can hear those cynical, young English producers saying: "Lard it on! Yanks love this stuff."

The little black dress

2011-03-27T07:34:00.000-07:00

Continuing with the Arab-Moslem theme here, I would like to put in a word for the little black dress. We are supposed to bewail the idea that so many of our Moslem sisters must encase themselves in black from head to toe. All I can say is that for many a day, right now, and for the whole of my adolescence that would have been a dream come true.

For a teenager obsessed with legs, hips, how awful you look from behind, to be able to step out protected by that cave of black would have given me a carefree youth. And when I think of my despair at and hatred for my nose, my skin, my hair, the bonus of being able to cover all that up too, would have been sheer heaven. Personal bias noted here: Growing up I always heard: "-She has lovely eyes!" (i.e. "At least there's something we can salvage.") So for me, the whole black outfit was just tailor made.

Well, you may say: we in the west have sweats- but sweat pants are clingy. And the western version of Don't look at my shape- the caftan - is so forlorn. Unless you are a lean six footer who doesn't need one, you look like an abandoned, graffiti-smothered traffic cone.

Safi, whom I met in Italy all those years ago, the young revolutionary journalist: ("I am the first Arab girl to hitchhike!") has adopted Moslem dress, including the veil. So I was told when I tried to contact her at her Cairo newspaper when I was in Egypt a few years ago. Had she

become ..a devout Moslem? "Well," said one of her colleagues slyly, "when women get to a certain age...it often seems a good idea."

The colors of the prophet

2011-03-22T07:18:00.000-07:00

So Gadhafi has claimed the color of the prophet as his own in a bright, optimistic shade, miles away from the standard, somber Muslim green used mainly in the west for agricultural machinery and school uniforms. His supporters only need shamrocks on their head gear to look like a pub crowd promoting St Patrick's Day.

Gadhafi green, like every other color, is there in India. When we were hunting for orchids along the country roads of Kerala, I was recording the colors of Kerala's mosques: pea green, lime green, that bright Caribbean, cabbage green, chartreuse. And that's just the start. I saw a lime green mosque with mint green trim. A bright Gadhafi green with orange accents. A deep violet, mixed with a lighter shade. And how about periwinkle blue and marigold? And why not pinstripe your minaret? In fact, some were turned into candy canes of pink and purple.

It was as though they'd let the Imams' children loose with paint cans - Let's have purple walls and a green arch! Well then, half a mile down the road we'll do a lime green mosque with a baby blue gate! And then they went on to the churches; a lavender church, a pink and white church and a Christian orphanage, all in sugar candy colors.

But when the colors fade this time they may stay faded. The money for such exuberance came from Muslim Indians working in Egypt, Algeria, Tunisia and the Gulf states, out of work now, refugees from the Arab revolutions.

The Arab Revolution

2011-02-25T05:22:00.000-08:00

If I'd been around for the French and Russian Revolutions I'd have been watching TV all day. But they might not have been so inspiring, close up, as the Arab Revolution. I am so proud of the Arab people. (What, all of them?) All the people I've seen on TV. The brave, the articulate - Who knew there were so many articulate English-speaking students, young doctors, beautiful young mothers, in Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Libya, in Yemen. Why weren't we told? And all crying out for freedom, passionately alive.

But these are backward societies. We in the West are way past that. We mumble and sigh, especially us Democrats: "The best lack all conviction, while the worst/ Are full of passionate intensity...."

The Arab world is fresh as Wordsworth's: "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,/But to be young was very heaven!"

And it's not just the young who are in heaven: it's the solid women all in black, like gleeful nuns, the Tunisian engineers and Egyptian managers and gap-toothed, worn out laborers.

Well, we all know how the French and Russian revolutions went... but what about the British or American ones? Well, that pair were Anglo-Saxon. The Arab Revolution is full of Arabs. And we know they lack discipline and civic pride...except for the Egyptians and the citizens of Bengazi... and they don't value human life like we do...except for the Libyan pilots who crashed their planes rather than bomb and all the soldiers who refused to fire... and they are not really ready for the modern world except for twitter, face book, etc. And by the way, who was it in Egypt who ordered a pizza for the Union protesters in Wisconsin?

And just a note to all the Anglo-Saxon students who need to get fueled up to march and shout: Most of the Moslem crowds are totally, deliriously sober in their joy.

Tamiwhat?

2011-02-09T13:52:00.000-08:00

Start a blog and you are buzzed in to that hive of interconnectedness, The Social Network. Read The Does and Don'ts of orchid selling.. and it's on to Orchid Territory -a fun read and buy it here! Kosova Kosovo too - (Hey, did you know there are still our boys stationed in Kosovo?) - and of course, front and center, Motes Orchids and its delights. And now comes Motes Orchids family members actually putting on a whole show- the Tamiami International Orchid Festival!

....Which you didn't read about here. Which actually was two weeks ago, more now. I didn't blog about the Tamiami International Orchid Festival because I was too busy getting orchids ready for The Tamiami International Orchid Festival. That should have made me the perfect Twitterer. If there was ever someone primed to make short, breathless statements at irritating intervals it's definitely the person scrambling to fill a truck when an orchid show is on.

Breaking flower spikes, Biggest blue-just snapped off! **ghhjxxx!! (Can you swear on Twitter?) Where are eight inch baskets? Cash box! Loading 7 am. Bloody cold! C U there!

Then there was the Egyptian Revolution! Check out the Revolution but don't forget at Tamiami this weekend our Indian Species Special: Ten dollars each- three for twenty-five!

And who on earth is reading this anyway? I know my daughter has corralled about three colleagues in California but we can hardly expect them to be interested in ten dollar dendrobiums in Miami, even with three for 25,00. There's the great young orchid-loving dentist I met in India- to whom I owe a great long email - t0 also thank his Mum, etc. But By now be rude just to email... should really send a card...what's the postage to India?

Now when someone says "I loved your book when's the next one?" I say read my blog and email me! Let me know if you like it! But most people reading Orchid Territory are like me: the internet is not central to their lives. And they are puzzled by new words like "friending.' I need to use the old currency: You liked OT? The blog? Let me know. Just drop me a line - it's 44cents.

M for Murder

2011-02-03T14:07:00.000-08:00

So Mubarak supporters are crashing the party.

The President of Egypt is joining the contemporary M series:

Milosevic, destroying Yugoslavia in order to gain power.

Mugabe, destroying Zimbabwe in order to hold power

Mubarak destroying Egypt's peaceful protest in order to hang on.

But then there's Mandela.

Hurray for Egypt and Tunisia!

2011-02-01T08:03:00.000-08:00

A few years ago I was lucky enough to visit Cairo; I had friends there. Everything I'd read or heard about Egyptians, and Cairenes especially, was good: mellow people. And there they were, in the midst of lethal traffic jams, the taxi drivers smiling and joking. I never felt worried to be A Woman Alone though of course by this time I was seen as nothing more than an LOL (Little Old Lady) Alone. (Go East, ladies, as you age and certainly in Moslem countries you will find the man in the street will treat you with respect and kindness, in total contrast to how they'll treat you when you are young and pretty.)

ANYWAY this is just a shout out to all Tunisians and especially Egyptians. Someone on CNN this morning reported that there were many lighthearted signs in the massive crowds calling for President Mubarak to go. One man was holding a sign up high, saying, "Hurry up, Mubarak, my arms are getting tired!"

One Egyptian in their very own Rally to Restore Sanity.

Heritage TV, the Big House

2011-01-18T14:19:00.000-08:00

Watching Downton Abbey, the latest TV Heritage dose from the UK, I thought of my grandfather, head groom, my grandmother, the lady's maid, (a union not so much of Upstairs Downstairs as Inside Outside,) and my mother who recounted how she'd eaten stolen nectarines in the hayloft as a child, and ridden down to the village in the estate's dog cart. And then it all ended, just like it always does on the TV series, with the First World War.

When my mother left school she learnt shorthand and typing and worked for the LNER: the London North Eastern Railway and then, she landed right back in that declining Heritage world. My father, just married, was being taken on as a head gardener. He had, as they said, bettered himself. One of six, a mother widowed, living "at the rough end of the village," he had left school at twelve, to work in the fields. But he had a chance to go to the big house: being 'in service' was the education you could get as a poor child in the country.

They went straight from the wedding to the gardener's cottage at Rushbrook Hall, to be greeted by the housekeeper, Polly who opened their front door with a big iron key, which she then put back in her apron pocket.

Rushbrook Hall was Elizabethan. I saw something from it, I think a section of panelled staircase, in the Metropolitan Museum, New York. For my mother, the biggest problem there was the worry that my elder brother when he was small would wander off and fall in the moat.

The PBS Downton Abbey, like the movie, Gosford Park, shows the rules that bound the upper class as tightly as the servants: the upset that a gentleman would serve himself wine, put on his own coat. It made me think of our hotel stays in Malaysia and India: someone to pour the tea, add the milk, someone else to pull out the chair, to hover. If you do these things, the modern young man is asked in Downton Abbey, then what will he do? How will he earn a living?

Every detail is delectable: the gleaming antique furniture, the feathered hats, the bosomy blouses but one thing now is always out of place. As someone who was sent to classes to learn how to speak like a "Lidy," a little suburban Eliza Doolittle, I can't help but register the accents.

The young'uns in Downton Abbey, speak with the casual voices of modern upper class England. Posh voices now are funny. The dowager Aunts, the Maggie Smiths, can drawl and purse lips and raise their eyebrows and their sentences but if the young mangled their vowels, full of frightfullys and Mummys and Daddys - more Bertie Wooster than Prince William - we'd see them as posh, out of touch, spoiled rotten upper class twits. But back then they would have spoken like that and the servants would have bowed in acknowledgement and taken their coats and hats and polished their boots and, like my grandmother, who started off as a tweeny maid, lowest of the low, too low even to have a uniform, would have washed their floors and cleaned their grates.

Kerala, view from an SUV

2011-01-05T18:28:00.000-08:00

Kerala means land of coconuts and the Indian-thin lanky coconut palms rose up everywhere beside the roads, behind the tiny shops festooned with clusters of bottled water and bananas. Like Malaysia, there was a heartening mix of churches, Christian schools, Hindu temples and many mosques, most newly painted. Must be money coming in from the Gulf states. So many people working there, said our Indian friends, so much money coming in: every home has a computer. And why so many school children? Kerala the state with the highest literacy. Two young boys did beg -they each asked for a pen. First the Christian missionaries established schools and now the Communists are a big part of government here. "Through the ballot,"as one of our colleagues said because they were seen to be good candidates but now just as corrupt as other politicians.

Everywhere words: on the trucks, FRIENDS, Bismillah!, Jesus Never Fails and on the back of trucks and buses, the most unnecessary command of all: Sound Horn! Above the shacks and tiny shops, signs promising a future: Digital Workshop, Beauty Academy, Internet Institute, Talent Academy, Perfect English Institute. Signs painted on fences and walls. Ideal Vests Briefs and Trunks painted on a succession of private garden walls, followed us all the way down to the Cape.

First day back, never before had the standard silent suburb seemed more like an empty stage set. Every house, every gate, clear cut and on display but where are the signs, the ads, the words, where is the noise, where are the trucks, the buses, the scooters, where is the color, where are the children? where are the people?

Notes on India -Where are the beggars?

2011-01-05T07:55:00.000-08:00

OK so we didn't go to Mumbai or Calcutta but we were in Bangalore, (the information capital of the world, according to President Sarkozy, who was there at the same time.)

But no keeping the head down, barging through a dozen outstretched hands, no averting the eyes or handing out cheap coins to the maimed and old at our feet. All I can remember were two young girls outside a big temple, a dignified old man, like a monk; a girl, making faces, pressed up against the car window.

In fact, all the children we saw seemed to be coming home from school, the boys cheeky, the girls bashful. All in uniform, clean and tidy. And there can't be a more beautiful sight than a line of Indian school girls, slim and graceful, dark hair to their shoulders, walking home under those big old orchid-hosting trees, their uniforms a delight: deep blue scarves over pale blue tunics and deep blue trousers, cream colored tunics with vermilion.

I asked about poverty. The poor can buy rice at a special rate. That's one thing. Pressure to survive is obviously intense. In The Hindu Times: six lottery sellers have committed suicide because lottery draws were to be limited to one per week and "a number had turned to begging to make ends meet."

Orchid Hunting in the Western Ghats

2010-12-27T08:17:00.000-08:00

We have been orchid hunting in the Western Ghats. I should really leave it at that. We went to Kerala, Southern India just before Christmas because that is the season for the flowering of Vanda wightii - a Vanda not seen in Western greenhouses, and not recorded in the wild for a hundred years. We also needed to check on the range of Vanda tessellata -we have the smaller northern Vanda tessellata in the greenhouse and the much bigger Sri Lanka version. These from Travancore were betwixt and between.

I had planned to stay back at the hotel with The Hindu Times and CNN. I've read enough old accounts of orchid hunting: "Despite the terrain we only lost one man..." But orchid hunting in the Western Ghats turned out to be a lot less strenuous than Christmas shopping. It involved an SUV on loan from the Trivandrum Botanical Gardens, with driver, and Indian colleagues with my sense of humor. Sorry, America, only those who have been through the British school system and the old caste system of the English can, deep down, be on the same wavelength.

We were hunting orchids along the roads because that is where the oldest trees are: not chopped down but left for shade, not jungled up but separate, receiving their share of sunlight. And it's only on the oldest trees, Dr. Motes says, seventy-five years or more, that orchids have time to grow and can find that crusty old bark they love.

Kerala is the most populous state in India. True, whenever we stopped under a particularly old tree on those country roads, there was always a house and garden nearby where we could negotiate for a bamboo pole, be observed by grinning groups of school children walking home or locals on crowded buses charging by, their elbows jutting out of windowless sides.

We did not lose one man on those trips; we did find a Dr. Motes, more than happy, as he saw these Vanda species in the wild. And I was more than happy to just slide into my SUV seat to go hunting orchids in the Western Ghats.

India ate my homework

2010-12-16T07:27:00.000-08:00

Home from two weeks in India. Back in BC (before computers) that would explain silence but with laptops and wi fi (a whole line in Abu Dhabi airport) it's no longer an excuse.

But pounding away on greasy metal keys? Now the closest the big old desk computer. And pounding along later, one is less likely to announce I'm at the airport! OMG need coffee!

So Toronto to Trivandrum, Southern India on Etihad, the Emirates airline. (Cheap joke: "Jihad" airlines?Ha Ha!) Maybe had is a verb or noun, just meaning a journey... and ji is the nasty bit. Ask the handsome young Arab attendant who bashfully explains Etihad is Arabic but a made up word. Like those Japanese car names.

ANYWAY, Etihad, economy class, is the way to fly: foot rest, individual movie screen, real earphones, printed menus with choices! (Not everyone needs to eat mutton) AND free drinks. Scotch, wine - and the smiling attendants return unbidden to refill your good-sized glass with no hint of disapproval. My advice to strict Moslem parents: book your children and wives on American Airlines where the head sets cost, the drinks cost, the glasses are small and the attendants hide behind the curtain in business class to avoid refills.

Watched a great Indian movie, "Three Idiots." Students at Imperial College of Engineering, pressure to succeed. The young flight attendant said it was made in response to the great number of student suicides. Note: Read later in The Hindu Times it's the biggest grossing movie ever.

Nearly asleep: changed categories to Arabia. The young gardener is falling in love with the rich young daughter who lives on what looks like a golf course and goes riding in jodphurs with a little scarf at the neck just so. They hold hands passionately in the shrubbery; no kissing. Years ago I hitchhiked down to Florence with two Egyptian girls I met at a youth hostel in Venice. Safinaz said for an Arab girl to kiss a man is like sleeping with someone. She was a journalist- sat up at night in the hostels writing her articles: First Egyptian girls ever to hitch hike! Forget how she got her material back to Cairo. Sent me a magazine. There we are, thumbs out, by the side of an Italian road. Said she told her readers how surprised she was to find she could be friends with an English girl. (We have ended the Suez crisis! she announced.)

OK. Trivandrum, Kerala, three in the morning. Hundreds of people waiting, dark faces, flashing smiles like it was midday. Down the darkened streets but could see hammers and sickles painted on walls and fences. Yeah, Toto we're not in the US anymore.

Playthings

2010-11-15T17:38:00.000-08:00

For play, young children need two boxes. When they are really small they need a box with three stones in it. Then it will rattle. And a somewhat clean box is best because they are going to gnaw on it when they are teething. When children start to run around they need something more. That's when parents need to go to ToysRUs, to the back entrance and ask for one of the large boxes that The Princesses Castle came in or The Big Plastic Slide.

That's it; dump the plastic castle and keep the box. In a big cardboard box you can serve tea, plot war, hide from the enemy. You can cut windows and doors or slits for arrows. You can't carve your will on plastic or if you do your Mum and Dad will be angry and worry you'll grow up to be a vandal.

Another thing: I was hanging up the washing the other morning and spread a King-sized sheet across the two laundry lines to dry. And there it was- the secret tent- the shadowy sides moving mysteriously in the breeze. So go green, employ the latest sophisticated solar technology,(hanging out your clothes in the Florida sunshine) and give your child an extra, organic hide out.

Not everyone has the space for a tree and a dog or a laundry line but everyone with a child must find room for the big cardboard box.

We need trees more than birds do

2010-11-12T04:35:00.000-08:00

Coral Gables: the City Beautiful. What's the difference between Coral Gables and the rest of us? Trees. The whole place is like the Brazilian rain forest. Yes, there are million zillion dollar homes crouching behind those tree trunks and leafy branches but it's the trees, stupid.

When we moved into our place the first thing we did was plant trees- well, actually, the first thing we did was plant selected seeds of live oaks and gumbo limbo and satin leafs into big old baked bean cans and, bless the South Florida climate, in a year or two they had left their cans behind.

But the point is, you can sit on a crate, you can eat off a piece of plywood (cover with a clean, bright cloth!) and later on you can buy your fancy Italian leather couch and table that seats eight in an afternoon but you can't wake up one morning and say I'm going to be surrounded by leafy branching trees this evening; where's my wallet! It doesn't work like that. (Well, the very rich and impatient can truck in instant trees complete with scaffolding and irrigation and good luck with that.) But the Brazilian rain forest or the gentle beech woods of southern England or just your shady corner were not built in a day - though I suppose our Creationist friends would beg to differ.

Does this blog make me look fat?

2010-11-01T05:07:00.000-07:00

I'd given up on the election: it was the Rally. And the vital thing about the Rally was the numbers. As Napoleon said of the Pope:How many divisions does he have?

Well, this Pope has numbers. Doing the wave at the Rally to Restore Sanity was a great way to emphasize the sheer number-ness of it all; all those arms, raised up, two at a time, all the way down the Mall.

Now I can face Tuesday. Though I am still extremely peeved and mystified as to why my powerful letter to The Miami Herald, concerning the electoral process, did not make the cut. Mystified because it had the winning ingredient: it was short.

Having total copyright control etc, I am going to print it here: even more shorter, it might have made a good Rally sign.

Buying Elections the Old-fashioned Way

Why don't we go back to the buying of elections the old-fashioned way? All those millions of dollars spent hiring ad men and political back-room boys...Let Scott, Rove and the others really do something for the unemployed. Maybe not the Oprah-level of a car for everyone - but a new washing machine or TV, or at least a gift voucher for Macys for the ladies and a quart of Jim Beam on election day as you ride to the polls. Cut out the middle men and we might get something out of this election!

Note: I have never forgotten a picture in The Herald some years ago, of a Mexican politician addressing a rural crowd, while behind him, like a Sunday choir, stood a semi circle of gleaming white washing machines.

In Praise of the T shirt

2010-10-14T18:15:00.000-07:00

Chanel may have started the clean, uncluttered look but Chanel always meant suits with little chains, and braid doggedly making its way round every collar and cuff and pocket, announcing "I'm Chanel. Who are you?"

Well, I'm the one over here in the classic T shirt, the real clean, uncluttered look that makes even tailored shirts look fussy.

A well-fitting T shirt, like a good education, can take you anywhere, especially in South Florida. But acquiring the right one, like a good education, can be tough. Even the best ones, after a few washings, have a tendency to droop. (Hint: treat your T shirts like silk - wash only on the Delicates cycle.) But the problem of droop has been mostly cured by the "...and 5 percent spandex" formula.

This essential garment, in fact, has started to be taken seriously not just as a way to tell the world to Save the Whales or Join the Marines or visit Jimmy's Bike Shop but something that can accompany you to lunch, and maybe with a lower neckline, fine for dinner.

But this unfortunately has led to the tarting up of the T shirt. From ruffles and lacy bits to flower and fruit prints, to sequins and beads and puffy sleeves. And finally the classic neckline has taken a dive down to the area usually reserved for the name of your team or your favorite soda. This gathered up concentration on the bust has created a slutty Empire line look, best described as Jane Austen meets Old Navy.

We purists can only intensify our hunt for the classy version. But even a cheap T shirt, if brand new, will take you through an event so always have one in your drawer. And even a cheap one will do fine if you check your colors carefully. No Crayola colors, please. Of course, there's alway black, though Christian Dior did say: Never wear cheap black. Easy for him. White is great. And if only one could find charcoal or midnight blue! The men get all the best colors. A rich velvety brown, of course; the essential olive, and oatmeal -mushroom -khaki, whatever you call that color and always sidestep the cliches. Not pink but salmon, not baby blue (No!) but ice blue and a delicate amethyst or turquoise. And watch out with navy. My advice? Never. Only exception if you are actually on a boat. Even when brand new, a navy T shirt looks too much like Dade Correctional Institute or the Parks Department.

Naysayers may counter: How dull! But what makes the T shirt a perfect canvas for prints of your new baby or favorite candidate, is what makes it the perfect background for your beads, your pendant or pearls, that Italian silk scarf and your fancy gold or silver with pashima for a dinner out. You can load a T shirt up with everything but the kitchen sink and you will still look cool. In fact, you will have achieved that goal that so often eludes the eager or worried dresser, especially in hot and steamy South Florida; you will never get that hit right to the stomach, as you enter a party or special event, that Oh oh! because you will never ever look as if you tried too hard.

A few Do's and Don'ts of Orchid Care

2010-09-26T13:21:00.000-07:00

It is always a good idea to talk to your orchids. This means, unless you have some very odd physical quirks, that you will be looking at them. And when you're looking at them, you will see

how they are doing. But don't wait till the second glass of Chardonnay in the twilight, when any minor problems may be hard to register.

And talking to your orchids does not mean addressing the assembled plants like someone at Toyota. As any good CEO will tell you, each operative blossoms when afforded individual attention.

If you think something is wrong with your orchid, Do Not Panic.

Most orchids die from worry. Not their worrying, yours. Because we always seem to be talking about keeping orchids warm enough, they are thought of more like patients than plants, or like hot house divas, ready any moment to get consumptive and dramatically expire.

Orchids are tough: think old boots not primroses. You could lose them in a land fill and most of them would emerge, if you dug around long enough, a little creased up, but still alive.

Which brings us to:

Never throw away an orchid because it looks dead.

Orchids are not like the Monty Python parrot. They can look like they're pushing up the daisies, they can look stiff as a board but hang on! Many look dead on purpose, like some dendrobiums, or play dead. (Many vandas I have known). They need:

Tough Love

Certain dendrobiums need to be ignored, for 3 months when they go into dead parrot mode. Some orchids apparently wither and die. But hold on to that crusty old stem or clump of roots. Hang it up, high and dry. And, often, after you've totally forgotten it, you may see tiny green buds emerging- signs of life.

This tough love also can work with a lush plant that refuses to bloom. It preens around, all green and happy but you didn't pay good money for that. A head of lettuce can do that. Take it out of its cosy spot- hang it up next to your wizzened stems. Ignore it. Shock it. And the final move: put that orchid in your Wilma.

Every orchid house needs a Wilma section. Hurricane Wilma wrecked one of our orchid houses, old shade cloth still hanging overhead, tilting benches. That's where we started to put ugly, dried out, near death plants or leggy orchids that had never bloomed. Ones with too much mite damage, ones I couldn't quite bring myself to throw away -Wilma was the back of the fridge.

And after a few months I would wonder: why had we put such healthy looking plants out there?And how come so many were blooming? Some bits and pieces had died away but most, falling out of broken pots and old baskets,were happily tangling up with new roots and climbing over each other like toddlers, open to whatever nature gave them: rain when it rained, bright hard sun. No extra help at all.

It's a reminder- (see under Don't Panic)- orchids are survivors. They have been surviving all over the world without the bloom boosters, the fancy fertilizers and sprays, the stakes and tidy pots.

I think they'll be around when we've all gone but that makes them sound too much like cockroaches. Just think old boots.

Joining the Party

2010-09-19T08:18:00.000-07:00

I'm a tea-partyer.

WHAAT?

I want my country back. I want my life back. I want my world back.

No, I'm not unsettled by black people, women people (You betcha!) Hispanic people or gay people finally starting to nudge the great white male to one side.

For me, it's the whole tech world owned by young people, the younger the better.

The old joke is no longer a joke: "This is so simple a child of five can operate it!" "OK. Find me a child of five."

That's why I'm adrift, like a tea-partyer in a three cornered hat.

For example: We agree I should put pictures in my blog, among these old woven, tweedy paragraphs. We did it with the Singapore Orchid Show, (see below.) But that was when my daughter was here. She may not be the child of five but she still retains all the legendary skills of that toddler. And now she's gone with the slogan of today's youth: "It's easy!"

And I want to snap my twenty-four pictures, take the roll into Walgreens or Publix, put it in an envelope and come back in a week to decide which were the good ones. There they were, in your hand. Get copies for Christmas.

Hopeless to tell me you can't get them into your computer that way. As a tea-partyer I'm not strong on logic.

After all, without my magic typewriter (the computer) I could never have knocked Orchid Territory into shape. How did I trudge through all those drafts on my Yugoslav stuff and Kosova Kosovo? OMG! The Smith Corona, the carbons. And right in the middle of the page a typo- and do you go with the white out that makes it worse and once more you rip out the paper...

So. Not much logic. The Tea Party would understand: "No Socialized Medicine!" but "Leave my Social Security alone!"

I loathe and fear the newfangled picture-making but don't touch my Word Perfect - OMG, Microsoft Word!

NB Actually, my daughter (Alice) did not say "It's easy" but "Give it a go, Mum!" which was much nicer but didn't fit. So to keep up with my self-image of fair and balanced, I must admit this mis-speak.

Random thoughts on Malaysia

2010-09-04T08:54:00.000-07:00

Across the Singapore Straits and into a Malaysian bus station: right away bubblegum, Wrigleys and Turkish lavs, what the Singapore airport calls "squat pans."

When I smell the sharp smell of stale pee, I'm home - it says the old Peoples Republic of Yugoslavia, like nothing else.

Something else reminds me. The waiters, taxi drivers, shop keepers, all insisting as they always had in Tito's patchwork Yugoslavia: "We are one -( Indian, Chinese, Malay, Hindu, Moslem, Buddhist, Christian-) no problem!" "There is no problem here."

In the capital, Kuala Lumpur, we stayed in the Citin for thirty dollars, the street market so close to the hotel steps that Dr. Motes would say "Shall we go in through the handbags or the dresses?"

Close by, was the grand, modern Indian mosque, the muezzin's balcony level with our window. We heard the call to prayer in Malaysia, officially Moslem, everywhere, most clearly at dawn and dusk. But nowhere such a voice, not the high, plaintive call but a passionate, deep voice, halting almost to a sob, on the edge, then plunging forward.

"Wow, think of doing that five times a day!"say I, giving rise to another of those eye-rolling family moments -Dr. Motes informing me: "It's a recording!"

I'd been remembering the imams climbing up the steps of the little mosques in the small towns of Kosovo.

Malaysia retains its colonial buildings, many echoing Westminster and the great old "cathedrals of steam" like Paddington Station. Many a night I've pounded down the platform under those soaring, sooty girders, just before midnight, getting the last train home -the cheap day return! In Malaysia, the mini Paddingtons are built in the Indian style and shine in the sun like white pavilions.

The Federation of Malaya, "belonged" to us, the Brits, till 1963. My older brother, a shy suburban lad, was sent to the jungles of Malaya during his two years of national service, to fight "the Communist insurgency," our mini-Vietnam. So we had airmails from Malaya, and postcards of the beaches of Penang where the soldiers went on leave. There were movies too, back then: seas of dark palms, lying in wait, the plucky tea and rubber plantations, the alien fruits, the heat and sweat.

Everyone apologizes for the heat. But we are from Florida! we say. Hey, we don't even have air conditioning! The straight-backed waiters, the hotel staff in their uniforms and white gloves, look puzzled: they must have misunderstood.

Yes, we know the fruits, the different palms! Living in South Florida links us not only to all things Latin but to Africa, Asia, the old Empire, the old imperial world of bananas and coconuts.

My brother is old style too. His only experience of life outside the UK is as a soldier: Germany and then Malaya. If he came to stay he would recognize a lot from his tropical days in the Durham Light Infantry. But he still has some kind of infection from the jungles of Malaya and says he can't take the heat.

Still no gum in Singapore

2010-08-08T17:35:00.000-07:00

"Well, don't bring like a whole box.." our Singaporean friend said. "Just enough for your own personal use."

So chewing gum was still frowned upon. We flew Cathay airlines to Singapore. Economy class but printed menus, (four choices for dinner!) complimentary wine in those generous little tumblers, and great choice on the music channels, including the Korean Music Box, Malay Hits, Thai Mix, Philippine Sound Wave, Mandarin Zone, Chinese All Time Hits and Mumbai Beat.

I knew Singapore had long since lost the old Imperial cobwebs though all the taxi drivers asked; "-Where you from, Sah?" The clipped Sah! taking me back to old wartime movies.

Singapore has always sounded like a clean, cold, Asian New York - nowhere to go but up - but there are trees everywhere and the trees grow up with the buildings, six or seven storeys high, and so elegantly pruned they are a delight to contemplate. The Singapore Orchid Show was part of the Singapore Garden Festival, organised, like the whole of Singapore it seems, by the the Parks Department. (motto: "Let's make Singapore our Garden.") The city is all over green, and at night, lights up like a classy Las Vegas.

And like Las Vegas, well ordered. Prostitution is legal. There are recycling bins in the hotel rooms, and a notice propped up on the breakfast buffet at the Grand Pacific: Additional charge for food wastage.' (The fine according to the number of grams left on your plate.)

That's my kind of nanny state. Plant trees or else! And clean your plate!

Singapore Orchid Show, the next one

2010-07-25T19:52:00.000-07:00

I'm having nightmares. It's when I start thinking about the next Singapore Orchid Show. And putting in an exhibit. Two garden chairs and a bird bath is all you need -

that's Aunt Charlotte's philosophy in Orchid Territory.("What's the show called this time? "Orchids from Paradise?"... Could be "Orchids From Hell." You put in what you've got.")But it's not just a question of Singapore being half the world away and what you can fit into the overhead bins. It's that the Singapore Orchid Show of 2010, so elegant, artistic, bright and beautiful is considered just a rehearsal for next year, the World Orchid Conference. The WOC is held every three or four years, the Olympics of the orchid world, the orchid World Cup. And we, Motes Orchids, will be taking part. And that means putting in an exhibit. We will be defending our title, Dr Motes jokes. In France, at Dijon, two WOCs ago, we swept the board for vandas. At the last WOC we were not invited, even though it was held here in Miami. Ah! Politics, politics! - What? See me after church.

So anyway, just getting fancy with ferns and hammering sheet moss on to the sides of old milk

crates is not going to do it. In Singapore, you are faced with elegant orchid displays, right off, in the airport. One of our Singaporean friends suggests - a Florida theme... Pink flamingos? Dr. Motes, of course, like Aunt Charlotte, dismisses exhibits as window dressing - that is, he doesn't like doing them.

I will be the one.

So here I am. Here it is, the end of July, and even though we've been snipping buds off because we're closed for the summer, Motes' orchids are still blooming their hearts out. And I'm starting to plead "Save it for November, guys! Not this November but the next..."

This November I'll be checking what's in bloom, what's in season, trying to get an idea of what I'll have to work with next November.... but then it all depends on the weather, on snails, let alone a hurricane. If I think about this anymore, I won't get a decent night's sleep between now and November 2011.

I must remember Aunt Charlotte's,"You put in what you've got!" After all, I invented the woman. And in fact, we pride ourselves on just that: only putting in our own orchids. No borrowing, no buying to add to an exhibit. And, for me, the one good thing to come out of observing the current Singapore show, is to see that no-one else has our kinds of hybrids, our vandas and ascocendas.

"See? Told you," said Dr. Motes, an old hand at the international orchid scene. As he says, he's the one doing the most breeding with certain neglected Vanda species: "No-one else was interested." So there's that. And I must remember the sad little Vanda I saw, right in the front of one exhibit, in Singapore. At Motes Orchids we wouldn't have thought it worth more than 12.50 US dollars on a good day. So there's that. But still, hardly enough for a good night's sleep.

The Fourth of July. Sort of.

2010-07-09T18:10:00.000-07:00

The wheels have fallen off my blog. It's all just "I" "I" and I'm sick of it - Maybe it was better in the old days with "One." It has come to one's attention... One often has the feeling....

One wanted to get something down for the Fourth of July- one tried to get away from oneself and go for something like :The Ten Step Program To Becoming American but that quickly turned nasty. For example:

Divide the world into where you can safely go on vacation or where you can bomb.

Do not master another language, that tells everyone your parents are just off the boat or over the wall.

OK so one tried another Fourth of July theme: Ten Ways To Know One Has Become An American:

I. When one says "We," and it no longer refer to one's country of origin. In this one's case, England and the English, unless it's really personal. i e "We always played Tiddleywinks on Tuesdays.'

2. One yelled for Team USA though that's partly because England SUCKED.

3. One can invite 60 people for the Fourth of July and prepare almost no food or drink.

We always have a big Fourth of July party and once an old friend was staying with us from Serbia. I spent the morning dusting and tidying and Draga was a great help but she was becoming more and more agitated. I was busy getting six months worth of fluff out from behind the furniture, cursing the chairs for having so many rungs. About three thirty we did put a ham in the oven,(Our motto: let's see if our Jewish, Moslem and Veggie friends really love us for ourselves alone.) We had some chips at the ready sitting on my newly de-cluttered and polished table. We had some beer.

Draga could stand it no longer. "Sixty people! Mary! Sixty people! And you have nothing!""

"Oh, some people won't come."

Draga asked where the flour was. Draga made a big loaf of bread. (For the English it's not a real meal without potatoes, for Serbians, without bread.) We placed the bread, warm from the oven, in the middle of my newly polished, empty table. Draga's hands were still clapped to her cheeks in the familiar Serbian gesture of dismay and despair. It was five o clock. We persuaded her to go have a shower. When she came back her bread was already surrounded by food, by "covered dishes," salsa and salads, with brownies and flan and a row of wine bottles to the side.

One could remark, as one did in the Second World War and after, on the remarkable generosity of the American people.

Remember the story of Jesus feeding the thousands with three loaves and two fishes? If that crowd had been American he wouldn't have needed a miracle. He'd just have said: "Hey, it's a party. Everyone just bring something."

One is now quite excited to be off to Singapore with the esteemed Dr. Motes who has been invited to be one of the judges at the 2010 Singapore Orchid Show.

North Carolina road trip

2010-06-19T06:30:00.000-07:00

Four North Carolina orchid societies in four days: if this is Tuesday, it must be Durham! Lovely people, they bought every one of my Orchid Territory's (forty) and almost ten Kosova Kosovo's. So let's hear it for North Carolina. But there was not so much time to ramble round the back roads, and noting details got a bit slap dash:

"Cat Hospital" but "Canine Academy." Young tobacco plants like Boston lettuce. New Zealand scored 92nd minute v Slovakia. On small bldg: "US Post Office" and "Homemade Ice Cream."

We have become frivolous. We read fewer historic markers: Colonel Dobson Jobson who commanded the first something, something was born here..." and more shop fronts and backsides of vehicles. Behind a gravel truck: "Stay back - Not responsible for broken windshields." On the door of a feed store: "Yes, the cat can go out." In the front were chickens: "Birds sold as is. No refunds no returns. Items relating to chicken health are in the store."

Then there are the gas stations. I saw another first: Do Drop In -though Dr. Motes said it was commonplace. All are new to me: Stop and Go, Stop and Shop, Chat and Chew, Pic and Go. One I could not believe when I first hit the US: Piggly Wiggly.

And hair dressers and barber shops: Upper Cuts, The Chopping Block. Dr. Motes observes that barbers and hairdressers have to be good talkers, so maybe that's it.

Everywhere I look I see great names for bands: "Seamless gutters" - can't beat that for a punk group. And Dusty Treasures - obviously country, maybe an old cowboy.

All this started years ago. I was on a double decker bus going to the other end of Reading for my first elocution lesson. Down below on a shop front, I saw Tibbles Bakery. There was an older man sitting next to me on the bus and he looked down at me with a gentle smile - She likes the name Tibbles and she's writing it down!

I can still remember the overwhelming mortification. I was just seven, that's when the elocution (speech) lessons began. So that's when all this started. And now it's seamless gutters and the same old thrill, sitting next to Dr. Motes now, who's doing the driving but still keeping an eye open too. It was Dr. Motes who caught "Hooker St, Business Park."

Turning The Page

2010-05-31T08:14:00.000-07:00

I went to a writers' conference last summer, only my second one. I'd signed up because an old friend would be there, one of the organizers, and because Dr. Motes was going fishing in Canada and so I thought well, two can play at that game.

The conference offered bracing advice on Using The Internet, and Publishing Do's and Don'ts. (Mostly Don't) And I opted for Short Story Writing in the morning (a promise of discipline - keeping things short!). But that left afternoons: Childrens' Fiction, Gender and Something Studies or Poetry, so I signed up for The First Page.

Because one can always learn more: how to be more like Elmore Leonard, for example. (He of Get Shorty and Out of Sight and now one of the geniuses behind FX's Justified.) One of his latest rules, apparently: No adverbs!

(Really? But then watch this: "She whispered softly.." "He shouted loudly.." "He ran quickly.." "He cursed angrily.." Your chosen verb is grown up; it can be let out all by itself.)

And every writer wants to find out the trick to speeding up and getting that great first page. If we could get even one dollar for every day spent on our First Pages, we'd all be living in the lap of luxury.

So there I was with about thirty others, having handed in all our First Pages and they were read in turn and each time the question was asked: "Would you, as publisher, agent or simple reader...Turn The Page?

Each time however bizarre, dull or embarrassing the First Page, at least half the class was in favor and raised their hands.

I had no new First Page but was quite proud of Orchid Territory's. Maybe because it was the last First Page, our instructor read it in a dull, weary monotone. And then the head was raised: "Well?"

No-one stirred- The question was re-phrased: "How many of you would NOT turn the page?"

Every hand shot up. People turned to each other and rolled their eyes. Did Orchid Territory really need a British accent? A British sensibility? (ie Are these people morons?) Are we really divided by a common language?

I'd always thought a lot of my very first line: "The dead pig jiggled behind Mark, sliding to and fro on a piece of bloodstained cardboard." Fetching the pig on Christmas Eve, in the old Volvo. There was something about the words cardboard and bloodstained, together. I'd fallen in love with those two words, allowed myself to be carried away. But even bloodstained didn't sway the crowd.

Yes, why would you turn the page? The pig was dead- nothing more to find out about the pig. Mark had only just arrived - the young Hugh Grant- the innocent in the South Florida orchid scene. There would be intrigue and conspiracy and finally cops and special agents but for the first page?

Would the group like: "Little did Mark know as he rattled along with the pig that in the dark days to come.."Not really. Later on he would think of the busty blond at The Rat and Parrot, but not on the first page. He'd fret over the lovely Rachel, fall afoul of the evil Regina..but not on the first page!

No, I should have begun just two pages on, with the second chapter- when Aunt Charlotte appears, announcing loudly over the menacing whine of her wheel chair, "You forgot the gin!"

Yes, Aunt Charlotte, with the occasional forbidden adverb, she would have done it. She would have got at least one or two hands up.

Orchid Territory, comical, economical

2010-05-20T12:13:00.000-07:00

Redland is over - the Redland International Orchid Festival - the big one - as in "After Redland I'll wash the dogs, clean the ceiling fans. After Redland I'll walk 30 minutes every day...write dynamite blogs.." And now it is after Redland, well after Redland. And here we are.

Well, Redland was a great success and Dr. Motes' Florida Orchid Growing, Month by Month, now considered the bible for South Florida growers, continues to fly off the shelves. And now there is Florida Vanda Growing Month by Month...

Me? I sold about half a dozen Orchid Territories. The South Florida Comic Orchid Novel. OK, so I was busy selling orchids not buttonholing passers by, most of whom anyway, had the glazed look of the orchidist let loose among a million orchids all for sale.

And it was not so much that I had competition from Florida Orchid Growing and the new Vanda book but I had competition from myself. It seemed every warm, humorous, intelligent, orchid loving literate person passing by already had Orchid Territory.

In fact, most people stopped by not to buy Orchid Territory but to tell me how much they enjoyed it. One wonderful young woman reported: "As soon as I finished it I just started to read it again!" And she's not the first one to say that. Bet they never said that about War and Peace.

And Brenda- Here's a shout out to Brenda!- "Had to come by and say how much I loved your book. I laughed out loud all the way through!"

Actually, according to the miserable stats on novels in this day and age, I've done quite well. Most novels, according to the Times Literary Supplement, sell less than a thousand copies. Orchid Territory has sold over two thousand. And if people weren't so clubby and sharing, then I could boost that number a great deal higher.

For example, Dennis from Maine, down for the Redland Show, came by: "Oh yes, I've read Orchid Territory- laughed! It went all round our orchid society. The members loved it."

What is wrong with this picture? It's not the economics of the thing - though it would be great to get more ten dollars each time - but it's the stats. Like basket ball, it's the stats. I need to improve my numbers. If I could add on all the orchid society free loaders, and friends of friends, I could up my numbers.

I don't help the cause. I like to joke that I'll just sign my name, (no dedication,) so if the buyer is a clean reader, no wine stains, no greasy fingers -then, Ha ha! in these tough economic times Orchid Territory can be re-gifted. ("It will be our little secret!")

Instead, I should be intoning: "Neither a borrower nor a lender be.." Because without any encouragement from me it seems people are just too generous with their property. Maybe I should up the price; instead of a mere ten dollars a copy, I should make Orchid Territory thirty-five. Then there'd be a lot more "Hey! I paid thirty-five for that! You buy your own!"

Happy International Workers' Day!

2010-05-01T05:43:00.000-07:00

My fellow Americans, today is May Day! International Workers' Day! Do I hear a Huh? It's just like soccer. You Americans (actually, us Americans, now I'm a citizen - Hallo Arizona!) are so cut off from the world.

Here the closest politicians can come to supporting the masses is: "I'm for the hardworking middle class!" A dynamite slogan if ever I heard one. And that's what the Democrats have to say.

Here we should have International Capitalists Day! I see them marching below the rippling red flags of individual money making liberty... Anyway, I have a fond feeling for May Day having worked in a workers' paradise (the old Peoples' Republic of Yugoslavia) for seven years. The Yugoslavs, of course, especially the Serbs, were the last ones to celebrate working. They were much better at holidays. "Mary!" I was always warned: "Only marry a Slovene!" Slovenia was up on the Austrian border and full of quiet, hardworking husbands. I was down south with the Serbians, Albanians, Montenegrins, Macedonians, Turks and gypsies.

Before eight o clock classes at the Faculty of Philosophy, we would all go down to the buffet to get started with coffee and a brandy. Then again for a second brandy and coffee; "elevenses" as my dear colleague Kornel called it. Even better was the invitation from the Chemistry department- they always had the real stuff in a drawer somewhere - homemade plum brandy from someone's village.

And then, at lunch time everything stopped and didn't start again till four. But in Belgrade it was the same. Yugoslav's attitude to work came to international attention when the capital of the Peoples' Republic became the first, with much fanfare, to welcome a McDonalds. So many Belgraders lined up to apply! It was all so bright and golden and western! But after a few months Mcdonalds was having a big problem. As the employees explained to the reporters: "They want us to work!"

That is, not put on the coffee, and slip out to the market to buy the vegetables and water melon for lunch, to sit down with Politika and check the football results. McDonalds wanted four solid hours, half an hour off and then another four.

Actually, coming from England, I am shocked at the American work day myself'. I've done a lot of jobs in my time, from kitchen worker, to Ministry of Pensions, to selling at Harrods, to working on a farm and everywhere it was ten (really fifteen minutes) tea break in the morning, an hour for lunch - and the tea break in the afternoon. Here? Grab a few minutes AM and PM and just half an hour in the middle.

I should be unfurling my workers' flag and arousing the masses. Don't Tread On Me! would be a good one too. Certainly the way things are at the moment, there should be a lot of able-bodied men and women just hanging around, free to march. So perhaps, on reflection, this is not quite the right year.

Naming of children

2010-04-27T18:38:00.000-07:00

Because "Motes" is so short we only considered names of more than two syllables for our son. The Bible seemed a good place to look -Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Zachariah. I liked the sound of Obadiah. Not for a young man, but what a tombstone: "Here lies Obadiah Motes." He'd have to go West for that one. In the end we decided on Bartholomew.

But when the nurse popped in to ask me what name had been chosen, I said, "I like the name Matthew." Fine, said the nurse, that's a nice name for your son. "Oh, no, it's not his name," said I. "I just like the sound of 'Matthew'. Don't you?" It had been a long night.

We got clear after a bit that actually Bartholomew's name was going to be Bartholomew and the nurse asked me to spell it because she couldn't spell it. But neither could I. That morning there seemed to be too many 'o''s.

So Bart started off as Bartholemew and of course, became almost immediately Bart- (though he does have orchid names in both forms: Some plant or two, called "Bart" for friends and Ascocenda Bartholomew Motes for prospective bosses or mothers-in-law.)

It was easy with Alice. "Alice" was a favorite from the start, both the Wonderland bit and the fact that it was less shopworn, (enough with the Sarahs and Rachels!) and for a touch of familial piety. Alice was the name of my mother's beloved sister who died too young. But when I presented my mother with the news, she just said, "Oh, yes." And that was it.

Admittedly, we are English and my mother is the very Anglo-Saxon side, but still. I'd forgotten that when it came to naming children her attitude had always been pretty spacey.

I'd asked her why was my brother called James Harvey. Nobody anywhere in the family was or had ever been a James, let alone a Harvey- a name I'd never even heard, apart from the rabbit. And she said she couldn't remember why "James" but Harvey was the name of the village blacksmith and when the godfather hadn't turned up for the christening, they asked the blacksmith to fill in.

Then there was the question of my name. My mother, having lost her brother when he was twelve and then her beloved Alice, said she didn't believe in God. So, why, said I in my Christopher-Columbus-Age-of-Discovery-years, why was I called Mary Christine?

No-one in the family was a Mary or a Christine. "Why am I named Mother of God and Follower of Christ?"

And my mother said "Um," in the good old English way. She didn't know why.

But I'm just the same: my brother's cat was called Mittens but for the life of me I can't remember why I called my cat Sam.

Naming Orchids

2010-04-01T13:25:00.000-07:00

I don't quite know how it started. Dr Motes and I are both English graduates, we like playing around with words. We're very competitive. He may have a Phd (English/Philosophy) but I can keep up. I have an English degree (as in from England) Upper Second Honors - back in the day when degrees were degrees. Hhrrumph, hhrrumph.

And we had fun right from the start, cocky English majors on the orchid breeding scene: you're calling your new hybrid Joe Bloggs Joy? Ha! We'll raise you Motes Jubilation! You're trotting out that old chestnut, Joe Bloggs Beauty? How about Motes Resplendent! Gotcha! And there was Hot Chestnut and Ruby Tuesday and Toledo Blue (though as Dr Motes remarks ruefully, all the others turned out pink.)

We had our spice series: Motes Nutmeg, Ginger Hot, Cinnamon: our African series...Motes Sahara, Motes Kalihari, and did we have Zanzibar? I know I was rooting for Zanzibar...

And just the word Miami was hot: Motes Miami Primrose, Miami Snowdrop, Miami Mandarin. And no Joe Bloggs Gold - let's have Motes Sunlit, Motes Gold Piece, Motes Burning Sands...

We always had a good dose of family. You can tell some of the earliest crosses: first was father's name, then mother, sister, then my mother, then Bart and Alice, the two children who keep reappearing.

And then we got into the naming of friends and dearly departed and that can be a problem. There is the naming of the orchid and the sending in of the registration to the Royal Horticultural Society at Kew, in the UK. And that name is going down in history! WOW! Wonderful! Thank-you, Thank-you! but then the flower dies on the chosen plant, the plant is put back in the midst of all the others... And then disappears or just can't be found at a minute's notice, when the recipient or a relative comes to see and we hear ourselves saying: "Oh, it's here somewhere.." like it's an Extra Large T shirt in a distant pile.

But anyway, what has turned out to be the big joke in all of this, in spite of our spice series, and Miami series, and archival family and old friends series, is that by now I am the person who has more orchids named after her than anyone else. Like I've hogged it -Me! Me! Like Imelda Marcos with shoes.

And my line is always the old wisecrack: "Well, if your husband brings you home flowers, you don't say "Thank you!" you say: "What have you been up to?" So at this rate, whatever it is that Dr. Motes has been up to, is definitely off the charts. Motes himself, he's enigmatic - he just seems intent on keeping the record. Maybe he's angling for -hey-the Guinness Book... Why not?

Motes Orchids could be right up there with the most hot dogs eaten, the tallest man...the biggest cabbage... Watch This Space.

Living the American Dream

2010-03-22T05:30:00.000-07:00

Motes Orchids, started from the ground up, would probably not exist if our kids hadn't been healthy. For years we lived without health insurance, (Older Mum, young kids, that'll cost you!) calculating the odds, fingers crossed. One of the worst moments came when young Alice fell and cut her forehead open on an old metal tub in the backyard. Emergency room $$$$$- or scarred for life? Martin cleared the blood off and we made the choice - OK, maybe scarred for life. Well, she could always wear her hair as you say so strangely in the States, in bangs. Miraculously, it all healed up. And Motes Orchids and Alice lived on. Family values as our Republican friends would say, Family Values!

Ascocenda Elizabeth Taylor

2010-03-15T18:37:00.000-07:00

OK , Dr. Motes was in Taiwan, judging an orchid show and I was home battling the unusual cold, and then along came the Fairchild Botanical Garden Orchid Festival. So that's why the second installment of Name Dropping comes a little late.

The story goes like this: a few years ago, just before Christmas, we were asked by a Lord and Lady someone in England, to send an orchid to "a dear friend" - Elizabeth Taylor. THE Elizabeth Taylor. And we said, thank-you but we don't ship. And then we thought, well, if it comes to name-dropping, it would make a neat story..."Oh, we just shipped one of our orchids (special request) to Elizabeth Taylor, for Christmas.."

And on cue, a handsome-looking plant was discovered, with three perfect flower spikes, just ripe to burst out gloriously in time for Christmas. We hung Elizabeth Taylor's Christmas present away in the back of the greenhouse, but after a Saturday pre-Christmas sale, discovered it had disappeared - stolen.

The whole scene turned black like a silent movie: "STOLEN! " "WHAT CAN THEY DO???"

Well, it turned out that just at that very moment, one of Motes Orchids' new crosses bloomed out, an Ascocenda of such a vibrant violet it all but yelled: "I should be called Elizabeth Taylor!" (It's her eyes, their legendary color, for those who don't follow such things.) So the beautiful violet-colored Ascocenda became Ascocenda Elizabeth Taylor and was shipped out to Elizabeth Taylor, movie star, for Christmas.

And we got a little signed card back: "From the desk of Elizabeth Taylor" thanking us for "the beautiful flower," and Dr. Motes, innocent soul, says "She signed it!" and I, having spent my teenage years sending away for pictures of the stars, did what one always did on receiving the glossy portrait with the name across the corner, licked a finger and rubbed the signature. No, Elizabeth Taylor, like Gregory Peck and all the others, had not actually signed her name, not even for her very own orchid. But the blooming out of Elizabeth Taylors continued, and we have them to this day - almost none since that first, a perfect deep violet, but deep purples, light purples and some pink. And whenever we sell one, or just are standing there, looking at orchids, when an Elizabeth Taylor is in bloom, even the pink ones, we have a story to tell.

A kiss from Michelle

2010-02-24T13:42:00.000-08:00

Probably impossible, now - apart from a few close friends and family, and the Queen and inner city children who've just lost 10lbs eating their carrots. The secret is to get in early - before the celebrity and the security.

It started with Obama's early visit to the Dade County Auditorium, back in the fall of '07, when he was still just one of seven and my idea was go see the man -pay to be up close, more fun than just writing a check. And why not take a few orchid flowers along, some of our big, fat, brilliant bling bling purples that say:"Our Time Has Come!"

We paid a hundred dollars each to sit right up close - so close that in front of us were just two rows of important people, and right in front, a sunny, perfect family, with two flaxen-haired small children being good. So when all the important people left their chairs to go meet Obama before he spoke, I gave the orchid flowers to one of the young children, to give to Barak. And when they came back to their seats, their sunny mother nodded and smiled: mission accomplished!

So when Michelle came to town in early '08, we did it again- paying to hear her speak at the Biltmore Hotel. We were just a few feet away, with our glasses of wine and cheesy fingers and three beautiful spikes of Vanda flowers. Deep purple, almost black, on white, they are an orchid that turns heads. In fact, coming into the sumptuous Biltmore it was like Pretty Woman: even the waiters and receptionists turned to look.

After Michelle spoke and before the clapping had stopped I crossed the few feet of carpet with the flowers and said I wanted to welcome her to our tropical US. I should have said "sub-tropical " but that doesn't have much swing to it. And Michelle looked down at me- (she is tall but she was up on a little dais) and said "Well, bless you!" and leant forward and gave me a kiss.

And then Dr Motes, pushing forward in the surge as she came down to meet and greet, was saying something to her and I prodded Bart forward but he said something deep and political and it was left to me to say: "Bart's going to work for Obama in New Hampshire!" and Michelle exclaimed, "Oh, bless you!" again, this time to Bart and gave him a kiss and turned to me, on that hot, sunny Florida winter's day and said: "Feed him up!"

So that's our Michelle story.

Las Vegas and the common man

2010-02-14T07:47:00.000-08:00

So the President and Vice-President of Motes Orchids went to Las Vegas on Super Bowl weekend, invited by the Las Vegas Orchid Society, (who may be called upon to verify this for the IRS,) and lodged within walking distance of the Bellagio and Caesar's Palace. On Sunday afternoon, after a stunning power point presentation on Breeding Intergeneric Vanda Orchids, review of the plant table and the raffle, we were back in our room with the big TV settled in for the second half of the Super Bowl.

Demand for hotels had been intense, they'd said, so after the game we surged out to celebrate under the lights, car horns blaring, amid the chants and cheering crowds. After all, in Las Vegas people can just walk around with beers in their hands and monster cocktaily kind of glasses from the casinos. But Sunday evening, after the game, there was absolutely nothing. Only the same black stretch limos gliding quietly up and down the strip, people strolling by. Maybe all those visitors were just gamblers, and lost inside. It wasn't until Monday afternoon that we passed two guys lurching along the pavement, one with a Mardi Gras necklace, hoarse from yelling "Who Dat?"

I saw only one beer bottle and one fancy plastic glass stuck in a tub of greenery, the whole weekend. No trash, no voices raised in sin city. No men in dark suits along the strip, standing in the background, like they do in the casinos. Las Vegas: Adult Disneyland. I always have the feeling that inside that Mickey Mouse suit is probably Security. How would Las Vegas deal with English soccer fans? That would be a match up. Brits have cracked down hard on soccer hooligans but the talk right now is of an epidemic of alcoholism, as though the UK were Russia.

You can wander into the Bellagio, flip flops flapping over the inlaid marble, under sparkling chandeliers, among the orchids and bromeliads, to be greeted with warm smiles and absolute courtesy. No-one seems abashed or intimidated by the splendor. Apparently no one needs to get drunk to feel they're entitled or to show they don't care. Las Vegas really is for the common people.

For the English, until a few years ago, the word "common" could make you cringe; we might as well have all been Jane Austens. And how you spoke defined you. As soon as you opened your mouth, that was it. For the English it was not the color of your skin but the sound of your vowels. From My Fair Lady until Michael Caine - the first English star who could carry a movie and still talk common. He was the pioneer, England's Will Smith or Denzel Washington. (Not our Sydney Poitier - there were plenty of those - but we would never have known. For English working-class actors it was easy to practice talking proper and pass for white.) Now, talking proper, posh, sounds comic. And even the young princes deliberately sound common. But I'm not sure that's turned us into Americans, yet.

Note to orchid lovers: Las Vegas is not only the friend of the common man but the common orchid lover on a tight or nonexistent budget. Orchid society members here don't have to dumpster dive round the back of Home Depot looking for faded phals: they can commandeer the orchids from old displays in the hotels and casinos. For example, there are phaleanopsis, oncidiums and cymbidiums in beautiful displays right now at the Bellagio, part of the celebration for Chinese New Year. Time your Vegas Weekend right, and you could make out like a bandit. Orchid takeaway. And if you find you have amassed too many, you can rent what we saw moving through down town Las Vegas: a stretch limo pick-up truck. Only in America. Or maybe, only in Las Vegas.

Haitian attitudes

2010-01-24T06:13:00.000-08:00

A Haitian accent gives me a twinge of inferiority. I don't speak French and for the English, to be reasonably educated and not know at least some French, is a little embarrassing. At least when I hear that soft French sound, whether from French or Creole, I can sling out a "merci!" and "au revoir!" at the Publix check out and get a flash of a smile, slight, conspiratorial. We are communicating elegantly over the grocery cart, in the clunking Anglo-Saxon world. I am saying you may be the poorest country around, you may be looked down upon by African Americans, but do you have a history and don't you sound good.

It was a different feeling at the old Florida City swap meet. As the rest of us bent over the heaped up weekly treasures at Carlos' "boutique" the word would go up "The Haitians are coming!" Then we grabbed whatever looked promising before the big strong women with the big boxes and sacks arrived. Back then, when it came to T shirts I was on the same economic level; over 25 cents and I thought twice. But when those ladies swung into action there was no time to think twice or you'd be left empty-handed, sure that you'd have appreciated that Liz Clairbourne more than some skinny Haitian somewhere.

In fact, the Haitian women at the swap meet were mostly defined by a certain chic - they wore a headscarf or bandanna just so, a beret or a small hat. They carried themselves erect and often with an air of looking down their noses -(so French!) And the children, especially the boys, always looked like they were dressed for church.

Many Haitians have bought orchids from us - no need to ask where are you from? Most elegant, rich, cool -French seems such an appropriate language! -And also some teachers and professionals over the years, some determined, others despairing. We hope to have a table at the Tamiami International Orchid Festival next weekend, and raise some money for Haiti, like everyone else. So they can keep those heads up, even though it means they may look down their noses at us, who were never so brave and bold in the past and never had to pay so dearly for it.

Avatar and District Nine

2010-01-17T07:58:00.000-08:00

So the Big Freeze - not so much. Almost no yellowing lower leaves on the vandas, almost no cold burn. The grass looked pretty browned off, though, and suddenly a lot of leaves are falling. But then the Fall in South Florida is the Spring: that's when the trees shed their leaves. The monstera has suffered too - those big, floppy tropical Avatar leaves withered and brown.

We went to see Avatar in 3D last week when it was still too cold to do much. I think how much more exotic it would have seemed if I were still in England. Now we have towering bamboo outside the kitchen door, big, flapping banana plants, crawling, broad predatory vines and monstera leaves rearing up along the paths. Dr. Motes thought Avatar "very botanical." I thought the colors too Disney and hunkered down expecting to be Lord of the Rings bored: how many times can these guys trudge up and down mountain paths? How stupid do trees on the move look? But three hours later I could not believe it was three hours later.

Then two nights on,we watched District Nine. And like Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh, I started to see a pattern emerging.

1. The Indians are allowed to win. (Pssst! Finally!)

Well, in District Nine, only two prawn-aliens really make it out of there but the white man dies! Sort of. He becomes a battered street alien, too.

In Avatar, though many Na'vi die, they beat the white man, the military machine, in one of the most thrilling battles since old World War Two movies.

2. Both heroes are ordinary, decent guys who just follow orders.....until...they follow their better nature. (Fox - They Betray Their Own People! )

3. Both are against the merciless, corporate world. Each An Army Of One. Both "go native," the thing most feared by imperial rulers. The disabled marine in Avatar, and the South African white who is forced to go native with the prawns. In both movies the police, the army, the marines, the tough officers and their incredible machines of war explode and die and, in District Nine, the hero prawn and son not only escape to their superior mother-ship - they leave many South Africans below wondering whether they might even return and invade.

This would not have happened under the Republicans. People want their country, or at least their movies, back!

On the other hand, the Greenies and the liberals will ask: why do you always need white men to be the saviours - the great white hope, as it were?

Well, even us liberals, we have to identify with someone. Hard, at the start, to identify with a large prawn-like creature or a towering blue creation with a tail. Though, by the end of District Nine we are all rooting for Christopher the brave and smart prawn and ready to adopt his incredibly cute and smart son.

The design of the Na'vi in Avatar and the prawns in District Nine are surprisingly similar: same basic shape- tall, imposing, long-waisted, small-bottomed, very light and springy on their feet.

The Na'vi of course, are the pretty ones. Ah, those cheekbones. Everyone a Cameron Diaz. Can't beat that. On the other hand - where do those cheekbones come from? Not from the Pilgrim Fathers or The Daughters of the American Revolution. Sorry, Glenn and Rush, you've lost. You won't get your country back.

The Big Freeze

2010-01-09T11:05:00.000-08:00

The BBC ended their World News round up the other evening with pictures of frozen iguanas falling out of South Florida trees.

Suddenly hard, miserable weather and not just cold but damp - English weather. It's always said about England, (like here: "Its not the heat it's the humidity") that: "It's not the cold it's the damp." And our old Cracker house, the model for Aunt Charlotte's in Orchid Territory, reminds me too much of England in the old days. Designed to keep heat out, it does such a good job we always joke we'd be warmer down with the orchids.

When I think back over the years here, growing orchids, what is most vivid is the drama of cold and freezes, rather than hurricanes, even Andrew. The big drama in Orchid Territory is the New Year's Eve freeze: the tearing plastic, the arctic blast coming out of nowhere, out shivering at midnight under the cold hard stars, praying the pump won't fail and the plastic holds. Novels set in Florida often do great, dramatic things with storms and hurricanes hitting high-rises...windows smashing...and they often read about as real as computer-generated disaster movies..But here's a modest word: Orchid Territory tells it like it is for orchid growers.

If you have orchids, the warm-loving ones, you feel the cold with them like a mother with a new born baby. It's the one thing that unites newcomers and the natives. When you observe a strapping mid-westerner wringing his hands over a forecast of 48 Fahrenheit, you know he's down here growing orchids and what's more, he's been celebrating the fact that he's down here growing orchids and not up in Minnesota growing orchids and has been happily, if not deliriously, draping them under trees, on fences and trellises:" Hey! I am out in my yard in December in my shorts at one with nature and it is good!"

And like us locals, he's basically unprepared, even more so. In England, it's always like that, even though we always have cold weather (any time of the year, actually.) Right now, apparently, they've run out of salt for the roads and the Prime Minister may have to resign. Years ago it was just the same: one little blizzard and out came the headlines: "Only Six Snow Ploughs for the Whole of England and Wales! All In North Yorkshire!"

Dr. Motes has sent out his Don't panic! Freeze emails. Am not sure what he's told those who've followed his advice by sticking orchids on to suitable trees with Liquid Nails. Even iguanas would have a hard job falling out of trees if they'd been stuck on with Liquid Nails. But there are always unlikely survivors, after a freeze. Some orchids put out in the grove because they refused to bloom, also, we discover, refuse to die. And on the other hand, some silly little Vanda in the shade house, in the middle of a warm and cosy row, gets a hissy fit and turns burned and brown for no reason at all.

But this time, with forecasts of maybe below freezing for two nights, then this looks like being the big one. And even our heaters and strategic watering may not be enough. And certainly when we emerge, blinking at the scene, everything outside should be mostly burned brown by the cold. So bring in what you can, or cover with sheets like the Ramada Inn. We were there two nights ago, courtesy of the Naples Orchid Society (after Martin's talk on Darwin and Survival of the Fittest) and the management had tucked sheets - some fitted, some top- all around their ornamental flower beds. ( "Beds!" -Ha!) As Martin observed: "Well, if you need sheets, then a hotel is certainly the place to find them."

The local channels will be telling us to bring in our orchids and our pets. Our two large mastiffs are in the kitchen right now, sitting there a little uneasy, like pupils told to relax in the principal's office and as far as the orchids are concerned, we can do no more. As our young hero in Orchid Territory reflects on the night of the freeze: "The plastic was tight, the water was on. Nature was on the rampage out there just taking her course, clumping down the peninsular: Termi-nature! And in an hour or two, in the dawn, they'd all see how merciless she'd been."

New Years' Eves I have known

2010-01-01T05:40:00.000-08:00

I was watching Tennessee against Virginia Tech in the Chic-Fil-A Bowl ( great cow ads!) till Dr.Motes fell asleep and I switched to After The Thin Man on TCM, which starts with a New Year's Eve party. And it set me to wondering, as we used to say ponderously in pre-twitter days, what on earth I"d done with all the New Years' Eves in my life.

When I was growing up in England New Year's Eve was something the Scots did over the border, a rowdy Celtic fringe night of drunkeness and broken glass. Of course, when I was small the war was on, which would have dampened down the Scots, even in Glasgow, so it was blackout curtaining and quiet. Living it up with noise and lights after dark would have been a kind of Fawlty Towers scenario: "Lights out, colonel! Bloody Jerry's coming ovah!"

As a teenager I remember opening the front door at midnight out into the cold to hear the train whistles going full blast. And once I went up to London, only forty minutes away, and joined everyone in Trafalgar Square. That must have been in my early Nuclear Disarmament days when I was confident of the benevolence of crowds: lots of smiling and greetings and a man in a green kilt twirling around by himself.

Then, teaching in Yugoslavia, and taking the train up to Belgrade for New Year to be with Mirka and Duska with their new husbands and all the old friends with their husbands or serious boy friends, out to the restaurants and me not allowed to pay for myself (no husband, no boyfriend) and the glasses raised at midnight. Everyone turning to me with the fervent wish: "Here's to Mary and her happiness in the New Year!" (i.e.: Find a husband! Or at least a regular boyfriend- and stay away from those Albanians! )

Then along came Dr. Motes, and it was a New Year in Greece and up on the roof of our hostel in Athens, looking down at the city and me dancing round the tables with local Greeks showing off that I was not so English after all, but what we both remember most clearly was the Greek girl sobbing at the foot of the stairs. Her brother had just been killed in Cyprus.

And then the US: pregnant and poor, two weary horticultural workers, cold fronts and worry over orchids, toddlers and no baby sitters. We didn't have carpets or curtains and NO TV! How could you get a teenager to come with no TV? Especially in the Miami area. Maybe somewhere in Vermont or a New Age commune in New Mexico...

And then much later, the young 'uns having bonfires out back, promising to be quiet and later on, swiping beers and promising to be quiet.

And now it's college football and with Dr Motes dozing off,(still the horticultural worker!) and Tennessee losing momentum, wouldn't it be a wonderful way to start the New Year by going to bed early? Basically sober and bright-eyed? An Early Night!! A New Year present to myself.

You kidding? Let's see: It's After the Thin Man on TCM, god bless them! A sparkling, smart comedy. It's white wine and popcorn, fireworks occasionally thumping outside, cosy inside. Lucky me.

Merry Christmas, Comrade Teacher!

2009-12-23T06:56:00.000-08:00

In the old communist Yugoslavia there was no Christmas, only New Year but in Kosovo strings of light bulbs were twinkling round the balconies of the minarets in mid-December, for Ramazan. It was my first Christmas teaching there and the head of the English department apologized when Christmas day came around because he'd forgotten. Milovan told me to take the day off.

But it was more fun to be in the English department where every day was Christmassy, with its early morning trip to the buffet in the basement for Turkish coffee and brandy. And then there was 'elevenses' when we slid down the snowy slope across Marshal Tito street to The Three Hats opposite the Faculty of Philosphy for more coffee and brandy "to keep out the cold."

Pristina, capital of Kosovo, already looked like a Christmas card, the sky a brilliant blue with the sun shining on the snow. And sometimes it seemed the whole point of being there, ("A missionary!" as my Belgrade friends said,) was that the only sound on Marshall Tito Street, apart from the occasional truck or Party car, was the hissing of sledges gliding over snow and the jingle of harness and sleigh bells as the peasants drove through town.

It was not until after Christmas that the shops started to look festive. For the poorest province of Yugoslavia that meant the arrival of oranges, lemons and bananas and the placing of white cotton wool snow along the tops of the framed portraits of Tito and Lenin that had been moved down in front of the school books, the canned meats and bottles of brandy. Fir trees were dragged home from the market on toboggans, like the pigs, but the small black or pink ones were carried like chickens, by the legs, squealing as they twirled first one way then the other. It ws New Year and anyone with a pig was Serbian, or at least Christian. The raising of pigs was a tactic of survival under Moslem rule: an unclean pig would not be stolen.

There were Catholic Albanians in Kosovo as well as Moslem but Serbians were Orthodox which meant their Christmas would have been in January. With older Yugoslavs the first question was always: "What is your religion?" "Protestant" meant nothing so the second, puzzled question was: "When do you celebrate Christmas?" And then came the triumphant:"But that's the Catholic Christmas!" and I was classified with the Catholics.

It was a little complicated for Oral Exercises in English, even with the fourth year but all the students had fun that first Christmas morning with their greetings and variations on "Merry Christmas, Comrade Miss Mary!" "Merry Christmas, Comrade Teacher!"

'Tis the Season

2009-12-06T06:11:00.000-08:00

Apart from my bit on Motes Orchids and Face Book, it has been twelve days since my last blog... Sounds as if I'm writing this with a quill pen, in my cabin, as the ship drifts becalmed, sails torn, food running low...

In fact, it IS a bit like that, becalmed by such modest thoughts as: Who do I think I am? And buffeted by the question: Isn't this always about me? (Cheering quote from Oscar Wilde, who enjoyed talking about nothing: -"... it's the only thing I know anything about.")

But now is the season for deep thoughts about Giving and Society and Commercialism and Stuff- (as in having too much.)

Once more, I didn't purchase the UNICEF Christmas cards - always leave it too late - but did get two lovely boxes of elegant little cards with colored envelopes, (no less) - 20 for 3.99 at T J Maxx - and have promised myself will donate the extra to a Charity of My Choice.

That would be Oxfam, though there are so many good ones now. Oxfam started as a reaction by a bunch of professors at Oxford, if I remember rightly, incensed that out of every pound sterling raised for charity, about eighty percent was spent raising money for charity.

Now, of course, Oxfam and my other glam charity, Doctors without Borders, in response to my modest contribution, send me enough paper work to feed a goat for a month.

How far away are we from the Victorians? How many generations? In the nineteenth century London was like Calcutta: Oliver Twist and Slumdog Millionaire. A question of skirting the overwhelming poverty and averting the eyes. I wonder if our great grand children will look back and ask How could you? How could you walk past your television screens, on your way to the fridge, or feeding the dog, saying the problem is just too big. And we will answer: it seemed OK and quite normal at the time.

Motes Orchids on Facebook!

2009-12-06T05:43:00.000-08:00

Motes Orchids is on Facebook !

By the way, a reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement states that exclamation marks are absolutely OK on the internet, in fact, required! They add emotion and life. This is a great relief as in paper letters exclamation marks come across as hyper teenage tics. So - Who Knew!!!!

Right- so here's a shout out to Motes Orchids on Face book which looks so pretty and bright - pixs of beautiful orchids - many of which are ours - (just saying!) And lively comment. We should have done this years ago!!! But better late than never !!!

Note: Now need justification for the use of the dash - I do love it. !!!

Thanksgiving from Scratch

2009-11-24T05:14:00.000-08:00

We all know America is the greatest melting pot of all and everyone is of equal value and if you say they're not then you have to apologize but I can't help feeling that being Anglo-Saxon definitely gives one a leg up in the melting pot.

I felt this especially because I met Dr. Motes, Martin, teaching in Kosovo, southern Serbia, where three languages were spoken: Serbian, Turkish and Albanian,-none of them anywhere close to English. (Locals grumbling about learning Spanish - you have no idea!)

So, anyway, it was obvious that coming from southern Serbia to South Florida would be a piece of cake. And for a 'native speaker' as the English teachers call us, minor facts - such as "vest" and "knickers" in American English having nothing to do with underwear, or that "washing up" means cleaning your face rather than doing the dishes- were not things likely to throw me or make me have to stop what I was doing and call my mother.

But having finally arrived in Florida in October, almost the first thing I was told by Martin, not known as a family man, was that we would be on the road again, for Thanksgiving: to be with the parents. "Thanksgiving is more important for Americans than Christmas."

More important than ...More important than Christmas? It was then I realized I was in a foreign country, that I had married a stranger from a strange land and the child I was bearing would grow up with almost as lopsided an idea of the calendar as the children of my Yugoslav friends, who had their big day in November too, the Day of the Republic. But for them, that was understandable. They were not Anglo-saxon and all the more fun for that, but Americans had no excuse.

All that was a long time ago and as Lord Chesterton said about something entirely different: "The agony has abated." I have since learned the customs of this strange new land and now am proud to announce that when it comes to the turkey for Thanksgiving I yield to noone in my ability to serve up a tender, golden bird. I have become a champion baster. And I do stuffing - from scratch- (I like that American expression) even if it takes for ever. My secret? you ask. One just keeps on adding: the half jar of mango chutney, the last dollop of mustard, whatever's in all those little pots hiding at the back of the fridge, the last few crackers that got put in the freezer. Say what you like about my stuffing - it's definitely from scratch.

And I do cranberry sauce from scratch. In that, I may be being too American. I don't know if our family and friends are different or more lazy than most, but I discovered that making real cranberry sauce did not seem to be traditional. The first year at home, I bought a bag of cranberries, (a new fruit to someone from England) - read the directions, slid the berries into boiling water with a cup of sugar- simmered them till they popped, cooled them and put them in a pretty bowl. And this brought forth exclamations of surprise. Apparently the real American thing is to have some kind of a roll of coagulated berries that slide out of a can.

Now I am an American, finally, but only just. When asked, I didn't know how many stripes were on the flag and I had no idea which president was on what dollar bill. But if they had asked me about basting a turkey or making cranberry sauce from scratch - I would have aced it.

Do's and Don'ts of Orchid Selling

2009-11-16T13:56:00.000-08:00

When I think of the Do's and Don'ts of Orchid Selling I realize that with Motes Orchids it's the Don'ts that stand out, that define us best.

1. Don't mix politics and religion with business!

Where's the fun in that? Our philosophy at Motes Orchids is: if you are going to be open to the public and selling things what better time than to talk about Darwin, politics and anything else that stirs us up? Otherwise, with all due respect, we might as well be bank tellers or greeters at Walmart.

2. Don't kid around too much especially with new people.

I once told a gentleman from Chicago, visiting with friends, "Yes, we have a Porta Potty but Martin always says for guys: "Why waste the nitrates! Just go into the grove!"

He was a tall, imposing man and I still remember the look on his face as he gazed down at me.

3. Don't kid around Part II

When people very nicely ask if they may just look around? Do not answer: "Of course! Just remember there are electronic devices at all exits! Ha ha!"

This actually is a visual joke and may be lost on those unfamiliar with the appearance of Motes Orchids. Those who are, always get the joke.

4. Don't hover. (Around a customer).

Actually, we don't. (Usually too busy talking and, or, arguing - see above.)

Whatever is said about personal service and attention to customers being the most important thing for small businesses competing with the likes of Walmart or Home Depot- don't ever hover-hovering is so out. If you stand around at a customer's elbow, with or without helpful suggestions, and follow them from plant to plant, you will not encourage them to prefer you to the impersonal garden center at Target- you will merely look like you're keeping an eye on them because you think they might be trying to pinch something.

5. Don't turn off the radio if only one person has ventured into the nursery early on, especially someone new. Leave the radio on, otherwise an ominous silence will develop and scare them away.

6. BUT Don't bully customers to listen to Car Talk just because you think it's the best thing on Saturday morning.

7. Don't immediately try out your elementary or quite good Spanish when you hear a Spanish accent.

It is tempting to practice or show off and often your attempts will be met with exclamations of surprise and delight and appreciation and Motes Orchids will triumph once again but sometimes not. And it is well to remember that this individual who does not appreciate your helping out, may well have been in South Florida far longer than the average English speaker, and may well have a richer vocabulary than you do -given the latinate nature of so much Spanish vocabulary- (ie: long words).

8. SO Don't hand out orchid culture sheets in Spanish when you hear an accent unless you hand out the English one as you do so, saying: "Well, probably grandmother will be looking after the orchids too!Ha ha!"

9. Don't make too many suggestions and give too many options to customers who have a hard job making up their minds.

You know you've lost a sale when the comments slide from: "Oh! They're both so lovely I can't decide!" to-"Oh, heavens - what do you think of this one too?" To-"Oh, I really just can't decide. They're ALL so lovely!" and off they drift.

And 10 Don't start a long gloomy economic history of the pricing of orchids.

People have come for the flowers and (if they know us) bracing argument and conversation. Though I do think it is TOTALLY legitimate to point out why vandas should be more expensive than cute little commercial phalaenopsis and oncidiums and dendrobiums- those little Barbie doll orchids. Because vandas and often ascocendas too, are older and often have gone through a lot. Our orchids are more like parrots - they can outlive you if treated right. And a slightly battered appearance merely means these are five, six, seven years old (and on you can go-) Some of these orchids remember Andrew(1992.) If they could speak what a tale they could tell! Whereas your little phals- under two years old! Theyre like little Miss Worlds with their pretty, empty little heads! I'm sure they're all for World Peace and recycling but that's about it.

BUT PSSST! If it weren't for being Mrs motesiana and married to vandas and ascocendas- if I were fresh into orchids, with my frugal Clearance Rail First! philosophy, my Goodwill or Goodbye! I'd be the first one there, dumpster diving on rescue missions for little orphaned, fading Phalaenopsis round the back of Home Depot.

Do's and Don'ts of Orchid Buying

2009-11-08T09:45:00.000-08:00

Actually Do's are pretty simple -Do buy orchids! Do pay the price stated including sales tax- which brings us to our first Don't:

Don't ask: "Why are you the only people charging sales tax?"

Because I want libraries to stay open, students to have music classes, pot holes to be filled! -And I don't want to get in trouble. Who are you? A sharp customer or a sharp customer from the IRS?

Don't ask: "This orchid doesn't have a price on it-so it's free isn't it? Ha Ha!"

And ha ha to you, too.

Don't ask: "How do I grow them?"

Orchids are the largest and most diverse family of flowering plants in the world. This is like going up to someone selling cakes and asking: "How do I cook?"

Don't ask "How do I grow them?" (Part 11)

If you live in Alaska, on a yacht, down a well, are allergic to plants or just waiting around for a friend, do not ask this question so eagerly and intently that the average orchid vendor becomes convinced that with a little encouragement and explanation, some of your disposable income will soon be his.

Don't ask: "I kill orchids! Now tell me what am I doing wrong?"

You are obviously an evil person and you are proving it by standing squarely in front of me and losing me a sale- Did you see that old hand at orchid shows, that lady who actually had picked up an orchid and was advancing, purse at the ready? Did you see her drifting off when she heard your opening line?

Don't ask: "Could you put this in a basket for me?"

No. The whole point is this orchid is sold as is, it's cheaper, a bargain, "bare-root" because it is Not In A Basket. This question works only too well if you are a drop dead gorgeous female addressing a male employee who has trouble getting dates and knows where the good baskets are kept.

Don't ask: "Do you have another orchid like that one last week- the one that woman got?"

You are distraught - it is the only one you ever really wanted and there must be another one somewhere in the nursery just as perfect and beautiful -but the funny thing is when we ask sympathetically, "What was the name? What size basket was it in? What color was it?" you often can't remember.

You just remember it was the most beautiful orchid and that woman swiped it. Here we need Dr. Motes (Literature and Philosophy)to fill us in on this phenomenon. If you cut out references to Plato etc., it boils down to the fact that reality can never live up to things remembered and dreamed of.

In the orchid world this means that however much the orchid house is scoured, however many other orchids are brought forward, even when we remember exactly the color and size of the lost one mourned over, the reaction is always the same: "Oh no, the one I mean, the one that woman got was darker, fuller, just more beautifuller!"

Well,if it were that much darker, fuller, more beautifuller, then it would not have been for sale in the first place.

Don't ask: "Do you have a smaller one of that?"

Because mostly you don't mean smaller, you mean cheaper.

And after having rummaged around in the back, emerging triumphantly, with a keiki or an offshoot:("I know the big one is 75.00 but this is only twenty!") one is almost always met with:

"Oh, um... no thanks."

Because when you've taken the trouble to make a special request, when you've waited patiently for someone to go back and hunt for this specific orchid, and your friends or maybe your Mum and Aunt are waiting too, and the children are starting to have fights with hand-fulls of gravel, then somehow it's not supposed to be smaller and cost all of twenty dollars when it arrives, why would anyone wait around for that? -It's supposed to be the same but cheaper.

This has been written while Dr. Motes is away talking to orchid societies in Philadelphia, New Jersey and Delaware - so while the President is away I was having some fun. In fact, as everyone knows, we answer all the questions above (and more!) with the patience, wit and wisdom for which Motes Orchids is justly famous.

But the little question I like best, the sweet little question that always makes me smile, is the one that often pops up as someone rounds the corner and catches sight of our orchid houses for the first time: vandas, hanging up, row upon row, sitting on benches, in baskets, on S hooks -as far as the eye can see- and they will turn to us and ask shyly:

"So - do you grow vandas?"

Aunt Charlotte and Miss Piggy

2009-11-02T11:07:00.000-08:00

Aunt Charlotte has a fan club. The sharp-tongued English Great Aunt, the weather-beaten old orchid grower who does not suffer fools gladly and prefers wasps to butterflies in nature's scheme of things, has turned out to be a real character. Though, given her pedigree, she should. Right at the start of Orchid Territory I state that Aunt Charlotte is based on Dame Judi Dench playing Queen Elizabeth the First and my grandmother "playing herself."

When I hear authors talking about their plots and how they had NO idea where their characters will lead them and how they just take over the story... I've always been right there with the millions who just roll their eyes and switch back to Power 96.

But somehow Aunt Charlotte is out there now, like Norm in Cheers or Miss Piggy. We all know that Miss Piggy, though she does have a great set of pearls, is basically half a yard of felt and a swish of taffeta (I hear a snort) and yet, she is also definitely there. And no-one would be surprised to hear it had been Miss Piggy up on Capitol Hill, lobbying for swine flu to be called something else.

Aunt Charlotte certainly has the swoopy, commanding voice of a Miss Piggy, hers the old upper class English version that has all but died out. Even the royal family now talk "common" as we used to say. For a while I played with the idea of having Aunt Charlotte be a bit of a con artist- claiming her father had been an eminent orchid collector in the far flung corners of the British Empire - rather than a cockney working in the flower market in the old Covent Garden.

In the end, though he didn't appear, I thought of him as a middle-class banker, anxious and orthodox behind his quiet privet hedge, trying to keep a veil of respectability over Charlotte till she'd finished school.

Some of my friends have said to my face that I am Aunt Charlotte which bewilders me. I am, of course, the timid young English teacher. I am Mark, the Hugh Grant of Orchid Territory, who can hardly start a sentence without "..Um..." Although in the presence of Aunt Charlotte, who, indeed, would not stumble, or preface any sentence with a worried or tentative "...Um?" What a fascinating world this world of the imagination is! Back to Power 96.

Orchids and Sweet Tea

2009-10-25T10:08:00.000-07:00

So we were on the road to Gulfport, Mississippi, then a night on the beautiful Back Bay of Biloxi and on to New Orleans. I noted down the usual things: how many great white herons we saw, and a fawn that luckily jumped back the right way, across the ditch into the wood. And the wayside signs: Big Daddy's Pawn Shop, Miss Molly's Mobile Home Park, Crawfish Burgers, Fatty's Restaurant, Free Pit Bull. But the states come so thick and fast, it's hard to remember if the signs were in Alabama, Mississippi or Louisiana. It's all a little overwhelming after Florida, where you're just either in the state or in the water.There is Alabama bearing down on the Florida panhandle, squeezing in next to Mississippi- staking out those miles of seafront (like rival old Great Powers- Russia, advancing south, hungry for a warm water port; landlocked Austro-Hungary, searching for an outlet to the sea.) But of course, when hurricanes strike, waterfront real estate doesn't look like such a good idea anymore.

Saturday night we stayed in a big house in the middle of a hay field near Gulfport or rather, thirty miles away. Thirty miles inland because as our hostess, whose whole solid house washed away in Gulfport, explained: "That's how far we were told we needed to be." She had a greenhouse up and full of great-looking orchids, especially her vandas, so we knew we were in the right place, but almost no trees yet.

That evening as the email had promised: "We will have gumbo and visit." There was a lot of laughter and good company and it was all done on sweet tea. Like many of my moslem friends, the members of the Gulf Coast Orchid Society did not need alcohol to get a good time going. And when I asked if there might be a glass of wine to go with my gumbo, there was that same moment of puzzlement and then a homemade bottle of cherry wine was located in a cupboard. But there was also a big cache of liquor too; wood floated away on the water while bottles sank, we were told, also guns and coins, left like seaweed at low tide.

We were the first to bring up Katrina, eager to show sympathy and understanding yet somehow it kept ending up everywhere with a lot of shaking of heads and sympathy for us and Andrew. But it was on the way to the meeting Sunday afternoon, along the seafront of Gulfport and Biloxi, that Katrina was inescapable. Among the spreading live oaks facing the beach, For Sale signs stuck in the grass, every few yards, like gravestones, mile after mile, marking where one big beautiful home after another had been swept away. But interestingly, the live oaks all were still there. Martin said it showed the contrast to Andrew, a hard, dry storm that took the trees; here the surge of Katrina had sucked away the houses.

After a night on the water of Back Bay, Biloxi, (We choose our orchid trips well!)where I learned the origin of the American pit bull ( brave and courageous cattle dogs) and was glad to hear someone else agree that the only bible to read was the King James version, we took off Monday to savor Louisiana and ended up spending the night at a beautiful turn of the century house at a small town called Hammond. Antique furniture, lamps and pictures, a great live oak, its branches reaching out to us, a fountain playing down below in the dark as we sat out on the broad veranda behind the pillars, with our chips and cheese.

We were proud of having discovered Hammond, and visiting tiny places north of New Orleans, places, unlike the city, that were something new and unexpected and showed that we were not tourists of disaster. We didn't arrive till mid afternoon - too late for our guided tour -driving into a New Orleans of leafy suburbs and botanical gardens the sort of area where orchid societies like to meet.

Taken out for another great seafood dinner before Martin's talk, I felt we were undeserving. Usually orchid people like it when we explore their back roads, not just zoom in for a talk, sell a few orchids and clear out. But this was New Orleans. Everyone had wanted us to see not how bad things were but how well New Orleans was surviving and coming back.

In fact, the great news to report is, if the New Orleans Orchid Society is anything to go by, New Orleans is doing more than just fine. We have been to many orchid societies from Southern California to New England and one of the usual problems you see is the age factor - too many old folk - and the feeling that quite a few of the older members are there primarily for the cookies and the raffle. Not so in New Orleans. The only addition to sweet tea was decaf coffee but the place was humming like a cocktail party. It was dark outside and inside there was a large cake with strawberries on top that said: WELCOME MOTES and nowhere could I see more than one or two who looked ready for Medicare. Since Katrina there's always been talk of people leaving New Orleans; well, certainly not the orchid society and for anyone wanting to join a young society this is the one- I'd even suggest moving in. And not just for the orchids.

Andrew and Katrina: Hurricane Talk

2009-10-12T12:23:00.000-07:00

This Friday we're leaving for Mississsippi. Martin, Dr. Motes, is speaking to the Gulf Port Orchid Society on Sunday afternoon, New Orleans on Tuesday night and in between we've been invited to spend a night in a lovely home in Biloxi. Those three names immediately conjure up a fourth, Katrina. Here, just north of Homestead, it was Andrew. For the longest time "Andrew" bore no relationship to the naming of male children and over half the sentences in South Dade began with either: "Before Andrew" or "After Andrew." And many times they still do: "Wasn't Turkish Ambassador hit on the road before Andrew?" (one of our dogs) or "Didn't Carlos start just after Andrew?" Or "Hasn't this mango chutney, old shirt, been around since before Andrew?

Andrew came through on August 22, 1992. Martin, that old South Florida hand, (together with all the other experts,) said it would never hit: "Too early, too fast, too straight. They always slow, they always turn." But it didn't. The big new houses round us popped open, the old ones crumbled like sand castles and you could see to US 1 and for miles around; any tree left standing was stripped bare, a broken stick. We were in our old house that hunkered down like an old turtle behind the trees Martin had planted to the north-a wind break, indeed. Those big gumbo limbos were torn in two and lay like fallen soldiers alongside the walls. They did, in fact, die protecting the house: seeing them lying there made me cry.

So, my children, trees are GOOD. Don't ever let anyone convince you otherwise! Don't listen to your parents, the cops, the insurance peddlers or FP and L. You are more likely to die from a falling beer bottle in a bar than a falling tree! (That is, when you get older.) Remember: Trees Are Your Friends!

This is what can start when you just say "Andrew" to a long term South Dader- I resolve not to mention hurricanes in New Orleans, Gulf Port or poor Biloxi- (Like Fawlty Towers- "Don't mention the war!') They've all had enough. We will resist trading war stories or, heaven forbid, give into hurricane-envy. Because our hurricane, until Katrina, was the biggest and the best.

But this will be difficult because we are going to be staying with orchid people who sound absolutely delightful but I know that even in non-hurricane areas, orchid people, however delightful, have a tendency to stand around contemplating trees and bushes in their yards, often until it is almost too dark to see. And this is even if there are no orchids on them, even if no devastating storm has come through in the last year or two or there is no Dr. Motes standing there to be asked where would be a perfect spot for a vanda or an ailing cattleya.

If there is a yard, there will be new trees to discuss and bare spaces to mourn where once a great family tree stood and it will be hard not to trade so many great stories about trees. Our old mulberry tree got such a shock to its system after Andrew that it fruited the very next month, in September. Our big beautiful sapodilla finally keeled over in Andrew- I watched it go, watching the storm through the gap between the planks we'd put up over the french doors in the kitchen. It fell slowly against the bamboo and the bamboo fell against the kitchen wall on the north side and the two of them we are sure helped hold the roof down. And, with great difficulty, (it was a big tree,) soon after, we propped it up again. It survived Katrina (minimal) and Rita (nothing at all) but when Wilma arrived the old sapodilla had had enough. I saw it once again from my spot, as I looked through the gap in the planks- (Martin, the old hurricane hand, asleep- saving his energy for the next morning.) It swayed to and fro while I called out "No! Hold on!" and it keeled over gently down towards the kitchen again, like an elephant sinking to its knees.

-(Note: We've, trimmed it back, propped it up again and it's fine. Children! Never give up on a tree! Especially in Florida!)

Probably no-one in Mississippi even remembers Andrew, the hurricane that made Homestead famous: the hurricane that destroyed the little town. For several years we enjoyed instant recognition and respect when showing our driver's licenses.( "From...? Isn't that where....? And how are you doing?") We were on the national news every night for a month or so but of course no-one had power and few had generators back then, so we never saw our brief moment in the spotlight. But if Andrew made Homestead famous, with Katrina it's the other way around. It is New Orleans that has made Katrina famous and infamous forever, the hurricane that destroyed so much and almost destroyed the fabled city of New Orleans.

-Of course we'll be talking about Katrina -who am I kidding?

The Woman's Page

2009-10-02T04:53:00.000-07:00

I was thinking a quick way to do a blog was the list - Ten Favorite Dogs, Ten Favorite Books -but on books I got stuck. I can dredge up thousands, looking back - all the way to Five Go Adventuring - but I'm not reading books any more. It's not a short attention span. I can spend hours with The Times Literary Supplement, re-examining the origins of the First World War, checking out "Tupai - A field study of Bornean tree shrews" or "Can We Have Our Balls Back, Please? How the British invented Sports" and, by the way, the best review of one of the greatest Westerns ever: Kevin Costner's Open Range.

But thinking of favorite reading right now, People magazine comes to mind, the movie reviews, the fashion, the gossip. I only buy it once a year, after the Academy Awards ("Hits and Misses on the Red Carpet!") not because I'm a snob but because it costs too much. Standing in the grocery line and comparison shopping - it just can't compete. A slim People magazine, even full of George Clooney kidding around with Brad Pitt, is not worth three pounds of oranges or four heads of lettuce or almost five cans of sardines. In fact, three People magazines would pay for a year of The New Yorker, introductory offer.

But I think something about the layout, the nice slightness of it, fills in for something missing since my youth, the Woman's Page. Not a Women's Magazine, that's too much and gets stuffed with filler like Getting ready for Spring! and What to do with left over potatoes. Too much of anything doesn't work - it's like three pages of the Automotive News, and you're ready to move on.

I know women escaped and stayed wary; it was the Women's Cage. And I should know. When asked what did I want to do, to be, ("Back in the day,"indeed!) my answer was "journalist" - even, in my wildest dreams, "foreign correspondent!" Answer came from all the battle-scarred and weary teachers (all women) at my all-girls' school: "Oh, Mary, they'll just put you on the women's page."

Unless you wanted to fight the whole world you could be a teacher or librarian, a secretary or a nurse. And if you were very pretty you'd be one of those snapped up first, to be a housewife.

So I should be the last one to hanker after the old days but I miss not so much just what the Italians are doing for spring but the inside stuff, the fun stuff - like the beauty tip from Princess Di's godmother's daughter. Boot polish, she confided, was better than mascara. Black boot polish. "Stays on forever- doesn't run! Waterproof!" Or the comment from one of the grand dames of Palm Beach on finding bargains. She had just scored with some great socks she'd bought at K Mart. "I don't shop. I hunt."

I would like A Page of One's Own again- We are now lawyers and judges and astronauts and we should be frivolous too and lighten the mood especially for poor expectant mums who need to forget the solemn mother load: playing Mozart to your belly button because unborn babies need to sharpen their mathematical skills.

Not many of us are going to change course because the dominant color for Fall is mustard or one of those colors with names that only Home Depot seems to have heard of in their paint department but it's fun to relish, for example, the ongoing saga of Michelle Obama and the Humble Cardigan. Dear Michelle Obama - who singlehandedly, in spite of the whole arms thing, has brought back the cardigan. Together with the raincoat, the cardigan has been England's traditional dreary, droopy national costume -the American Express card of our national wardrobe- don't leave home without it. But Michelle has shown us the way. In fact, wasn't she wearing a good old cardy when she met the Queen? And they got on so well, that if she wasn't, I bet the Queen said as she left, like all English Mums do, "It's going to be cold, dear, so don't forget your cardy!"

And as the man says, reading about things like that -"I don't care where you're from- that's just fun!"

Vanda motesiana - Who's your Daddy?

2009-09-26T16:38:00.001-07:00

The bright colored flags are up at Motes Orchids, like a car dealership. Martin, Dr. Martin R Motes, has just received- no, earned- the ultimate honor for an orchid breeder, or any orchid nut: he has a new species named for him- Vanda motesiana - the plant long inaccurately known as Vanda stangeana.

He's right up there now with Mr. Sanders, Mr. Schiller (Phal Schilleriana, etc) the two Dr.Hookers- father and son. All nineteenth century gentlemen, their names somehow right for long black coats and top hats, gas light and cobblestones, alongside Sherlock Holmes and Jack the Ripper. Whereas twenty-first century Motesiana has a lightness to it; it sounds like a music festival.

So in the wake of this great event I set out to interview Dr. Motes on this honor and found a happy man.

First question of course, is: "Why the name change?""

"Well," said Dr. Motes, "the species formerly known in horticulture as Vanda stangeana was NOT the plant described by Reichenbach."

Oh. "How could that be?"

"Ignorance! Everyone thought they knew what V. stangeana Reich. f. was but the plant in cultivation had never been described! And now this young graduate student in botany from Pennsylvania, has discovered that the plant in cultivation was not that described by Reichenbach."

Pennsylvania? Vandas are warm-loving orchids-you would think it should be Manila, or Bangkok or Hawaii.. In the same odd way it happens that the revised rules for fertilizing vandas have come from research at the University of Michigan, that hot house of a state.

"So how did the lad in Pennsylvania..?"

"He went to the old plates and pictures, examined them." Played, in fact, the botanical Sherlock Holmes. "And when he pointed out these discrepancies to me and Dr. Eric Christenson" (the two top hats)-"we agreed."

"-That that was not the orchid described by Reichenbach?"

For those for whom this explanation seems a little thin and lacking in detail I refer them to the September edition of The Orchid Review, the journal of the Royal Horticultural Society: page 147: "A new species of Vanda." "Timothy Choltco describes and illustrates Vanda motesiana Choltco, a new species and the correct name for plants in cultivation hiding as Vanda stangeana hort."

"And why did you get the name?"

"I've done more breeding with Vanda motesiana than anyone else- as with many vanda species- It was just that no-one else was very interested." Dr Motes here exhibits a pleasing modesty.

I know the aforenamed "V stangeana"- a not very brilliant yellow vanda but with interesting tessellations-that was why Dr.Motes used it in breeding. (When you live with someone who breeds orchids you learn there are often odd reasons why they like a certain plant: -Me-"What's so special about that one?"- Dr. Motes: "It's the length of the stem!" Me: "Oh."

And of course Dr. Motes helped Timothy Choltco and provided the type specimen of the vanda that was "hiding" under a false identity so the young botanist offered the name to Martin and Dr. Motes is now proposing to name our best "stangeana"- now motesiana- cross after the sharp-eyed young botanist.

So I asked Dr. Motes what did this mean for him, the family, society at large and civilization in general?

Dr. Motes modestly drew attention back to the domestic scene, as well he should: "I will no longer be known as the man married to the woman who has more orchids named after her than anyone else."

Oh. OK. So from now on I'll be the woman married to.. . I'll be Mrs. Motesiana.

Play it again, Sam!

2009-09-18T03:17:00.000-07:00

We won last night! The Canes are back. The University of Miami, our Miami Hurricanes, beat Georgia Tech 33-17. Yeah! Except when our household raised a cheer it was after the event. Together with our new, enormous flat screen TV with HD, we have the record-and-watch-when-you-want miracle feature; the ability to play with time.

Now we can start watching later, skip the commercials, replay the touchdowns..play God. Be king of all we survey, emperor of the remote, thumbs up, thumb down - Caesar surveying the arena. But ...well, for one thing, I rather like the commercials. Football tends to bring out the fun in advertisers. Not like the ones who turn the old-fashioned nightly news broadcasts into a doctor's waiting room.

I know it's a great advance in technology to be able to play with time but if I can't be there in person I'd like to be there in time, when it's all happening - when the Canes come surging out of the smoke on to the field, I want to be cheering with everyone else. When they score a touch down I want to feel I'm yelling with the whole of South Florida, with the nutty students stripped to the waist and painted orange, the tail-gaters waving beer cans and hot dogs, the crowds in bars.. a collective moment.

We are already removed physically from the action -miles away from the stadium. One perched on the rocking chair bought new from Hialeah, one on the futon, one on the old rocking chair from a Salvation Army store in North Carolina: comfortable, not far from the fridge, but isolated in our Florida room, by ourselves. But at least, till now, when we yelled Yes! or howled No! it was with everyone else.

I suppose the argument is soon everyone will have this feature because nothing can stop progress! We'll all be working the remote: fast forwarding, pausing, stopping, twirling time around. And everyone outside of the stadium will be cheering a little later, after it's all happened, and then playing the good moments of course, again and again.

I must admit I planned if Georgia Tech buried us, I'd insist we just go back and replay our first victory of the season over Florida State which we recorded on Labor Day. Again and again till the pain of defeat had subsided. So there would be some basic gut level consolation in high tech progress- Play it again, Sam!

Orchid Territory -New! Improved!

2009-09-11T10:59:00.000-07:00

I had been bemoaning the fact that Martin has sold thousands of his book- Florida Orchid Growing Month by Month - while I toil along - six here, two there - with "Orchid Territory: A Comic Novel." (Will make you laugh, actually! It’s funny about orchids, the business of orchids- You know the English- got to see the funny side!)

People, especially Americans, want to be informed, not laugh. And to say “a novel’ unless you’re Stephen King or those horribly successful women who write about vampires and teenagers...then that’s the kiss of death. Or maybe I should have been inspirational: Chicken Soup for the Orchid Soul..or maybe Cooking with Orchids...

But Orchid Territory, of course, is full of orchid stuff and Aunt Charlotte, the central character, is channeling Dr. Martin Motes, author of the bible for orchid growers: Florida Orchid Growing Month by Month.

Martin wants to add that despite my complaints Orchid Territory has sold 2000 copies and is going to a second edition - which is where the Insider’s Guide comes in: (see below) Each chapter of the second edition will now begin with a little nugget of information. Mary Motes is out to capture some of the How To public. So here goes:

Orchid Territory

An Insider’s Guide

Chapter I Fetching the Pig

If you are serious about Christmas in South Florida you buy a pig. If you are serious about the pig you buy a live one.

Chapter 2 Christmas Eve: Preparations for the Party

“Remember: If a Cattleya looks like it needs watering water it tomorrow. If a Vanda looks like it needs watering water it today, if a Phalaenopsis or a Paphiopedilum looks like it needs watering, you should have watered it YESTERDAY.”

Aunt Charlotte’s famous advice on watering orchids.

Chapter 3 The Party

“You don’t have to know a thing, dear boy! A lot of orchid judges haven’t grown a damn orchid in years! All you need to remember for judging is that you’ve always seen a better one of whatever it is, last year or in another region.”

Aunt Charlotte’s helpful advice to Mark on impersonating an orchid expert from Kew.

Chapter 4 Christmas Day

“Orchids that need moths for pollination are fragrant after dark and tend to be lighter in color– the white or yellows! There’s the hallmark of your orchid– adaptation and intelligence!”

Charlotte (“I do not suffer fools gladly!”) would not have grown orchids if they were stupid.

Chapter 5 New Year’s Eve Party

“I’ve always said Christmas is a tricky market.”

“No-one wants to commit till Christmas Eve. ..You can’t wrap up a plant in November and put it in the closet.”

It may be a party but, if you’re selling orchids for a living, it’s always a good time to complain.

Chapter 6 Cold Front

“Every farmer and nursery-man had the water on. All the way home to Orchid Empire the whole of Redland humming with water: a warm sixty-three degrees out of the ground.”

When there’s a cold front, let alone a freeze, turn on the sprinklers: water can save your orchids.

Chapter 7 New Year’s Night

“Mark had done all he could do. The plastic was tight, the water was on. Nature was on the rampage out there just taking her course, clumping down the peninsular: Termi-nature! And in an hour or two, with the dawn, they’d all see how merciless she’d been.”

Mark facing the freeze New Year’s night.

Chapter 8 New Year’s Day

“The orchids along the front of the greenhouses, the landscape orchids, their actual flowers were frozen under the sprinklers. Charlotte says a coating of ice protects; calls it ‘relatively benign.’”

Mark trying to make conversation New Year’s morning.

Chapter 9 New Year’s Week

“You’ve got your blood lines and your winners. Horses can have four words, orchids only three. Make a new cross, a hybrid, or win an award, you can put any name on it. Register with the Royal Horticultural Society and you’re part of orchid history!”

Charlotte on the naming of orchids.

Chapter 10 A Visit to Orchid Magic

“Apparently for industrial espionage among the orchids all that was needed was a toothpick to lift the pollen from the flower...An awarded orchid of course, was like a prize racehorse. “But a damn sight easier to breed with!” Charlotte had chortled. “All you need is the toothpick!”

Chapter 11 Las Olas Show: Preparation

“Always a litany of disaster! Cold damage, bud drop from high temps, flowers fading, flowers not open–It’s show time!”

Charlotte on the standard nightmares for orchid exhibitors.

Chapter 12 Las Olas: Putting in the Show

“For just the Oncidium Alliance alone there were twenty classes: Oncidium equitant hybrids, pink and lavender predominating, then yellow, orange, red predominating, then ‘other colors.’ Then after having covered more variations than anyone in his right mind could even think or imagine, the list ended with: Oncidium genera, species and hybrids– “other than above.”

Mark on just one corner of orchid judging.

“But...when someone’s got a plant, a pet they want to exhibit and there’s not a division for it to be entered, they’ll scream bloody murder.”

Charlotte explaining.

Chapter 13 Selling at the Las Olas Show

“..treat Phaleanopsis like an African violet, great for beginners or those with low light; but you can’t flower a Vanda just on a window sill even in South Florida.”

Mark, discovering to his surprise he has learned a few general rules about orchids.

Chapter 14 Visiting Rachel and Jen

“You need a cat in South Florida to grow catts. They should be able to walk along a bench without knocking the plants over. Then you have them spaced properly....till the seventies orchids here always meant cattleyas.”

Mark, making conversation; facts courtesy of Charlotte.

Chapter 15 Preparations for the Orchid Talk

“Don’t these societies always have an endless agenda, anyway?...Rachel was complaining, remember, Rachel? They got you all the way up to Central Florida to talk micro-propagation and then what with the minutes and the discussions and the treasurer’s report you had about twenty minutes at the end.”

Larry persuading Mark he’ll be able to survive having to give a talk to an orchid society.

Chapter 16 Orchid Talk: Part 1

“...orchids that looked fairly ordinary and those were the most treacherous of all, the orchids with a totally obscure reason for being special: ‘It’s the breadth of the side lobes!’‘It’s the fact that this is a pink one and coming from the south side of the those mountains in East Java that species should be yellow!’

Mark panicking at being asked, as guest speaker, to identify and assess the orchids brought in by society members.

Chapter 17 Orchid Talk: Part 2

“There were references to the new temperature tolerant Oncidinae, the breeding of short day plants to long day, the fact that cattleyas were still judged as corsages, and the need to work on the strengthening of their stems; the beauty of odontoglossums, so big in England and what a joy that the intergeneric breeding was creating temperature tolerant varieties for Florida.”

Charlotte taking over orchid duties from Mark at the meeting, triumphantly.

Chapter 18 Valentine’s Day at the Mall

“Watch people. You take a flower. You say ‘How beautiful.’ You bring it forward to the face, your nose. Quite instinctive. A painting? A necklace? You say ‘How beautiful,’ and you hold it away to view.’

Cooper on his quest to breed fragrant Vandas.

Chapter 19 The Beginning of the End

“...Mark and Carlos had been ‘consistently over-watering’ but that was a common mistake, one she was sometimes guilty of herself. And Mark knew that was as close as Charlotte would ever get of saying Thank-you, thank-you for keeping Orchid Empire going.’”

Chapter 20 Preparations for the Miami Expo

“Who cares? Two garden chairs and a bird bath...It’s only two hundred square feet, for God’s sake! It’s not the bloody cricket ground at Lords! I tell you, you put in what you’ve got. No soul searching required.”

Charlotte on not getting carried away when setting up an orchid exhibit.

Chapter 21 Monday: The Sand

“Monday was finding the exhibit spot and the allocation of sand; Tuesday allocation of palms and greenery and Wednesday ’You trundle in the plants and get cracking.’ Wednesday was Putting in the Exhibit, the day Rachel would rent the U haul.”

Why orchids cost more at traditional orchid shows.

Chapter 22 Tuesday: The Palms

“All around people were landscaping their chalked out squares: trundling in their rationed allocation of palms and greenery, the background for their Orchid Fantasies.”

Why orchids cost more at traditional orchid shows.

Chapter 23 Wednesday: Putting in the Exhibit**

“The whole essence of being epiphytes – air growing plants- is to escape from the enemy -fungus. Fungus likes to be moist. So orchids have learned how to be dry. Dryness is the important factor in growing all orchids: not what moisture your plant needs but how much dry it can tolerate!”

Charlotte again.

**Why orchids cost more at traditional orchid shows.

Chapter 24 Thursday: Judgement Day

“Most exhibits seemed to have at least one big old specimen plant eating up space.’You can’t blame the big commercial people for going with the quick and easy stuff but who is going to keep these sacrificial wonders in their greenhouses?’” -Charlotte.

“It was Bert who had lamented the fact that when the old firms died out, with them went so many of the great orchids, the perennial one of a kind stars and ‘pets’...”

Chapter 25 The End

“Friday was the day for the botanicals, for the orchid society people and the best and cleanest of the commercial plants so the orchidists won’t decide the nursery’s going downhill and the spray program a total disaster. Saturday always mainstream but wait till Sunday to bring in the scratch and dents and the fully open, even fading so the Sunday afternoon bargain hunters can be allowed to beat you down, you with heart-rending reluctance, on price.”

Mark, on his second orchid show, already an old hand.

Chapter 26 The Last Party

“...I have learned much from living among you, no, not just the quaint customs of orchid vending. Though I must say, I have discovered you could sell an old boot if it has buds on it.”

Mark saying farewell.

2009-09-05T11:44:00.000-07:00

Mirror Image

I could never go past a mirror without glancing in it. In fact, any reflective surface - shop windows, car windows, shiny fridge doors- Yes, it's me. It's still me.

I know it's always called vanity but I think for a lot of us it's more like the opposite. We don't think we look so good: we're just hoping somehow this time, at this angle, in this light, we won't look so bad. Even beautiful young things do it and most for the same reason. It doesn't matter how young or beautiful you are you will find something wrong. All those gorgeous teenagers scowling along a line of parked cars, checking themselves in the succession of car windows.

Or they used to. Now they're all talking or texting and they hold these iPods like young women used to hold compacts, looking in that little round mirror and touching up the face. Interesting! One thing these miracles of technology lack, apparently, is a mirror.

When you're young, of course, it's no good being reassured how nice you look. Perhaps that's why my grandmother never bothered. If I grumbled about my legs, she would announce that I was lucky to have two because some people only had one. She was one of the models for Aunt Charlotte in Orchid Territory but I missed out one of her classic lines. If anyone asked what time it was, she would answer, for example: "Two o clock! You be lucky you've lived so long. Some people die at one!"

Mr. Wilson had the same no nonsense approach. If I ever start a wellness center I will replicate Mr. Wilson's. He rented rooms in a small house on a beach in Jamaica, a stretch of beach with evidence of past hurricane damage -maybe that's why it was so nicely underdeveloped. We stayed there a few years ago and I remember it with much affection because at Mr Wilson's you just got out of bed in the morning and went down to the beach.

Mr Wilson did not have mirrors in his rooms. I think I remember one narrow oblong high up in the bathroom. Short, anxious females had to stand on tiptoe and still not see much below their ear lobes. He had no new shiny appliances either or cars parked outside and the beach shack where we got breakfast had no walls to hang a mirror on. It was worth any amount of massages and treatment with hot pebbles and aromatic candles. Nothing could beat not looking at yourself for a few days. It was a real holiday.

Darwin at Venice

2009-09-01T12:57:00.000-07:00

Martin, Dr, Motes, will be speaking to the Venice Orchid Society on Wednesday evening, September 2nd, and the subject is Darwin and Orchids. Of course, just the phrase “Darwin at Venice” has a fine ring to it, as though some scholarly botanist has discovered a forgotten trip the great man took, a Victorian Mediterranean voyage. One sees him gliding along in a gondola, maybe checking for molluscs or whatever there might be clinging to the mossy walls of the palaces lining the canals.

Of course, Darwin and orchids are indelibly bound together and a perfect subject for an orchid society talk. I am very pleased we have a new topic because though Martin is a great speaker, when the subject is orchid culture there are really very few variations on presenting the rules for watering, tackling mites or repotting cattleyas. And as a loyal wife and partner accompanying Martin on many of these trips I’ve heard them all.

I’m lucky, of course, because at these meetings I have a chance to steal five minutes from the potting and the insect warfare, and introduce my popular, comic novel Orchid Territory. This is what every struggling author dreams of: a captive audience interested in their subject. And I also slide in and speak at the very start, when the audience is at its most captive.

I’ll have something new to introduce now - this blog. And for Wednesday evening at Venice, I’ve just discovered a lovely fact about Darwin. In his later years he confessed that what he really liked to read were “popular novels” though "...only if they do not end unhappily - against which a law should be passed."

Orchid Territory passes the test! Darwin - a great man indeed!

Mickey Mouse Ears

2009-09-01T12:51:00.000-07:00

Orchid Territory is dedicated to Martin, of course, and also Bart and Alice “who were never taken to Disney-world because there was always too much to do in the orchid house.”

I have had many hardened orchidists nod sagely- of course! - and tenderhearted mothers sigh over these few words. But the truth is, this is a family joke.

I had announced from the very start that I would never take any child of mine to Disney World. I saw it as my one claim to being a Good Mother (most of the other criteria being hopelessly out of my reach). There was a good dollop of English snobbery involved, but mostly the despair of the Eng. Lit graduate who sees the end of civilization at every turn. This even though I’d grown up with Snow White, and the seven dwarfs are more a part of my internal landscape than most of my relatives.

The more Bart and Alice argued the more resolved I became. First, of course, I was informed that they were the only children in their school who had not been to Disney World, which - hallo! was just a little north of us, just up the road in Orlando. Then it became the whole of South Dade, had gone, then the whole of Florida and, as their horizons broadened, the US, and of course, living in Miami, the whole of the Spanish-speaking world. Then we heard about the influx of cheap flights straight to Orlando, from Western Europe and beyond and then the Emperor of Japan had to announce that he loved Disney World too.

I didn’t know about the Emperor but I had to admit that whenever I went back to the UK, the plane filled up with families coming or going to Orlando, and coloring books and crayons were being given out to at least half the passengers.

So the funniest thing happened last year when Martin was invited to speak to several orchid societies in the Los Angeles area and one day our hosts arranged for us to have a free trip to Disney Land. We were picked up and deposited at the gates for the day. So it came to pass that in our family it’s the parents who have been to Disney Land. We called Bart and Alice from outside one of the sunny palaces and I think they were old enough to have a good laugh. We mostly people-watched and Martin made sage comments about the landscaping and I really got into the spirit of it all. I discovered how delicious the chocolate-vanilla Mickey Mouse ice-creams were and all day whenever I felt hungry I got a Mickey Mouse ice-cream and ate it, starting with the ears.

The Kennedy Boys

2009-08-26T18:18:00.000-07:00

Tonight we've been watching tributes to Ted Kennedy, much about his reputation in the senate, his sterling work as a senator. And talk of his brothers who died so early. As they say one never forgets where one was.

I was in Yugoslavia - the old Peoples' Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia - in November, 1963. I had just got back to Belgrade from a long trip, on the 22nd. My friend Nada and her family lived right in the center. Their flat was very cosy; the big tiled stove had been lit and Nada was hemming a skirt, ready for a party on Saturday. But in a few hours we heard that Kennedy had been shot and everything came to a halt.

Saturday was a national day of mourning. All entertainment was banned: only solemn music on the television and radio. The mother of Nada's friend cancelled the party. The American reading room was not far away and we saw people gathering in silence outside in the cold, some in tears, some taking flowers inside. In the trams that passed we saw Belgraders sitting stone faced and silent. People were crying in the street. And Nada cried. Nada who had survived the German occupation of Belgrade, everything, who always vowed she would never cry. But she said, chin up, she was crying because she was angry. And she said what many Yugoslavs were saying then: "There is too much violence in America!"

I was in Yugoslavia five years later, this time teaching down in Kosovo, southern Serbia, much to the dismay of my Belgrade friends for whom Kosovo was the wild west. A wild west full of Albanian moslems. I was in my little lector's flat, getting ready for class when three of my fourth year students came to the door. One of them, Mark, was crying. This was something I'd never seen. Kosovo was called the wild west for a reason. This was where the blood feud still existed, where every self-respecting Albanian male was supposed to own a gun or at least a knife. The other two students asked if they could all come in for a moment, apologising. Mark, they explained, just wanted to pay his respects. They were both moslem but Mark was from a catholic Albanian tribe; you could tell that from his name. And Mark, they told me, had just heard that Robert Kennedy had been killed.

Health USA: No country for young men

2009-08-23T07:06:00.000-07:00

I am from England.

Until I came to America I didn't know what a financial burden the body could be.

Now I'm much older I can relax. Contrary to the idea that America is a land dedicated to youth is the fact that it looks after the old. Reach the gently sloping uplands of Medicare and you can quietly graze away.

I used to joke that one should spend one's youth in the West, specifically the States and then go East, to Turkey, to China - where reverence for youth gives way to reverence for age. But increasingly, as we are told, more money is spent on the last six months of life in the States, than any other time. Reverence indeed.

It seems America is obsessed with the first six months of life in the womb, and the last six months in bed. The first six months of life coming from zero to the last six months, going to zero.

In between, it's business as usual because your body is big business.

Ask your doctor. Tell your doctor. Ask your doctor. Tell your doctor.

Why Don't We Do It In The Road?

2009-08-15T08:36:00.000-07:00

My Woodstock moment came on Easter Saturday 1958. I'd heard about the "Ban the Bomb"march on the BBC. Organised by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, it had started from Trafalgar Square on Good Friday and was headed for the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment outside Aldermaston, a village on the other side of Reading, my home town.

I had come out to see it go by, standing in the cold by our bus stop on the London Road. A few neighbors had come out too. It was late afternoon, already getting on for dusk. And then we saw them coming down the hill, not many, a few hundred, their flags and banners drooping in the rain. The snow that had fallen on Good Friday had turned to classic, cold, English rain. It was the coldest Easter in living memory.

My heart was thumping hard, not just because of the banners, the raised voices and ragged chanting but the fact that they were all walking in the road. I was thinking what will happen when a bus comes down the hill, behind them, one of the big double decker Thames Valley buses. As we so often say now: it was a simpler time. People did not walk in the road. On Friday and Saturday nights when the pubs closed at ten thirty then a few unruly, lower-class citizens might lurch along the gutters but that was it. The first march for nuclear disarmament in 1958 was the first time the British had taken to the streets since the hunger marches of the thirties, when the starving Welsh miners marched on London.

As the marchers got closer we could see their banners said all kinds of things: Unite Ireland! Independence for Cyprus! There were elaborate Trade Union banners, embroidered like something from a church among the anti-bomb and peace signs. Our little group by the bus stop were the only bystanders in sight so we got the full force of the column starting to chant: "Come and join us!"

And I did, the only one, heart thumping harder, like a village boy swept up by the soldiers to go fight for the King. Though afterwards I always liked to say modestly, yes, indeed, I had been on the first Aldermaston march, one of the pioneers, first of the few.. I usually didn't add that it was basically because we lived just round the corner from the London Road and I was home from college, on Easter break.

The reasons why I wanted to ban the bomb, fight the cold war and work for world peace were quite personal, even selfish. Some of my best friends were young Communist Party members. In 1956 I'd gone to Yugoslavia, just shy of eighteen and spent the summer in the Peoples' Socialist Republic with two pen pals, two school girls from Belgrade. I came back, glowing with the discovery that many young American students were to make when they volunteered to help harvest the sugar cane in revolutionary Cuba: sunburnt, handsome young party members made one think twice about the evils of communism.

Then almost before my summer Adriatic tan had faded, Russian tanks were grinding into Hungary to put down the Hungarian revolution and any idea of a warm and friendly communist was dead.

But here on the march a few months later, were people who I felt for the first time understood how complex things were and yet how full of possibilties life was. All you had to do was not bother what people thought, not care about being respectable. I'd been swept into a group of marchers who didn't care: a young doctor from Ceylon, now Sri Lanka. Behind us an older couple, Quakers. Two dark young men with the "Independence for Cyprus!" banner. A very serious man with a beard and maybe his students. They were all incredibly friendly and, even the English, totally uninhibited. We chanted Ban the Bomb! And Come and Join Us! all the way into Reading in the twilight facing the same little knots of dazed and disbelieving people watching us go by, that I'd just left.

Sunday morning I didn't wait for a bus; I walked into Reading and found the marchers, found my group, my Singhalese doctor, outside St Lawrence parish hall. We started off for Aldermaston, the village in the Thames Valley with its Atomic Weapons Research Establishment. Word came down the line when we reached the tall wire fences: march in silence. The place seemed huge. There were clusters of men in uniform behind the wire, with dogs and guns. It was the first time I'd seen guns in England.

And when I got home for the first time when I listened to the BBC, I knew things they did not or refused to acknowledge. We were not a few rowdy students, a group of naive housewives pushing prams fifty-two miles through the good old English rain. The next year the BBC could not dismiss the march. We were sixty-thousand leaving Trafalgar Square. There were bigger and better banners and ones proclaiming all the towns and cities represented and bigger and shinier badges with the CND logo.

But I wore my little one given to me on that first Easter Saturday, the international symbol of peace, the semaphore for N and D, which began life on drenched and drooping banners coming from Trafalgar Square to Aldermaston on that first Easter march against the bomb.

Florida City Swap Meet

2009-08-10T17:37:00.000-07:00

The Florida City Swap Meet is featured quite a bit in Orchid Territory. Aunt Charlotte's Extra Large mens' shirts come from there, second hand -a dollar a piece. And the dignified old Mexican ladies in charge of the Christmas Eve dinner make their appearance in a motley array of old T shirts that Aunt Charlotte always looks forward to. "It's something of a Christmas Eve tradition wondering what will turn up on their fronts." She was hoping for another Only-in-America zinger like the one a few years earlier: 'Coon Hunters For Christ.' But this time the swap meet sample was disappointing. There was a RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE on the lady who'd stayed up all night with the roasting pig but the other two doling out the rice and beans could only offer an almost brand new MIAMI DADE PARKS DEPARTMENT and a fading TOMMY HILFIGER. Nothing even from Harley Davidson or the military.

"Over the years," Charlotte says, "judging from the T shirts, a surprising number (of these ladies) seem to have served in the Marines."

The Florida City Swap Meet featured a lot in my life too. and T shirts were only the tip of the iceberg. When Martin and I came back from teaching in Yugoslavia, he was unemployed and I was pregnant. He'd warned me he'd rather starve in South Florida than go back to his college job in Ohio. (Note: It was the winters, Ohio! He's a Miami boy!)

We didn't starve, but for many years the Sunday morning Florida City Swap Meet was just about my sole resource, for clothes, furniture, plates, jewelry, knives, forks and spoons, beautiful bowls, often a little cracked, and things I hadn't realized I'd always wanted until I saw them sitting there in the early morning sun for not more than a dollar or two.

I still remember what I paid for almost everything - if I can't, then the vase, silk shirt, side table, and anything else, belong to a later time when our economic situation lacked the drama of the early years. At the start my budget ranged from 25 cents for T shirts to two or three dollars for something like a chair. Yes, it was that great a swap meet. (Though it was too good. It got to the point where I would show off my latest prize: "It only cost fifty cents!" and Martin, surrounded by teapots, old atlases, irresistably pretty plates in blue and white, sterling silver bowls only slightly tarnished, would plead: "I'll pay you a dollar to take it back!")

For twenty-five cents (we're talking the eighties here) I harvested all the T shirts, blouses, scarves I could ever need. And the best guy we regulars went to was Carlos. We called his spot Carlos's Boutique. Carlos was a shy young man who parked his old green van in the same place every week, putting down a plastic sheet and spilling out black trash bags of treasures. I got my first Ralph Lauren shirt there, an Hermes silk scarf - someone, the maid probably, had put it in a hot washing machine and the colors had run a bit. We all just got down and dug. But then one Sunday morning everything changed. Carlos had brought along some kind of a stand and a load of coat hangers and everything was hung up and 50 cents. In one awful moment he'd doubled his prices and a lot of the fun had gone out of it.

It was probably at Carlos's Boutique where I got my 'Alabama' T shirt. It was white and green and unlike most T shirts, fitted perfectly. I wore it till it died and from time to time, someone, usually a youngish woman, would stop me and say- "Hey! Wasn't that a great concert!" I had no idea about a concert but it was certainly a great shirt. And for a moment I'd be lost, oblivious as the old Mexican ladies as to what was written on my front.

Saying it with flowers

2009-08-08T11:28:00.000-07:00

Motes Orchids has been awash in flowers, all our vandas and ascocendas that we're so proud to say bloom all the year round. But the problem is we've been closed for the summer and we wanted them to take the summer off too. But of course, they've been blooming their little hearts out.

We should have started to cut the buds off round about the end of June, but I only did just a few. It seems a little too coldblooded, murderous, like deliberately taking eggs out of a bird's nest, like Herod slaughtering the first born. And what if someone close to us- let alone one of the children (Ha!)- suddenly decided to get married? Flowers are what we have -beautiful, unique vandas and ascocendas, though we say so ourselves - born and bred on the property. That's what we would bring to a family wedding, not fine linen or rich relatives or distinguished grandparents.

But we would never ever want to get into the wedding business. It's fine to give flowers to friends for their weddings or hot dates ("No, not that big pink - she'll think I'm proposing!") as long as no rules are involved. Yes, we have orchids in many lovely colors but they are not coordinated with Macys or J C Penneys or bridal books. I list florists who do weddings right up there with elementary school teachers and emergency room nurses. I admire them from afar and wish them luck.

Only once did we get sucked into promising orchids for a wedding without our golden rule. I knew we were sunk when the bride's mother sent me a little square of taffeta with a note: "This is the color for the bridesmaids' dresses. For the bride two shades lighter. And there'll be twenty tables."

We prefer to keep our flower presentations casual. The new FPL guy usually gets a flower especially if the dogs have been extra noisy. The two from Best Buy who put in the new stove. If we didn't have at least one of the big purple sprays or a fragrant yellow to hand, the family would feel uneasy. Motes Orchids with no flowers? That's like a pub with no beer.

Judging the judge

2009-08-08T06:35:00.000-07:00

I didn't get too excited or teary-eyed about Judge Sotomayor's ascendancy to the Supreme Court. It was the compelling, historic moment for all the older, white men of substance and power in the Senate, something to tell their grandchildren. That was the fun part. Sonya with her sexy, humorous, lived-in face, warm but quzzical, sitting there observing a gang of important men in a muddle. It was like watching the workers drive the bosses out and locking the gates- but ever so politely. For a woman of a certain age it was especially sweet. And now on to Danica winning the Five Hundred, a filly winning the Preakness with a female jockey and Mr. Florida going on to win Mr. America.

Hurricane Season

2009-08-07T07:10:00.000-07:00

Motes Orchids has closed for the summer but we're not going anywhere. We have orchids -a lot of them. Too many to be left with a neighbor. And hurricane season has been starting earlier each year.

So Martin scheduled his last speaking engagement out of state for the middle of June with the Tulsa Orchid Society. A great time was had by all and then as usual we took off in a rental car for a few days and discovered how wonderfully friendly Oklahomans are, and so worried for us, from Miami.

"Hurricanes!" The waitress in the diner in a little town had gasped, "I'd be so scared!" And she'd just been telling us about the couple of tornadoes that had hit just the last week, two roads over. No big deal. This lady had the big trees fall in her yard and then two days later-on the Thursday- another tornado came through and that was when the other tree hit the house.

We are used to hurricanes being plannned for, like finding a cheap fare on Orbitz. You tune in with the first announcement, a slight dust cloud forming off the coast of Africa. If you're really eager, you look for your hurricane chart conveniently provided by the local Walgreens and while you're still hunting round the TV for where you put it, those folk in Oklahoma, if they had managed to hear a tornado warning at that same time, would already have raced for the basement, clung to a tree, or crawled into a ditch.

And while we are being shown charts of the Caribbean and kept informed on the status of this cloud of dust far off in the Atlantic, surprised once more by how close Trinidad is to Venezuela, and what a long trip your neighbors from Trinidad have to take each time, and wow how close Cuba really is, so no wonder ...a day or two goes by. Meanwhile, often before your tropical depression even becomes a storm, let alone a future hurricane with a name, the poor people in tornado alley have already salvaged their remaining possessions and hopefully found the cat and are being looked after by the Red Cross.

If the tropical storm finally makes it to hurricane strength- seventy miles an hour - then, unlike us with our Orbitz travel plans, the itinerary can change. And every one can join in and play. OK, maybe headed straight over Cuba - once more, poor Cuba - but lucky for us. Or straight past and into the Gulf- Watch out Mexico! No, wait, maybe turning north, maybe us, this time -South Florida. Time to go for the baked beans, the batteries and the Chlorox! No, no -Now they're saying more east and north. Oh, Oh, North Carolina, your turn again!

Floridians can spend a whole night at a bar discussing this. Indeed, this can all go on for days. It's all very gentlemanly and leisurely. Does anyone ever have time even to name a tornado?

Maybe we just all get hardened to whatever happens in our own state. Most Californians I've met accept earthquakes but like the sturdy Oklahomans make faces over hurricanes. I hate the idea of earthquakes. Unless you live near a zoo and hear all the animals making a commotion- how do you know? And all my favorite plates are just propped up on my shelves. They get knocked off just by lizards. Californians must keep all their best stuff in a box.

Whenever there's an earthquake there's always a mellow, cool Californian on TV standing stoically in front of the sliding grocery shelves, amid the cans and packets, or crunching cheerfully through their living room over their broken plates and glasses:"Yeah! The bed shook. I just woke up- hey just a small tremor! No big deal!"

But I'd be wailing at the camera: "No warning! All my lovely stuff from the Florida City Swap Meet! Gone! We were never told!"

First Post by Internet Immigrant

2009-08-05T13:26:00.000-07:00

There was a cyclamen in a pot, a vase of yellow roses, seven cards and then suddenly about fifty emails zoomed in to our Motes Orchids email account when I broke my hip in March. That's when I finally had to admit the internet is where it's at, even for Get Well messages. And at some point I had to come out from behind the orchids and face the computer and stop writing orchid names out by hand because I'm scared of the labelling machine.

The great divide now, I heard on the radio, is between technological inhabitants and technological immigrants. Between those younger among us and any random three year old, and those who've arrived late on the scene, coming down the gangplank, clutching their homespun bundles of pens and papers, folders and dictionaries, blinking at the shiny new world.

Actually, when it comes to computers, I've not even arrived at Ellis Island; I'm still well out at sea. But, like a classic immigrant Mum I rely on my son to translate. He speaks the language. Not only that, he excels-Bart writes for the Huffington Post-and with him holding my hand and only occasionally rolling his eyes, I am advancing into this wild and unknown territory like I did into the Balkans (Kosova Kosovo) and later, into the South Florida world of orchids. (Orchid Territory)