Human Flower Project

Thursday, May 22, 2008

Garden Chocolates: Get a Rush

If composting doesn’t get you off, how about chocolate-scented flowers? Have a botanical bonbon, or two, or three….

Chocolate orchid (Encyclia phoenicea)

Photo: FlowersWeb



Our heart goes out to addicts, the needle freaks and hot-wheels collectors. There’s something admirable about dedication to anything, we think, whether it’s curing cancer or opening the next beer.  With obsessions aplenty of our own, however, we’re always grateful to realize there are a few psychic tigers that haven’t sunk their claws into us…yet.

Chocolate, for instance. In small doses, like chips in ice cream, we can handle it. But the thought of a whole brownie makes us cower. This has nothing to do with virtue. It’s that ingesting chocolate in chunks that big brings on instant headache, also sore jaws and, sometimes, zits the next day.

A dear friend once confided to us her intense pleasure at lying alone in bed, turning off the lights, and eating dark chocolate. We hate missing out entirely on something that sounds this fun and wonder if perhaps chocolate flowers couldn’t transport us at least to First Base.

The proto-craving was set off by an article from Cuba, extolling the delights of a spectacular island flower, Encyclia phoenicea.  Called the chocolate orchid, for both its color and its fragrance, it grows primarily in the foothills of Sierra del Rosario of Western Cuba, but according to this piece, is also found as far east as Guantánamo, and in the Bahamas and Cayman Islands, too. Not surprisingly, this plant has suffered “predation” – appealing as it does to two voracious species of addicts: orchid-collectors and chocolate fiends.

Chocolate-scented Daisy (Berlandiera lyrata)

Photo: Mountain Valley Growers

This Caribbean delicacy is out of the question for us here in Central Texas, but we find there are many more chocolate flowers to choose from. While not anywhere as dazzling as the Cuban Godiva, we can have Hershey’s kisses—Berlandiera lyrata, the chocolate-scented daisy. 

It’s highly praised for strong fragrance by the obsessive experts at Chocolate Flower Farm. Really. They specialize in brown flowers, foliage plants, and other botanical chocolatiana. Yvonne Swanson’s article gives a short profile of the Washington State gardener/owners and includes quite a list of choco-centric plants. You may note that many of these species are also admired by Goth gardeners, but calling them “chocolate” brings out a different clientele – with bigger waistlines and fewer tattoos.

This article includes an even more extensive list that curiously includes Akebia quinata,  “a vine with cocoa blossoms that smells of vanilla.” Another case of fixation overlap.

Karen Finley, spreading art

Photo: Art Interviews

This topic of course leads us to Karen Finley, artist, performer, plaintiff. Finley, with three others, challenged the National Endowment for the Arts in 1990 for failing to award her an artist’s fellowship. Finley’s piece “A Different Kind of Intimacy” involved her stripping down and smearing her body with chocolate: “to commemorate Tawana Brawley, a young woman who alleged that some police officers raped her and smeared her with feces.” For Finley, this was creative art, for then Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina it was obscenity, and for the NEA is was a near-fatal headache.

Using chocolate – not mud or some other smearable brown matter – Finley struck a nerve—the same nerve that used to titillate our old friend with the lights out and still makes us shudder.

We hope that readers will let us know which chocolate varieties (by scent or color) they’ve tried in the garden and to what effect. We don’t go in much for bonbons, but like everyone else on the planet, we want ecstasy minus the pimples.