a letter from San francisco....U

Now, U is one of the letters that has been worrying me about this self imposed “I have to have something for each letter of the alphabet”.

Sure I could always fall back on “United States” or “Unexpected Events” (the writer of the series comes from San Francisco) but both solutions seemed to me to be unacceptable (much as Zinfandel Wine seemed too easy for Z.

For one moment i thought i might have to go to the Evolution of The Ukulele exhibition at the museum of craft and folk art, so I was very happy the other day when I was idly flicking through the San Francisco Chronicle and came across an article about the Amorphophallus Titanum. And since yesterday was one of those days that John Steinbeck once described as having air “washed and polished like a lens”, I decided it was time to escape the simmering concrete of downtown, suffer the crash of gears and snarl of steel on the freeway, amongst the struts and girders, bars and bolts of Bay Bridge and head east across the blue bay to the University of California Botanical gardens.

You have to leave the freeway and slip along shady boulevards, start to climb towards the wooded hills and there in an almost perfect valley fold, neither halfway up or down you see the Cacti and redwoods of the Botanical garden.

A young boy, about five years old was crossing the car park and stopped to ask, “Are you going to see the big flower?”

Amorphophallus is the largest flowering structure in the plant world, originally from Sumatra in Indonesia but today doing its stuff back of Berkley. And thousands had already come and visited. The gardens are beautiful; worthy of a visit for themselves but it has been two years since the last Amorphophallus event, and the first time in 12 years for this particular specimen.

A lot of the time the plant resembles little, a sort of stone like root that does nothing. Then it sends up a single leaf that in fact looks like a tree and then after a few months goes back to being inert. But every once in a while (12 years in this case) it sends up a leaf that turns into something else (a spadix) and people get excited. The Botanical Garden has documented the event on its web page and you can check it out here;

http://botanicalgarden.berkeley.edu/program/event_des/titan.html

In the tropical greenhouse six of us listened wide-eyed to the enthusiastic explanations of the volunteer who was on permanent duty to answer every question we could think of. (A paintbrush was used for pollination, Toucans sometimes eat the fruit).

It was the little boys third visit so he had witnessed the exceptional three-inch a day growth, but all of us had missed the smell. The flower is also known as the corpse flower as when it opens it emits the smell of rotting flesh to attract pollinating beetles and flies.

The local free newspaper the Bay Guardian described the event so well in its listings that I’ll quote directly. "The flower’s name comes from the ancient Greek words amorphous, meaning misshapen, phallus meaning penis, and titan meaning giant. So there you have it. There’s a giant misshapen penis flower booming at the University of California Botanical garden. Are you really going to miss this?”

No way!