Suddenly, it's spring – even though the mercury hit 85 degrees the other day – and, inevitably, having lost my mother, father, and brother all in the same season, I was thinking about them this Memorial Day, and how, in nature, thankfully, death leads to renewal. I'm also thinking how my friend "Marie" always put The Hubby's bonsai plants out on their back porch as soon as the weather got warm enough. Every time I looked at them, I winced.
First of all, bonsai reminds me of my late dad. "You can even bonsai an azalea," I once wrote to my civil-servant father, in an imaginary letter – a poem, really – upon his retirement as an embattled electronics engineer for the Signal Corps:
Cut the plain branches at odd angles. Forget balance. Tie the branches into twisted shapes. And prune the root-ball so the bush belies what wildness was. Be sure to strain the soil three times, and poke the roots with a chopstick, for air. The exposed roots grasp the sides of a shallow dish, the way you held your government job for 40 years. Dwarfed, the azaleas will not bloom again. It is like your life, scaled down to a reality whose promise is small.
Plant torture! I commiserate, staring in spite of myself at the thick copper wire "Marie's" hubby has wound around and around and around the branches of his bonsai collection, a queer array wrapped and stunted into dwarfed and twisted caricatures of growing things. No wonder they call it bon-sai – evoking bondage! Bonsai has to be a dominator's pursuit, appealing to those who thrill to watch abuse-TV: "The Weakest Link," and "Boot Camp." Wound, pronounced AOW, equals Wound, pronounced OOOO. Like Espalier, "training" plants in stark unnatural candelabra-esque outlines to climb walls. And Topiary, pruning and sculpting them into swirls and spirals and twists – and even stranger sometimes animal shapes. Topiary Tigers! Man asserting dominance over Mother Nature!
Surely, there are those among us who would just love these sorry specimens.
How on earth did bonsai start? A bunch of ancient elder venerable visionaries doubtlessly sitting around under a Bo tree, smoking their opium and congratulating themselves on the invention of foot-binding, as they seriously watch the effect it had on women's feet, hobbling the girls just enough so they couldn't run away from their guys? No accident all the admirers of bonsai I have ever known were men. "Improving" Barberry or Ficus or Apple or Japanese Maple or Cherry or Azeala, "correcting" them until they are pathetically diminutive, malnourished-looking specimens, nearly unrecognizable and hopelessly unreal, like a prop plant displayed to deliberately make your cat so psycho the vet puts it on Prozac, thereby lining the pockets of the pharmaceutical conglomerates even further.
Another plot of the Patriarchy ... that's what bonsai is!
For a change of inspiration, let's consider looking at – not for – love and sex in the plant world, a convenient substitute since, like many television contestants, they don't talk back, either. Acanthus does it. English peas do it. Bat plants do it. Poincianas and jacarandas and frangipanis do it. Semipervium does it. Zoysia does it. Did I hallucinate this, or did I once read something about lust in Eden, showcasing plant-sex? Er, how all those fabulous flowers, those exotic blossoms and perfume-drenched petals, are really the glorious gonads of plants – plant babes – attention-grabbing reproductive organs throbbing with color, shape, and scent! Yes, boys and girls, flowers have male and female parts! How can you tell which is which? Put your ear to the ground at dusk, you will hear the guy parts seductively whispering to the pliant plant-babes, "I'll call youuuuu."
Stands to reason, since plants are rooted in one place, they need to entice a surrogate to perform their sex for them. THE BIRDS AND THE BEES! Dig? While you are sitting in your French lawn chair innocently enjoying your garden tableau, remember, it's a flower bed! And what happens in beds? You got it! All around you, your plants and their, uh, pollinating accomplices are involved in a voluptuous, lascivious dance, a triple-x display of gluttony and, you should pardon the expression, um, fornication. People – and their flowers – are governed by the same drives! They each decide whether to conceal or reveal their private parts. Some are coy. Others suggestive. Still others flaunt it. Shy violets. Lurid hibiscus. Outrageous orchids. Geishas enrobed and concealed, hidden allure! Regents wearing codpieces. Pinups in form-fitting bikinis. Seeds! Stamens! Pistils!
Silly me, but I'm comforted at the notion of plants struggling to procreate, much as humans do. Which leads me to ponder the possibility that even though Adam and Eve were banished from the Garden, there's still sex in Eden. That's encouraging. Which gives me hope about any number of things, or people. Whaddya think a seed is anyway? Though, unlike most folks, but reminiscent of perhaps all too many politicians, plants have no ethics and may use bribery, treachery, and traps – offering their pollinators food, shelter, or other inducements. I read that someplace. Uplifting, isn't it? Nevertheless, I prefer a more, uh, pastoral, bucolic view of these gyrations: Think of all the female names flowers have: Daisy. Rose. Iris. Veronica. Poppy. Flora. Lily. Buttercup. Tulip. Ivy. Sweet Pea. Which came first, the flower or the woman? Who could forget my father's so-called sex plants with their flagrant, perpetual taunt?
Or the real guilt trip, that spring journey to Mother's, shocks like looking out a window just washed – colors suddenly bright, intense. Dogwood, Japanese red maple, bony seedlings now thick trees clotted with blooms. Why such memories of an awkward past filled with pain? Everything there seemed so clean. Names like Shadow Lawn, Whalepond Road. Who made them up in the middle of nowhere? My parents' age unsettled me. They were like shrunken potatoes, all eyes and roots.
Even as a daughter, I communicated with my forlorn faraway family in letters, or imaginary poems. It was easier that way. And so, in spring, when I look at bonsai, for a moment or two, I get wistful – a wistfulness that grows each time I see those tiny tormented trees and bushes and shrubs, their lovely but distorted branches, all budded up for a new season.