Painting the roses red...

I have a small buddy named ‘Phred’. Phred is a flowering plant and probably a member of the Daisy family somewhere among the botanical line of blooming annuals. For unknown years Phred has occupied a tranquil spot in the flower bed that lies just under a peripheral ring of roses, encircling a decrepit and now dysfunctional fountain between the two State office buildings across the street from the Capitol. Phred and his buddies (the closest one being ‘Phred Junior’, situated a foot or so away) have long provided a rather beautiful, if perhaps overlooked, ground-level setting for the red and white rose bushes that tower above them with a stately air.

About a year ago it was discovered that the irrigation pipes supplying water to the fountain (and its encircling floral cohort) were damaged to the point of being totally inoperable, so for a full and blisteringly dry summer all those poor flowers sat roasting under the hot California sun without a drop of water to help them survive. Since the grounds crew (numbering only one man for our large part of the Capitol complex)  found it difficult to run hoses out from the nearest faucet to give the flowers an occasional drink, those of us in the office were forced to daily witness the slow deterioration of all that floral beauty, as the heat took its toll on the roses and on Phred and his cohorts.

Coincidentally, at about the same time that the water was switched off to the fountain area, I was experiencing a rather strange malady that had me quite worried. Consisting mostly of strange episodes of breathlessness and anxiety that occurred at rest, my medical background prompted me to imagine all sorts of dire possibilities, despite the fact that on the surface of things I seemed to be in excellent shape for a man of my years (66). As a daily bicycle commuter who runs a 2.2 mile conditioning course every other day, someone who is a life-long non-smoker and graced with a wife who is an absolute health food ‘Nazi’, it just didn’t seem possible that I could REALLY be suffering from a serious malady. And yet I felt episodically crummy and ‘off’, and the HMO diagnostic witchdoctors were completely unhelpful.

It was then that I started going out and walking around the old fountain, with its barely surviving floral guardians, just to take my mind off this nagging problem. All the inwardly directed pondering of my puzzling status that I had been engaging in slowly began to shift my focus not just from fancied problem, but from all the usual (and typically needless) temporal concerns we surround ourselves with as well. I soon found myself taking a renewed long, slow look at all the beautiful natural things (like trees and flowers) our campus has, marveling all the while on how insignificant we human beings are in the immutable and enduring ways of the natural world. Such philosophic musings have never been that far from my mind, as someone who has a tendency to view the world in that way, anyway, but I found myself vastly enjoying the roses and smaller flowing plants out by that fountain circle, despite their sad condition. But more importantly it ended up being the best attitudinal therapy I could have hoped for.

Before long, it occurred to me that although there was nothing I could do to alter the sad collective neglect these state-maintained botanicals existed in, I could at least select one single plant and dedicate a few minutes of each day to giving it some TLC. Looking around among them, and being someone who has always had a strong bias for the ‘underdog’ (a dangerous ‘human’ sentimentality that is contrary to all laws of Darwinian selection), I soon settled on a poor ground flower specimen that looked far worse for wear than its fellows and promptly named it ‘Phred’. Phred was so dry and desiccated that it almost looked beyond saving, while strangely enough its nearby neighbors all appeared to be somewhat better off. Something about Phred's sad state must have communicated itself to me at some deeper level, however, for Phred became my ‘adoptee’ and the recipient of a daily two liter drink of water that I brought out to it.

Looking back at that distant date, it’s really amazing how attached I became to that flower, often sitting down in the unshaded glare of a Sacramento midday near it to observe the scenes unfolding about the State capitol that lies directly across the street from us. There was something very comforting about being there with my silent buddy Phred, albeit for no more than a few minutes each day, and Phred gave me a chance to stop dwelling on whatever it was that was plaguing me and redirect my thoughts to the greater integrity of the natural world about me. It was a non-verbal sort of companionship that Phred offered, but nonetheless substantial and rewarding for all that. I am sure that more than a few of my fellow analysts glanced up from their smart-phone texting as I walked across the circle to Fred’s location each day, perhaps wondering what it was all about, but no matter. Over the following weeks and months, Phred proved to be a far better companion than most of my human acquaintances and was completely unjudgmental, as well. What more can anyone ask for in a kindred spirit, after all?

The daily watering led, after some time, to a covert sprinkling of some potting soil around Phred’s base, since it was clear that in addition to a total absence of water, the soil in that flower bed was severely depleted of nutrients as well. And so the relationship with Phred quietly continued for more than a year, until today.

It is presently the deepest of winters here (Winter Solstice), and despite California’s usually fair weather it has been cold and wet for the past weeks, finally relieving the need for my daily ministrations to Fred and allowing me a bit of satisfaction over having saved this glorious little bit of natural beauty from man-enhanced extinction. It’s actually quite a hard feeling to articulate, since we’re talking about a relationship between a human biped and a plant here.

So there I am, savoring the results of my admittedly maudlin sentimentality and feeling all cozy and warm in the radiant reflection on my actions, when a day ago I suddenly looked out the office window to see someone on a Bobcat back-hoe yanking out the rose bushes, much as you’d imagine a dentist would jerk dental roots out in his darkest moments of fantasy. WHAT? My roses!?

By the time I noticed this unsettling situation unfolding in the fountain circle, over half of the roses and their smaller ground-cover growth beneath had already been ripped up and removed. The rose bushes were stacked forlornly on their sides, awaiting a grim haul to the local disposal yard. As for the ground cover, most had been spaded up and tossed casually aside into a pile, leaving gaping holes in the ground where the flowers had formerly been. Rather unhappy news to someone who had painstaking nursed Phred back to health, not to mention several other admirers of those roses who work in the treasury.

Feeling violated in a certain aesthetic sense, I went over to the person on the back-hoe who was doing the rosebush jerking and asked him what was going on, since none of us had been advised of any such pending grounds work in the weeks preceding Christmas. True to my intuitive expectations, this individual turned out to be a rudely reactive functionary who couldn’t be bothered to snarl out any more information in rsponse to my polite request than the fact he was just ‘...doing what I was told to do.’

This prompted me to launch a series of email queries to various people in the office, hoping for some information on what was happening out front. Many individuals from administration were off for the holidays, so most of my inquiries went unanswered, but I finally got back a reply from an individual informing me that grounds services had decided to remove the old roses so as to ‘beautify’ and renew the old fountain (which by now had a newly installed supplying pipe for water). I was told, when I asked why the pulled rosebushes weren’t being made available to anyone who wanted them, that they were ‘diseased’;  and being state property, they couldn’t be offered to the public (I was sorely tempted to respond that as a state taxpayer, they actually were my rosebushes and not the state’s!).

Meanwhile, I began to think about what I could do to ‘save’ Phred from imminent destruction on the way home from work and at first hatched a devious plot to rescue Phred late at night by sneaking up, commando style, and ‘liberating’ it. That prompted uncomfortable visions of my being intercepted by one of the capitol security guards and taken in for God-knows what sort of state property violations (stealing flowers? Flower-napping?). Although such a scenario would likely make the local newspaper’s day (read: ‘Local state employee arrested and booked for stealing a flower at the Capitol!’), the possible fall-out could nevertheless be quite messy, since satisfactory explanations would take quite a while to adequately get across to all concerned, not to mention how farcical it would appear if the state actually arrested someone for ‘saving’ a flower that was doomed to be trashed and discarded anyway!

After talking this all over with wifie, we agreed that the commando raid would not be the wisest way of saving Phred, given the possible legal misapprehensions that could arise, so instead I decided to wait until early morning to do anything further about this. Putting Phred out of my conscious mind, I found I was still frustrated by some apparently deeper subconscious associations with all this that lingered on in the shadows of my brain, making sleep difficult most of the night. I suppose this is a revealing look into how my mind works, or perhaps I should say my ‘emotions’, since the thought of losing my little green buddy to some yahoo driving a back-hoe was about as upsetting as the thought of losing one of my wonderful Siberian Huskies would be. That shared, I readily admit to being an excessively sentimental individual, despite all of my frusty,  pseudo-intellectual rationalising and philosophizing, a fact wifie well knows.

Thus it was that after a restless night, I got up at 5AM (as usual) and prepared to go to the office. I normally go to work at 6:30 AM, but this time took my pickup (rather than my bicycle) and drove over to the fountain circle. Acting quickly in the early AM light fog, I managed to pull Phred from the ground using only a small hand trowel in a matter of seconds. Then, with furtive looks in all directions, I quickly stashed Phred in the back of the pickup like so much illegal contraband, soil, roots and all, and then went on to work after parking the vehicle.

Despite the rough handling, Fred managed to survived this impromptu transplant operation and is now safely installed in the front yard of our home (coincidentally situated under two of our own rosebushes!), where it serves as a visible reminder to me of both how much more important green growing things often are to us than most bureaucratic development aspirations. It also suggests an amusing allgory to that famous scene in Lewis Carroll‘s Alice in Wonderland (wherein the Red Queen ordered her guards to paint the white roses red…).

For my part, reflecting on the fact I had to technically 'break the law' to save my little buddy from the mandates of implacable bureaucratic dogma simultaneously gives me both some philosophical disquiet and small personal satisfaction that is difficult to articulate; yet it is strangely also somewhat satisfying. You had to be there to understand it, I think...an extraordinarily small and insignificant victory against the stultifying and unimaginative forces of civilised ennui we are surrounded by in our human society! [Perhaps it's also proof that you can take the 'boy' out of Berkeley, but you can never take Berkeley out of the 'boy'...]

Wifie, for her part, still arches her eyebrows and looks quizzically at me every now and then, doubtless trying to understand someone (after 25 years of marriage) who would risk everything for a handful of flowering plant and some soil, for as she put it, “Remember, it’s ONLY a plant.”

“Only” perhaps, but I find more and more often these days that I enjoy things like dogs and trees far in excess of many human beings I count among my friends and acquaintances! How ironic, then, that it inevitably takes most of us a lifetime to grasp a fragment of true understanding of the relative importance of things we routinely take for granted (like flowers and domestic animals), since such awarenesses are concommitant to the arduous process of becoming truly mature individuals (an enviable status that many of us never attain).

For the moment, Phred's former environs now reflect the desolation of the Ypres Salient battlefield of 1914, with only gouges and small crators left to remind us of the precious natural beauty it previously held (and of humanity's inherent tendency to 'deconstruct' in order to 'improve'). Hopefully, come Spring, we will see renewed life in its place.

To purloin and appropriate the first part of Mao Zhedong's famous 'Hundred Flowers Campaign' (1956) speech in a perhaps unintended (but environmentally positive) manner, "Let a hundred Phreds bloom!"

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Postscript (May 2013): 'Phred' is thriving in its new location at my home, I'm pleased to say. Turns out Phred is actually a 'Transvaal Daisy', also known as a Gerber Daisy and by its official name Gerbera jamesonii . They are native to South Africa (esp. to Swaziland) and are perfect for a Zone 9B climate zone such as we have here in Central Californica.