OF GREENHOUSES, MOTEL SMELLS, AND HUMAN EVOLUTION

I spent the weekend at an orchid show and sale in a small town in the southern part of Washington State. While the rest of the US is cooking in record heat, we are currently suffering the usual midsummer doldrums of weather that’s neither hot nor cold, just clammy and mostly cloudy. Usually on the 5^th of July the sun comes out and stays out until September, but that’s still a few days off.

The orchid show was held in a commercial greenhouse. On Saturday, the sun was shining part of the time, warming the greenhouse up to at least 80-85 degrees F (28-30C). It was surprising how quickly things warmed up once the sun started shining in. It was a perfect demonstration of the “greenhouse effect” on a relatively small scale. Of course as soon as the space got warm, everyone started whining about the heat. I was perfectly comfortable after stripping down to my tank top, but everyone else insisted on keeping their long-sleeved t-shirts and fleece hoodies on, sweating, and complaining about how hot they were.

People in the Pacific Northwest wear fleece jackets or hoodies year-round as a sort of uniform.  I’ve come to do so, too, usually as a middle layer that can be removed if it’s warm (seldom), or added to with a leather jacket if it’s cold (often). It’s a practical way to deal with the unpredictable weather, but a lot of people don’t seem to realize that the fleece is removable.

Saturday night I stayed at a cheap motel. The room smelled like it had never been aired out, retaining the smell of years worth of steamy showers and the resulting odor of dirty hair and mildew. I will have to say that it wasn’t as bad as the smell of years worth of cigarette smoking in the old days, before non-smoking rooms. Every hotel or motel room has its own characteristic odor, some worse than others. A lot of them reek of cleaning supplies, some almost to the point of being intolerable. In the US and Europe, the cleaning odors are caustic and vaguely synthetic-citrus, and can be practically asphyxiating. I remember once staying in a hotel near the airport in Madrid where the cleaning supply smell was so bad that I picked a lot of lavender and rosemary from a flower bed outside and slept with it under my nose to mask the odor of the room. In the old DDR and other Soviet bloc countries, everything smelled of a certain type of phenolic disinfectant – I still think of that as the smell of communism.

The other thing I noticed at the motel was that the air conditioning unit in the room next door was running all night long, making noise. The temperature outside was about 68F (22C), so I don’t know whether the people were heating or cooling the room. It could have gone either way. My guess is that they were cooling it, given that the restaurant where we ate on Saturday evening was significantly colder inside than the temperature outside. I’m always puzzled by the practice, common in the Pacific Northwest, of using air conditioning when the temperature outside is in a comfortable range. There’s something that’s just not right about having to bundle up in cold-weather gear when shopping in a supermarket or eating in a restaurant. The most ironic thing of all is that the production of energy to run all of the air conditioners in the US must be generating a huge amount of CO2, which contributes to the greenhouse effect and global warming, which causes people to run their air conditioners even more … a vicious cycle if ever there was one.

It’s my understanding that humans first evolved somewhere in Africa, where the temperature is warm to hot. Speaking for myself, I’m pretty sure my remote ancestors were closer to monkeys swinging in a jungle than walruses sitting on an iceberg, so I like to be warm enough to go barefoot and take off my fleece jacket. I now seem to be in the minority, since most people like to be much cooler than I do, and I can’t help wondering if humans are evolving in a way that is causing them to lose the ability to temperature-regulate when it’s warm. 

[All photos from Wikimedia]

CATCHING UP

The boxes for the San Francisco Artisan Perfume Salon are packed, sealed, and delivered to Fed Ex, to magically appear at our hotel in time for the Salon. Kudos to FedEx for making everything go so smoothly and inexpensively! Once the precious packages were given up to their fate, I spent most of yesterday preparing and packing up the usual hundreds of orchid plants for this weekend’s show and sale in Tacoma. Quick change of hats.  Whew!!! Now it’s 6:00 AM on Saturday and I’m ready for the drive to Tacoma.

Once the orchid show is over on Sunday night, I can relax and take care of last-minute preparations for San Francisco, and maybe even post here a few times before I leave next Friday. I plan to take my camera to San Francisco (although my phone will do in a pinch) and take lots of photos at the Salon, so stay tuned. I’m excited to meet the other participating perfumers, the bloggers who will be there, and all of the other wonderful people who gravitate to a place that’s loaded with perfume.

For the weekend, though, I’ll be away from the internet. Maybe a couple of days break is a good thing.

[Golden Gate Bridge photo from Wikimedia]

WHAT WERE THEY THINKING? CHANGES AT THE SEATTLE CENTER

I haven’t posted much this spring due to what seems like an unusually heavy work overload. Finally, now that another academic year has come to an end, I’m trying to catch up on some abandoned posts that were started but never finished. This one was started during tech week of our last theatre show, back in May. That show took place in our usual performance space in the Center House at the Seattle Center, under the shadow of the iconic space needle. I hadn’t been there since last November, so was shocked to see that in the intervening months the last vestiges of the colorful kiddie rides at the Fun Forest amusement park had been removed. In its place was a closed-in, corporate-looking, over-designed space surrounding the new Chihuly glass museum. The museum itself looks like a standard-issue greenhouse, with formal, vaguely Asian-style gardens. The big building that used to house bumper cars and other forms of entertainment has been transformed into something that looks like an office park in an industrial strip mall where you would find shipping offices and wholesalers. The path I used to take to get from the street to the Center House is now blocked by a walled compound that reportedly charges $19 admission to see Dale Chihuly’s personal collections of non-glass tchotchkes. In the courtyard are a few large glass installations, just waiting for some teenagers to throw rocks over the fence at them.

Oh well, I suppose the whole concept fits right in with the tradition of building a fancy building to house the collections of “stuff” amassed by the very rich. After all, the Experience Music Project (EMP for short) is just a big space to house Paul Allen’s collection of music memorabilia. The EMP is a Ghery-ish, brightly colored, metallic-tiled, twisted structure that one of my school colleagues described as “looking like the Space Needle vomited”. At least it doesn’t look like it’s wearing a corporate suit, and the metallic finish shines beautifully when there’s a late afternoon sun break. Like it or not, the building is more unique and interesting than the "stuff" that's inside. 

Apparently as part of the Chihuly renovations, the food court on the ground floor of the Center House was also remodeled, removing all of the colorful food stands that used to brighten it up a bit. Now it’s a bare, gray dismal-looking, corporate-feeling space that could easily be a warehouse without the boxes and forklifts. Most of the food vendors are gone, replaced by a trendy window area that would be right at home in an office building, and a lot of boarded-up booths with “for rent” signs. The only vendors left are what appears to be an upscale burger chain, a Starbucks, a Subway, and a kebab stand that seems to be family-owned and operated, the last vestige of the old guard. The prices at the kebab stand have almost doubled. According to the woman who works there, the rent went up significantly after the remodel. I hope they can make it. At least they don’t have much competition, and not much prospect of any in the near future unless the economy suddenly jumps up from its deathbed and walks.

Now I hear that Seattle wants to sell its iconic old waterfront trolley cars to Saint Louis. The trolley was banished a couple of years ago to build a rather soul-less sculpture park. The argument for removing it was that it would clash with the suburban-mall appearance of the “do-not touch” sculptures and their grassy suburban-lawn surroundings. The more things change, the more stereotyped and sterile they seem to become. The most ironic thing of all is that “art” installations have been in some way responsible for this de-humanization of the city. 

OUTDOOR ORCHIDS: BLETILLA STRIATA

Soon after we moved into our current house over 10 years ago, I ordered some plants from one of those beautiful, slick catalogs that come in the mail every spring. You know the ones – they always show the strawberries as big as footballs, the dahlias as big as your head (and in psychedelic colors no less!), the lilac that bears red, white, and blue flowers (all on the same bush!) and the pumpkins that you have to harvest using a crane and flatbed truck. I’m ashamed to say that I’m always tempted by these catalogs, and even fall for them once in a while.

When our house was new our back yard looked like a desert, so in a moment of weakness I ordered some things from one of those catalogs. As I should have expected, all of the plants were either dead on arrival or so severely debilitated that there was no way they could live, even under the best of conditions. The one surprise was the freebie that came with the order. It was three bulbs called “peacock orchids”. (“Order $20 worth of plants, get these little fellows free!”) I took a look at the miserable, moldy brown lumps and gave them a decent burial on the east side of the back deck, wished them a happy trip to the afterlife of abused plants, and forgot about them.

Then something sprouted from the grave. It started out as three little conical shoots that soon turned into three vigorous plants with broad, pleated green leaves, and before I knew it, they had produced three tall flower spikes, each with many bright magenta flowers. It was the peacock orchids! Only they weren’t peacock orchids. The plant that is commonly known as a “peacock orchid” isn’t an orchid at all, it’s a gladiolus-like plant called Gladiolus acidanthera or Gladiolus callianthus, shown in the photo on the left. It’s white with a red center, and it has anthers covered with powdery pollen and a pistil like a regular flower. My plants were neon magenta, with three sepals, two petals, a frilly lip with raised ridges like super-corduroy, and the typical orchid column with built-in, snap-off pollinia. It didn’t take much research to determine that they were Bletilla striata, also known as “Chinese ground orchid”, an Asian deciduous terrestrial species, and a real orchid. In fact, it looks like a small Cattleya.

Over the years the Bletilla have died down every fall, come up every spring, and multiplied like rabbits. I think all of the multiplication takes place underground, through growth of new bulbs from old ones, but they do get pollinated and form seed pods each year. I’ve given some bulbs away, but there’s now a huge patch with an uncountable number of growths. They’re the only thing out of that whole shipment that survived. Obviously the company didn’t know what they were sending, given that they were not only misidentified, but actually grew and thrived. They’re in full bloom right now, already setting this year’s crop of seed pods.

Because they’re outside, I’ve never paid a lot of attention to them, just like the Dactylorrhyzas and Calanthes that come up and bloom like clockwork every year. It was not until this year that I actually realized that the Bletilla are fragrant. It’s not a strong fragrance, it’s a very light and subtle sweet pink scent, a little powdery and a little bit moist and airy, but most definitely floral. It reminds me somehow of the old version of Shiseido Murasaki. It’s beautiful in a near-transparent sort of way. To think that I never realized that these orchids, which are some of the most reliable perennials in our garden, actually have a gorgeous fragrance in addition to their lush foliage and colorful flowers! It’s just one more reason to love them.

[Gladiolus callianthus photo from Wikimedia]

WINNER OF THE LILITH DRAWING

The drawing was conducted in an objective and low-tech way, using names written on tiny folded scraps of paper.

The winner was Laurie Brown. Congratulations! Please e-mail me with your shipping address.

A DIFFERENT KIND OF SHOW

Night before last I had a classic anxiety dream, arriving in San Francisco for the Artisan Fragrance Salon only to find that I had no hotel room. Worse yet, I had not only forgotten to bring and/or ship anything to exhibit, but hadn’t even made anything.

I’ve participated in a lot of shows, ranging from academic conferences where I gave a talk in a room as big as an airplane hangar, to orchid shows where I hauled in a truckload of blooming plants and seedlings to sell, to theatre shows that required weeks of unbelievably stressful preparation, but this is my first fragrance show. I think the biggest source of stress is that it’s out of town and everything has to be prepared in advance and shipped. I’m pretty good at doing things spontaneously, but advance planning is not one of my big strengths. After that dream, I immediately sat down and made a list of all the things I need to do, which in itself is a big source of anxiety, since I’m not usually a list-maker, just doing things randomly at the last minute.

Having said that, I’ve already taken care of printing some post cards publicizing Olympic Orchids Perfumes and the new DevilScent fragrances that I’ll be launching there, along with new and improved business cards. Now I’m just waiting for the printer to send them, fingers crossed, hoping they’ll look OK.

Yesterday I went into robot mode and worked for 20 hours straight (one of my big strengths, when I’m in the mood for it) writing a press release for the DevilScents, taking a trip to the store to buy baggies and other supplies, making all of the samples for the 50 packets that Tama will be handing out at the San Francisco Sniff event on the day before the salon, making all of the samples for the press packets, and making all of the small spray bottles that I’ll be selling there. I have no idea how many samples and bottles I made, but having them done makes me feel much better. Now I just have to make the big bottles, which are relatively easy.

In the process of filling orders and making samples and bottles of everything, I ran out of a bunch of things and had to make new dilutions and one stock concentrate. After filtering the dilutions this morning, there was a huge sink full of dirty glassware staring at me like a bad hangover. I’m happy to report that the glassware is now clean and drying, and my shelf of ready-to-bottle fragrances is full again.

I’m sure that once I have one of these perfume shows under my belt it will all get easier, but for now it’s a new and scary adventure. Writing a blog post is like a combination of a top-notch therapy session and an exotic vacation.

THE LILITH EFFECT (AND A DRAWING)

This morning I filtered the first production batch of Lilith (aka LIL) and, as usual, made sure I got some on myself while doing it. It wasn’t a lot, just the equivalent of a medium-sized spray dose. About an hour later I went out for a run.

The first inkling I had of the “Lilith Phenomenon” or “Lilith Effect”, first described by Tarleisio in this blog post, was when I was doing my warm-up walk down our little street to the main road and passed a group of three 7- or 8-year old boys playing in a puddle. As I got close, they all looked up, eyes wide as saucers, promptly stood at attention facing me, and politely said “hello”. They seemed in awe. I was flabbergasted. As I continued on with my run I thought of Tarleisio’s post, and started to connect the dots.


As I made my way around the neighborhood, everyone I passed on my side of the road looked at me, smiled in a friendly way, and made it a point to politely say “hello”. Except for the postal delivery woman, I knew none of these people. Even though I stared intently at people on the other side of the road, they did not react. Now this might not seem worthy of note except for the fact that in the Pacific Northwest, people tend to act uncomfortable and look the other way when they pass another human being on the street or road. It’s very unusual for even one person to acknowledge my presence when I’m out walking or running, let alone everyone I pass. Maybe there’s something in LIL that makes people shape up and be polite.

Have you ever experienced unusual reactions from random people when wearing a specific perfume? If so, leave a comment about the perfume and your experience. You will be entered in a random drawing, the winner of which will receive a 3 ml spray sample of LIL to try for yourself and see whether there’s anything to the Lilith Effect besides our overactive imaginations. Moreover, you’ll have a chance to try this fragrance before it’s officially released at the San Francisco Artisan Fragrance Salon on July 8. The drawing will take place on Wednesday, June 20.