(Local home gardening -- or keeping house plants, in particular -- is just like the world of fashion: taste and preferences come and go.)
In the '70s, you could easily tell which house plants local residents preferred to take care of, because most households had them. There was the usual 'pampasuerte' or ‘lucky charm' plants called palmera and la suerte, often neatly lined up in clay planters, evergreen and low-maintenance, which was perfect for busy housewives.
Competing for the lady's attention while puttering around were the so-called San Francisco shrubs lined up to flaunt their multicolor beauty. There were also creepers called 'manaog ka sa ilog,' water plant, and cadena de amor. Each plant was beautiful in its own right, adding a spark of life in an otherwise lackluster corner.
One's neighbors, of course, had the same, plus maybe an impressive variety of gumamelas and santans. There were red, yellow, orange, and sometimes, pink and white varieties of gumamela, plus single or double-petaled ones besides, while there were red, crimson, yellow, orange, and sometimes, pink santans.
In the latter part of the decade, parading and preening at the front yard of townsfolk were zinnias, bachelor’s button, bandera hispaniolas, marigold, chichirica, miniature Chinese bamboo…
An aside: Come March, during school graduations, imported botanicals would arrive in town, although only as disembodied flowers and leaves. The preferred flower tucked on shirt lapels was dahlia on a bed of baby’s breath or fragrant cypress leaves. Others would wear a garland of everlasting flowers. I know at least one neighbor who successfully grew one lone dahlia plant, but in general, this flower and the others came all the way from Baguio City.
Then as now, Valentine’s Day was the same affair of red roses. Roses are difficult to grow, but there were those with the proverbial green thumb, who managed to have a collection right on their front lawn -- red, pink, white, miniature varieties. I've always wondered what their secret was.
Since we're at it, the preferred flowers for the dead were the kalachuchi and palong-palong, which one could pick from somebody's yard.
In the public plaza, there were cypress trees and clumps of flowering kantutay, locally called bangbangsit (Ilocano word for stinky), but whose florets come in various colors per head.
Going back to the home front... Here and there, in someone's yard, stood alibangbang trees (bauhinia) for ornamental purposes, with their pink orchid-like blooms, but this variety is said to be an introduced species. (Note that the town's name most likely came from balangabang, which is the local term for another species of bauhinia, the one with white flowers and whose shoots were used as souring agent for soups. Bayambang, though, used to be called Malunguey or Balunguey, but its etymology (moringa?) remains a mystery.) Fire trees and yellow candle trees gave sprays of bold colors, making even the dullest corners bright and look special.
Towards the '80s, there came a time when everyone seemed to be into Vietnam rose, to the detriment of old favorites, as though they turned ugly in the eyes of their masters overnight.
Then there was a time when Doña Aurora plants were all the rage.
The moneyed ones also had stuff brought in from Baguio: yellow candle and other species.
In the '90s, one wondered why, but suddenly there were tinik ni Kristo everywhere one looked.
There were already other succulents then: little cactus varieties and giant cacti with pricks so big they were covered with whole eggshells maybe as décor or maybe to prevent injury. Katakataka (kalanchoe) was also popular. But no one bothered about the scientific names of these species yet, except perhaps the biology students.
The hard-core gardeners tended orchids.
Then in the '00s, the desert rose and the ZZ plant came, and everyone seemed to have followed suit after someone introduced these. Both plants were quite indestructible and required no tender love and care from their owners.
How each plant became popular – or how it waned on the radar of home horticulturists – is wrapped in mystery. Today, there are some plants that are altogether missing from the garden, as though they have been discarded like yesterday's outmoded clothing: sampaguita, camia, rosal, dama de noche, ylang ylang, adelfa, bangka-bangkaan, to name just a few.
In this day and age of plantitos and plantitas, the most popular appear to be the once-ignored senseverias or snake plant varieties and the pothos varieties because they reportedly clear the air of toxins. Snake plant, of course, used to be called espada, and pothos, simply as waterplant (because it miraculously grows in plain water), but the huge difference is they now come in several varieties. There is, of course, a host of new cactus species and varieties, with eye-popping geometric designs, the aglaonema 'series', the jade plant varieties, and a host of exotics we’ve never seen before, with curious 'accents' and 'accessories' as appendages. There are rubber trees, variegated this and variegated that, fiddleleaf figs, and so on, all changing the current landscape quite literally. Today, the San Francisco shrubs are a rare exception in that they are staging a comeback, but they are coming back with the more fashionable name of...crotons.
Oscar Wilde (or a character in his novel) once defined fashion – with his usual overdose of sarcasm – as "a never-ending parade of ugliness," which is hilariously on point on some level. On the other hand, gardening, we could say in all seriousness, is a never-ending parade of pulchritude. In the cloistered times when people find solace in their little pockets of Eden in the middle of the pandemic, there's no telling which bevy of beauties will turn out to be the next flavor of the month, or apple of the eye, of local home gardeners.
With the endless variety of 'materials,' color, size, shape, geometry, and 'architecture,' the gardener is constantly bombarded with beauty in all its splendor: original, inventive, creative. As though these attributes are not enough, each plant appears to have a unique 'personality,' with its own quirky requirements.
I learned this the hard way as I experimented with being, um, a 'plantito' myself while covid-19 pandemic was raging. I have long been particularly fascinated by the unending variety of forms and structures among cacti (now fashionably called succulents), so it was simply frustrating to find out how certain species die on you if there was too much sun, or to little sun, too much water, or too little water, too much loam or too little sand, etc. The trial-and-error period was quite long and costly, at the expense of too many of them succulents shrivelling or rotting to death.
But finding your own green thumb proves to be quite an experience, as the few survivors begin to thrive and even reward you with a battalion of clones.
The seemingly trivial gardening hobby, I slowly found out, can become something else other than taking care of non-moving pets and adding newer and newer 'items' to your growing collection. I can now more fully understand why someone in the past perceptively saw gardening as a kind of reclaiming the paradise that we humans have lost since the dawn of time (after we had been banished from it).
Plants appear to communicate to us in their own language, and together, they clearly speak of an unseen director that has a taste for great shows, a keen design and fashion sense, unfailingly dazzling in his surprises, or to steal from the stylish Italian novelist Umberto Eco himself, a marvelous "capacity for invention."
Perhaps this is the one aspect of home gardening, here or anywhere, that never changes throughout history.
No comments:
Post a Comment