Gift of Green Fire and Other Strange Encounters

by Linda Talbot

  And again, that night, the nephew passes with but a brief acknowledgement of her presence in the twilit house.

  “Your peacock is very striking,” Lisane comments to her host.

  “Ah - yes. No ordinary bird. One has always been kept in the garden. There is a legend claiming that if you pluck a feather from its tail, float it in a bowl of rosewater and wish, whatever you want will be granted. Nonsense of course, but a pretty tale - excuse me, I have to organise a few things. I’ll see you at dinner, my dear.”

  “Yes, of course.” Lisane rises and steps into the moonlit garden.

  A rustle close by and she turns to see the peacock brazenly spreading his feathers in the icy light. Cautiously she draws near. “Quiet now. Just let me -”

  She reaches a white hand over his handsome head to touch a feather in his tail. As though expecting this, the peacock does not stir and lets her pluck the feather with trembling fingers. Then he quietly folds his tail, turns with head held high and struts into the night.

  Lisane shivers. She returns to the house, clutching the feather in her right hand. In her room a bowl of rosewater already stands, as though awaiting her wish. Gently she lays the feather on the still surface. The feather stirs; its “eye” appearing to candidly assess her.

  She cups her hands round the bowl and silently mouths her desire to seduce Bazal, her host’s haughty nephew. No sooner has she expressed the wish, than she hears footsteps in the passage outside her room. They pause at her door. A knock.

  “Come in!” Lisane, who is not beautiful, adjusts the pale pink night robe embroidered with carnations. Her fair hair falls unheeded on her shoulders. The door opens. Bazal steps into the room, resplendent in a blue silk robe. His black hair is perfumed and sleek, his elegant fingers boast rings of tourmaline and amber. He treads softly in embroidered slippers across the Turkish carpet.

  “Good evening!” His voice is low.

  “Hello!” Lisane is sitting on the white silk coverlet.

  “I felt you call. Did you want to discuss something?” asks Bazal.

  “No, not really I ...” Lisane breaks off and smiles. She holds out her ringless hands. She feels strong and strangely endowed. Bazal looks puzzled but also sits on the bed, then takes one of her sunburned hands in his. Lisane draws him closer and plants a light kiss on his lips.

  The peacock feather stirs. The couple embrace.

  Each day brings discoveries of delight. Lisane leads Bazal through an inner garden of sensuality where flowers burst into flame amid deep pools of contemplation. When Bazal is not in the room with the white coverlet and the gilded bowl of rosewater, he slavishly follows Lisane with his eyes; recalling and anticipating, unaware of the workaday world. Inwardly his father smiles.

  Lisane admires Bazal’s rings and discovers he deals in precious and semi-precious stones. One day they drive to the building where he sorts and grades the stones he has bought.

  “You have good eyesight. Would you like to sort and grade while I travel?” asks Bazal.

  “I’d love to - stones fascinate me!” says Lisane, seeing her future now inextricably linked with his.

  They are walking through the garden at dusk. The peacock is suddenly in their path. Motionless, he waits.

  “He has a feather missing!” exclaims Bazal.

  “Oh yes!” Lisane acknowledges, then hastens to change the subject.

  They turn, leaving the peacock on the path. Lisane feels his eyes accusing, demanding....Why? Does he regret sacrificing one of his feathers?

  In her room she sees the feather in the rosewater quiver, as though with impatience. Lisane draws Bazal to her. She shivers, experiencing a sudden chill of fear. The peacock’s eye, reflected in the feather, expands in her mind like a dark dream. Uneasily, she sleeps at last, but wakes unrested with a sense of foreboding.

  She starts work, handling the lovely stones, examining each through the eye glass for flaws. They are distant, ice cold between her fingers; small kaleidoscopes of shooting light.

  One morning the details of a rare opal begin to blur. Lisane adjusts the eye glass but is unable to bring the stone into focus. When she looks around the laboratory, the benches, walls and floor blur too, performing a dull dance.

  Lisane goes outside. The laboratory is set in another, more modest garden. The flowers, nodding in a light breeze, are not clear cut. They merge with the vague movement of a semi-abstract painting.

  Lisane rubs her eyes and looks again. The sunlit day is darker. Scared now, she returns to the house.

  “Bazal!” she calls.

  He hurries to her. “What’s wrong?”

  Lisane lifts her eyes to look at him. His face is indistinct, then fades. The peacock feather spins in the rosewater. Lisane’s host had neglected to tell her - and had himself forgotten - that after her wish was granted, she should return the feather to the peacock or, his injured vanity would cause him to retaliate.

  The eye in the plucked feather is fixed on her as she lies on the white coverlet. But she cannot see it. She is blind.

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  Neolithic men living by Swiss lakes may have been among the first to reveal the potential of the poppy. Probably for the oil they discovered in its seeds. The poppy has since been found to offer much more - from opium to a contribution to cough mixture.

  When Persephone was abducted by Hades, her mother Demeter drank the juice of the poppy (papaver somniferum) to take her mind off it. And statuettes of Cretan-Mycenaean goddesses with poppy capsules have been found. The association with Demeter, who looked after the land, may spring from the poppy’s numerous seeds. The poppy was known too as Aphrodite’s flower, since she was also essentially linked to vegetation.

  Even Hippocrates knew the power of the poppy and its opium and Dioscorides told how to make opium and warned of ineffectual imitations.

  He pounded the poppy heads with leaves, crushed them in a mortar and made pills with the paste. A pill the size of a small pea would relieve pain he claimed, although an overdose would kill. It is said that Helen at Troy gave a sedative drink, that probably contained the poppy latex, called “nepenthes” to Telemachus and his cohorts to help them forget their dead soldiers.

  The young capsules contain many alkaloids which are collectively known as opium, including the narcotics morphine and codeine. The latex is collected from cuts made in young green but fully grown seed pods. To intoxicate they may be smoked or chewed. Poppy seed oil used on salads is not narcotic.

  The Yellow Horned Poppy (glaucium flavum), grows by the sea and may reach one metre high, flowering from May to August. Theophrastus and Dioscorides advised eating the roots to cure intestinal and urinary problems.

  In Crete the Corn Poppy (papaver rhoeas) is darker than its British counterpart. It is the parent of the garden Shirley Poppy. Seeds are used as a tonic for horses by the Arabs and Turks and infusions from the fruits help coughs and are used as an eye lotion for animals. A red ink comes from the petals.

  In London I grew masses of Californian Poppy (eschscholtzia californica) - a blazing annual that comes, not surprisingly, from California and Oregon. It loves the sun and moderate watering, but is not keen on being moved.

  In contrast, the Iceland Poppy (papaver nudicaule) comes from subarctic parts of north America, Europe and Asia. Pale pink and papery with a yellow centre, this too likes full sun and a soil rich in lime and organic material. It also demands regular watering and appreciates an occasional feed of liquid fertiliser. If the soil is unsuitable it might get root rot.

  You can easily grow the classic Corn or Shirley Poppy, whose bright red face flutters like a symbol of defiance in the sun which it relishes. It likes open cool soil with a little organic material. Water sparingly and pick the faded flowers to prolong bloom. Remove the plants as soon as they have flowered and in spring plant fresh seed.

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  Ben firms in the final tulip bulb. He sees them in the spring; heads da
ncing in the brisk breeze; irrepressible after the snow.

  Chrysanthemums are massed; explosively optimistic. Dahlias, more rarefied, turn to him neatly cultivated heads which he touches with soft reverence. The summer had been resplendent with geraniums, foxgloves, zinnias and godetia. Californian poppies had blazed at the back of the border. Busy Lizzies and petunias had flowered endlessly.

  Now Ben will take his trowel to the weeds that he neglected as he lazed on the sunlit lawn. But first he sinks briefly into the deckchair. Astonished, he sees Beth, his former wife walking towards him across the garden. He hears again her suggestion that he plants a honeysuckle to spread fragrance over the wicket gate. At the end of the wide border, a cream rose tinged with pink, blooms profusely, its perfume borne seductively on the breeze. The rose had been there when he took over the garden from another keen plantsman. He did not know its name, so he called it Beth.

  The wicket gate creaks open and he sees Hugh, his best friend, walking towards them. He has aged and grown fat. He is stroking his shaggy black beard and the amiability in his eyes turns to cunning and the desire for acquisition. He glides past Ben and casually takes Beth’s arm, coaxing her away from the garden, away from Ben.

  “No!” Ben runs after them. Hugh swings round and throws a punch. Ben totters but responds with one which is harder. Hugh goes down. But he recovers and leaps at Ben, sending him reeling this time into the flowers.

  That was how it had happened ten years ago. When Ben staggers to his feet he sees a quick movement behind a red dahlia. He blinks and looks again. A tiny brown-skinned being skips into the open. She is naked with black hair like the fine web of a spider, topped by a white daisy.

  Behind her comes a minute male, mirroring a human in every detail, save for ears ending in tiny points. He stares for a moment at Ben with lilac eyes. He turns to the female who has stopped skipping and is looking over her shoulder at him. She laughs - a high silver sound. He catches her round the waist with hands whose fingers end in miniature replicas of human nails. He rolls her over. She laughs again and gleefully he mounts her. Ben keeps blinking, unbelieving.

  A few seconds later another brown-skinned being appears. He is fat and has a straggly black beard and darting eyes sunk in folds of flesh. He leaps onto the back of the other male and wrenches him off the squirming female. The two lock in combat; a parody of contention between full grown men. For three minutes they wrestle, rolling over and over on the fresh brown earth. Their pants of exertion are barely perceptible puffs of air.

  The young male punches the older on his flat nose and he topples onto the soil. The youngster scoops up the female and stumbles with her to a nearby rabbit hole. They disappear. The old male slowly rises, rubs his bruised limbs and shuffles off in the other direction.

  Ben feels his flesh shrinking. The chrysanthemums expand until they fill the sky. But it is Ben who is diminishing. He thinks of Alice in Wonderland as the flowers’ leaves loom above, obliterating the light.

  He looks at the hole - as big as a cave now at the back of the border. Curious, he takes a step between the flowers, sinking to his waist in the moist soil. He struggles out, towards the rabbit hole. His trowel lies like the abandoned plaything of a giant.

  He reaches the hole and peers into the darkness. Silence. Thinking again about Alice, he steps inside. But he does not hurtle through space. He instantly arrives on a patch of soft grass. Around its edge sit ten of the brown beings, their arms and legs crossed, wry smiles on their faces.

  They’re laughing at me, thinks Ben. He stands up and smiles too.

  “Who are you?” His voice is as high as when he was a baby.

  The little folk titter. Clearly they do not understand. Then he sees the young male and female who had cavorted in his garden. They leap up. Although shrunken, he is twice their size but they reach to take his hand. The young male begins to hum - tunelessly but in time with a high stepping dance. The female springs on the other side and Ben, who has not danced since he was seven, imitates their steps. Round and round they dance while the seated folk clap. Ben grows dizzy. He may be small but he still feels sixty.

  Gradually the fairy beings lead Ben from the grass patch through a tangle of white flowers he cannot identify into a garden aflame with rare plants. Alice in Wonderland again. But there are no croquet hoops or flamingos. And no queen demanding decapitation. Only peace. The flowers wave; multi-coloured flags, pink and blue ribbons streaming above serrated leaves, squat orange daisies with petals loosely splayed.

  Ben pauses to look closer but the fairy folk urge him on along a yellow cinder path towards an enormous cream rose tinged with pink. In its centre sits another female with long fair hair and a face resembling Beth’s. She smiles and beckons. Ben looks, incredulous, remembering..... His companions give him a gentle shove.

  He stumbles against the thorny stem of the rose. Then the tiny woman begins to descend, pointing one elegant foot before the other; each clad in tiny slippers made from the petals of white daisies. One slips off as she nears the ground and gallantly Ben picks it up and hands it to her.

  She reaches the grass and with a small curtsy takes the slipper and replaces it on her foot. Then she takes Ben’s hand and skips with him round the flower, down a grassy slope to a clear green pool. Ben looks into it and sees striped fish darting among floating flowers. The fairy woman laughs and pulls him with surprising strength onto the grass. She smells of crushed flower petals and feels like moist velvet.

  Ben recalls lost love and wonderful sensations and grasps her with both hands. Her lips taste like dew, her hair slithers on her shoulders. He enjoys her soft unearthliness, the pool rippling approval.

  Then strong arms tug at him, pulling him off the fairy and pummelling him until he gasps for breath. It is the elderly being with the beard who separated the other happy couple. The one who looks like Hugh.

  Ben pummels him back but the creature, who smells of dead leaves, rolls him over and into the pool. The striped fish streak out of the way. The floating flowers disintegrate.

  Ben opens his eyes. When did he nod off in the deckchair? He had been about to weed the flower bed. Cautiously he gets up and peers behind the chrysanthemums. He sees only weeds, a disturbance of dark soil and the rabbit hole.

  Ben is his former size - in no way suitable for emulating Alice. He sighs, shakes his head and bends with his trowel to uproot the bindweed. But, as he turns the autumn earth, he recalls the smell of crushed flower petals and the feel of moist velvet.

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  It is ironic that some of our most beautiful flowers should have their mythical roots in brutality. Heliotrope is a chilling example. The sun god Helius gossiped about Aphrodite’s faithlessness. Her husband, the lame smith god Hephaistus, was never to have her exclusively. Aphrodite responded to the gossip by encouraging Helius to lust after the mortal woman Leucothea.

  But Helius had been careless. He had once made love to Clytie, Leucothea’s sister. Clytie was jealous when she learned of his new love and told Orchamos, her father. He promptly buried Leucothea alive.

  Helius arrived in distress and tried to penetrate the earth with his rays to revive her but he was too late. Like several other unfortunate females, she had the dubious compensation of becoming a popular plant. Helius turned her into an incense shrub.

  Clytie realised she had lost her new love. She refused food and drink and wasted away beneath the soil, changing slowly into a purple-petalled flower that turned to watch the sun from the moment it rose to when it set. Clytie had become the evergreen Heliotrope. Ever since this plant has favoured full sun.

  Heliotropium europaeum has arched branches with white or lilac flowers. And a good type for the garden is heliotropium arborescens from Peru, with rounded heads of small lilac flowers and textural leaves. This flowers for most of the year and favours a bright, very sheltered spot with a moistly rich, fairly compact soil. It likes well rotted organic material and regular watering.
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  After flowering prune it lightly and propagate by cuttings in autumn or spring.

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  Why is the winged monkey poised with the regal woman in the pleated skirt? And why are other women approaching with the crocuses they have just picked? This is one of the enigmas emerging in the frescoes unearthed at Akrotiri on Santorini - where a town and its remarkable artefacts was preserved by the ash of the violent volcanic eruption some believe wiped out the Minoans.

  But what was the significance of the humble crocus? The flower reappears - for instance, palely stated on the dark brown of an offering table. Crocuses are found too in Minoan Crete. The Saffron Crocus (crocus sativus) is resplendent on a mural from Hagia Triada from the south of the island.

  This crocus was vital in dye-making. The large scarlet stigmas of the flowers were used to make a bright yellow dye and to make 1kg of dried saffron for this, from 100,000 to 140,000 stigmas were needed. Ancient Greeks surely did not have enough crocuses. Perhaps they imported saffron from Asia Minor. It is also used as a cooking spice. It grows unhindered in the wild but in countries from Kashmir to Spain, Iran and northern Greece, is grown commercially.

  Crocus cancellatus is an autumn flowering species with white or pale lilac flowers often feathered with violet. This is found in countries from Greece to those of the Middle East. The corms are edible and are sold in the streets. And you may stumble across crocus sieberi; pinkish and exotic among coarse clods of earth.

  For northeners the crocus is a symbol of spring and the promise of the cornucopia of flowers to come. The Dutch perfected the hybrid crocus, Ornamental Dutch crocuses emerging from the patient crossing of crocuses vernus, flavus, sativus, susianus and versicolor.

  You can plant crocus bulbs in a light or semi-shaded place. They will grow in any soil but prefer fertile, moist sandy soil mixed with leaf mould and a little well rotted manure. You should not need to water them.