And Cymbidia Was Her Name

From: Caroline
Sent: Tuesday, March 18, 2003 7:46 AM
Subject: And Cymbidia Was Her Name

[Dear Editor ... I do know that Cymbidia is plural – but this after all is creative non-fiction. “And Cymbidium was her name” doesn’t have the necessary impact. ...]

I am not sure what got my father interested in orchids. I have a vague recollection that a friend closed down her greenhouse and gave my mother their plants to grow in hers. And so he fell under their spell. First he built one greenhouse, then another, connected in the middle by a shed with an oil burner. (The buried oil tank and the asbestos benches were to cause problems many years later.) As these greenhouses were quite a distance from the house he had an alarm system rigged up under his bed to wake him if the greenhouse temperature fell below a certain point. We soon discovered that it was so loud that he wasn’t the only one it woke but as winters in Boxford at that time could go to –30 this was a very necessary safeguard.

The terrestrial growing cymbidiums or “cybs” were his passion and as they prefer much cooler temperatures at night than almost any other kind of orchid, they were his specialty. Of course an orchid out-of-bloom isn’t particularly fascinating to a non-enthusiast, but he still had a lot of visitors, some of them growers. For these he had set a little trap. Way up on a cross beam, almost out of sight he had tacked a 3x5 card with a fertilizer formula written on it. He would recount with glee how he had caught a visitor secretly copying this. The joke of course was that it was a fake.

He was an early riser and would spend an hour or so with his orchids before the long drive to Cambridge. As his devoted secretaries firmly believed that they could run the business better than he, he was able to spend all of Wednesdays with his cymbidiums as well as Saturday mornings.

During the “cybs” blooming season, which is mid-winter, he would bring a particularly beautiful plant with perhaps ten or fifteen flower spikes into the “green room” where he and my mother sat in the evenings and after lunch. As each spike had at least a dozen flowers it made for a breathtaking show. If he didn’t bring a plant he would bring one of the sprays he hadn’t sold in the Boston wholesale flower market and put it in a vase where it would last for at least two weeks.

His reputation as an amateur grower must have been very solid, as at the beginning of the second war, British growers, forced to close down their greenhouses due to coal rationing, sent him prized stock, to be returned later. Unfortunately the necessary fumigating process killed many of them but he was very proud of the ones that survived.

He showed his orchids at the Boston Flower Show then being held in beautiful Mechanics Hall. The exhibit was always arranged by the talented and formidable French proprietor of a Charles Street florist and regularly brought him gold and silver medals. These were in the green room too, displayed on little mahogany stands.

Many years later, friends gave me a cymbidium, which I grew fairly successfully for a couple of years in my bathroom. One February, when it was in flower I took a spray up to my widowed mother. As I was loath to cut it, but thinking that it would give her a great deal of pleasure, I made the sacrifice. “Breast feathers” she would have called the gesture. Not long after my arrival her handy man came into the green room and my mother said, “Oh John, look what Caroline has brought you!”

“But Mother, this is for you”, I remonstrated, very much taken aback. I then went out and found a vase and put the beautiful spray of green and cream flowers on the mantle.

Some time later, after her death, I recounted her unexpected reaction to my brother. “Oh, didn’t you know? The day after our father died she asked me to tear down the greenhouses.”

So I never had a chance to ask her if it was jealousy or grief that had prompted her reaction to my offering. Personally, I think it was jealousy.