Mystery Flora: Salmon-Hued Beauties

Picture a temperate February day that is more like spring than winter. The sun is shining gently, its rays occasionally obscured by passing clouds. Birds are singing lustily all about. A delicate breeze stirs the awakening life. The groundhog was dead right about the rest of the country, but here in the West, we are absolutely not suffering six more weeks of winter. Sorry, people who had to dig out of several feet of snow!

I’d walked down to the office to pick up Misha’s high-calorie supplement paste, and spotted an absolutely fabulous flowering bush as I emerged.

Image shows a nearly-leafless bush festooned with salmon-pink blooms.
Mystery flowers I

This, people, is why my purse is a camera bag. I set down the box (box, for a little tube of cat calorie paste! They must understand cats) and drew out the camera.

Close-up view of the flowers. They have 5 rounded, overlapping petals, and a cluster of yellow anthers and stamens in the middle.
Mystery flowers II

The light was just perfect for photography, my darlings, neither too bright nor too dim. I’ve barely had to adjust these photos to bring out the full majesty. Just a tiny shift in the highlights, maybe a nudge to the contrast on a few.

One of the flowers is turned up toward the sky like a satellite dish.
Mystery flowers III

When it comes down to it, all this beauty comes down to sex. We cultivate these gorgeous plants because they please us and make our spaces pretty. They expend all of this energy basically because they’re trying to have sex.

Detail of the satellite bloom, showing a small bud beneath it.
Mystery flowers IV

We’re basically staring at the sex organs of these plants. And they’re gaudy and colorful so they can attract third parties to an orgy, basically. Bees and other pollinators are unwitting sex workers, the reproductive technicians who carry out the task of fertilization.

One flower is pointed toward the camera, another away.
Mystery flowers V

Someday, perhaps I’ll have to write an erotic story about sentient flowers getting it on via bees. Maybe there will be a sect of bees that preaches against collecting pollen, considering it a form of sexual immorality even though they’re not the ones getting off on it.

Image shows a cluster of the flowers, and a small oval leaf with serrated edges. The outer bits of the leaf are red, the interior green.
Mystery flowers VI

So of course it’s only the atheist, agnostic, and liberal bees that have got honey. The devout bees have to find other ways to feed themselves, perhaps purchasing pollen from their heathen neighbors, or picking up stray bits of pollen that have been blown off in the wind. They preach self-sufficiency and piety whilst mooching off their fellow bees.

Image shows a pair of flowers back-to-back.
Mystery flowers VII

There’s a whole lecture circuit of reformed bees preaching about their hedonistic life back when they were still crawling around flowers’ sexual organs collecting that delicious sweet pollen. Then they got religion, and realized Beezus didn’t want them befouling themselves. They also realized Beezus had nothing much to do with its omniscience and omnipotence, so it spent a lot of time thinking of sticky flower sex and those flowers rubbing their naughty bits all over the bees…

Close-up view of a flower's naughty bits.
Mystery flowers VIII

Meanwhile, the flowers and the heathen bees absolutely could not care less about this weird Beezus cult. The heathen bees are out getting yummy foodstuffs and being all industrious, while the flowers are enjoying their orgies, and looking forward to all those adorable seedlings that will soon start growing.

A cluster of the flowers.
Mystery flowers IX

Meanwhile, the really pious bees have begun homeschooling their eggs, and trying to survive on what scraps of pollen they can scrape together from the ground, and denying that flowers and bees evolved together. They preach that flowers were once good and pure until Abee and Beeve ate the nectar from the wrong plant, and flowers were cursed to become lusty little Jezebels, always tempting the poor bees, who will only go to the great hive in the sky if they don’t fall prey to those awful flowery wiles. But once the eggs hatch, and the new bees venture out in the world, and knock back a little nectar with the heathens, they learn this is all complete BS and leave their parents fuming about kids these days as they go off to live a life free of the judgements of Beezus.

And the flowers do rejoice.

The top of the flowering bush, with the flowers looking like they're waving at the air.
Mystery flowers X

The end.

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Mystery Flora: Salmon-Hued Beauties
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8 thoughts on “Mystery Flora: Salmon-Hued Beauties

  1. rq
    5

    This would explain why they looked so familiar – the ones at work are currently at it, as well (plant sex – it’s everywhere these days!). :P

  2. 6

    Having looked it up on Wikipedia, I’ll agree with the quince. My parents used to have a huge one (about 10 feet diameter) in their back yard.

  3. 7

    Yup, it’s an ornamental variety of quince! Very pretty, grows virtually anywhere, can’t remember a single house I lived in as a kid that didn’t have at least one overgrown bush. They bear fruit in the fall which is not inedible, though astringent and somewhat bitter. A very striking specimen you have found. The ones I remember were much lankier.

  4. rq
    8

    They’re nice in the winter, dried up in slices and drunk in tea with a lot of honey. Like lemon, but different. Also, locally, they’re often found in syrupized form – either syrup from the juice, or as a preserve-type syrup with chopped fruit bits in it – or as candied slices for snacking. Also best as a tea, as their acidic taste is hard to eliminate completely, but very consumable (Middle Child loves them specifically for the sourness and can eat handfuls at a time). Probably good as a marmalade-type preserve, though I haven’t tried.

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