Every so often someone stops at the van, points into a bucket, and asks whether a thing is real. It usually is. The flowers that get that question are the ones I think of as unique flowers — not rare, necessarily, and not expensive, just built in a way your eye doesn't have a file for yet. An artichoke that turned out to be a flower. A stem wearing felt. A bloom that smells faintly of dessert. You look twice, and the second look is the whole point.
Late September is a good time for them. The light in Venice goes long and amber in the afternoon, and flowers from dry, sunburnt places look like they have finally found the weather they were waiting for.
The King Protea, Which Isn't Quite What It Seems
The king protea is South Africa's national flower, and its botanical name, Protea cynaroides, is an honest description: cynaroides means artichoke-like, after the genus Cynara. The family name comes from Proteus, the Greek sea god who could change his shape at will — chosen because the family is so various it seems to be several things at once.
What most people call the petals aren't petals. They're bracts, modified leaves, ringing a crowd of small true flowers packed into the center. The whole thing is an inflorescence dressed up as a single bloom. In the wild it survives fire by sending up new stems from buds in a thick underground stem once the flames have passed. I think about that when I put one in a vase. This is not a delicate flower. It has been through worse than a warm afternoon.
The family is old, scattered across the Southern Hemisphere in a pattern that traces back to Gondwana, when those continents were one. The protea you see in Los Angeles often haven't come nearly so far. Coastal California is one of the world's five Mediterranean-climate regions, and growers in Fallbrook, in northern San Diego County, raise protea, pincushions, banksia and leucadendron in conditions close to the Cape.
Kangaroo Paw, a Flower Wearing Velvet
Kangaroo paw is a genus of eleven species, and the red-and-green one, Anigozanthos manglesii, has been the floral emblem of Western Australia since 1960. The color is the strange part. It doesn't sit in the petals the way it does in a rose; it comes from fine hairs covering the buds, which is why a kangaroo paw looks less painted than upholstered. Run a thumb down one and it feels like the nap of a good coat.
The tubular, claw-like flowers are made for birds, which come for the nectar and pollinate as they go. In an arrangement I use them for line and for texture — something your hand wants to touch before your eye has finished looking. The color lasts well after cutting, which is why growers here and in Australia raise them for the vase.
Chocolate Cosmos, and a Story That Turned Out Wrong
This one I love partly for its reputation. Chocolate cosmos, Cosmos atrosanguineus, is the dark red-brown of a bruised cherry, and it carries a light vanilla scent — vanillin, the same note you find in a lot of chocolate — that grows stronger toward evening.
For decades the story went that it was extinct in the wild, and that every chocolate cosmos in every garden descended from a single sterile clone kept going by cuttings and tissue culture. It was a lovely, melancholy story. It also wasn't true. A research project led by the Mexican botanist Aarón Rodríguez, begun in 2007, confirmed wild populations in Guanajuato, Querétaro and San Luis Potosí, with records going back to 1986. Meanwhile a geneticist in New Zealand had been raising fertile, seed-grown plants since 1990. The flower wasn't vanishing. Most of us just weren't looking in the right places.
I think that is a fair lesson for unique flowers in general. The rarity is often in us — in what we haven't happened to see yet.
Unique Flowers, Closer to Home
Two of these three come from places a lot like here: dry summers, mild winters, hard light. Maybe that's why they look so at home in Los Angeles, and why they tend to outlast the softer flowers around them. If you want to meet one in person, come find the van on Abbot Kinney, or stop by the studio and ask what came in that week that nobody could name. There is almost always something.
