Cymbidium

Every year, a large flat box would arrive via the chocolate-brown UPS truck. I should note that in my childhood days, mail order was still quite a rare thing, and delivery trucks were equally rare. If the brown truck showed up in the week before your birthday, you knew Grandmother had been shopping--something she was very good at.

The box was inscribed in my grandfather's careful handwriting in all caps, using a red felt pen: "FRESH FLOWERS - RUSH" with a red box or squiggles around it to make extra sure. My mother would stop what she was doing, and bring the box to the kitchen, carefully cut open the tape, and remove the tissue paper to reveal six perfect stems of Cymbidium, each with its own little tube of water (which we would save and return to him at our next visit). She would dunk them in the tub to refresh them from the long voyage. And then came her annual admonition to not touch the delicate petals, as the oils on our hands would brown them prematurely. 

Known to the rest of the world as boat orchids, you probably know them from prom and mother's day corsages as individual flowers, but you probably don't know there are at least a dozen flowers to each three-foot arced stem, and in a range of striking colors. My mother adored the pale pinks and deep magentas; my favorite was always the lime green. 

What made these special was that they were not from a florist: my grandfather grew them himself in a narrow lean-to greenhouse attached to the garage in their upscale neighborhood. He would spend hours in his garden, and any rainy day he spent with his orchids, potting and repotting, puttering to his heart's delight. When he read that plants like music, he switched his transistor radio from ball games to classical music.

For a boy who grew up in rural Minnesota, the clime of the San Francisco Bay Area must have seemed positively tropical. I can imagine the joy he got in selecting the perfect stems and packing them up for the recipients. The boxes came every year to relatives: my uncle's family, our great aunts, and, as the elders passed away, to us as young people starting out on our own. I was a senior in college when I received a brown box of my own--one of the last he would send before his health began to fail. 

So, imagine my delight, as I was finishing up a four-year stint of travel for serving on a board, when I arrived travel-weary to a nice little cheese plate--and a lovely single lime green cybidium in my posh suite. 

Cymbidia growing in my grandfather's side yard