Flower power

Flower power
The expression is said to have been coined by the US poet Allen Ginsberg in 1965.

 

 

1967 Fashion

Hippies spoke readily of "flower power" as many of them got their power from the cannabis flower - as well as wearing flowery garb.

 

Hippie psychedelia reached its peak in 1967, flooding the 'alternative' fashion world with kaftans, afghan coats, body paint and flowers in the hair.

 

This was the year of Scott McKenzie's hit San Francisco (Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair) and the phrase 'turn on, tune in, drop out'.

 

 

The Art OF Flower Language Speaks Again
The power of flower language used by would-be burglar.

A burglar broke into a home in the United Kingdom, to find a 91 year-old woman in the house. The burglar fled the scene empty handed, leaving behind a badly frightened elderly woman. In a rare show of conscience, the would-be burglar the next day, sent a bunch of flowers and a card to the woman. He apologized for having caused the elderly woman alarm, explaining he thought the house was empty at the time. The local police are asking the man to turn himself in.


God gets some flower power
New York - A New York City man says the elephant-headed Hindu god Ganesh appeared to him in his backyard in the shape of a 1.2-metre-tall purple flower.

The amaranth plant in the backyard of Sam Lal's home in the Queens section of the city began to resemble an elephant's head and trunk in August after growing all summer.

The 60-year-old Hindu man tells the Daily News it appears to have healed him. He says pain he suffered from a bone spur disappeared when the plant grew.

Queens Botanical Garden spokesperson Tim Heimerle says horticulturists there have never seen an amaranth take an elephant-like shape. He says the trunk-like formation is "not a natural thing".

 

Flower power
Professor Stefano Mancuso, director of the International Laboratory of Plant Neurobiology in Italy, the world's only lab dedicated to plant intelligence, says while plants have neither nerves nor a brain, they are brilliant problem solvers. "Problems like finding food, reproducing, avoiding useless risks drive the lives of men as well as those of animals and plants," he says. "Plants are able to find food and water, to defend themselves (against) predators, to communicate with other plants, to raise newborns, to recognise kin. They are even able to manipulate animals, for example during pollination, luring them with false rewards or promising sex — as in the case of the many orchids that attract insect males by producing female (insect) pheromones and flowers mimicking the female body."

In a recent discovery in Queensland, scientists found primitive plants called cycads manipulated insects in a flourishing food-for-sex trade. Pollination of the plants was once thought to occur randomly by wind blowing from the male to female cycads, Science Daily reported last year. But scientists in Utah and Queensland have now found the male cycad cones emit a toxic odour to drive away pollen-covered insects, while female cones simultaneously release a milder odour to attract them — fooling the insects into pollinating them by making them think they are males.

Some plants under attack from grubs emit odours, similar to lavender, to alert other plants to the presence of a predator, as well as attracting wasps — the natural enemy of the grub. The New York Times recently reported a separate study showing how certain plants can distinguish between their relatives and strangers, and give preferential treatment to their kin. Scientists in Ontario found a beach weed, known as Great Lakes Sea Rocket, reacts aggressively to a strange plant by sprouting nutrient-grabbing roots, starving its rival of space. But when it recognises a nearby plant as a relative, it restrains itself — an ability not even animals are known to display.

The Laboratory of Plant Neurobiology believes plants have much to teach us. It has designed a "plantoid" robot to explore the surface of Mars — by dropping mechanical "pods" into the planet's soil for study — and is now waiting on the green light from the European Space Agency so it can produce its first plant in space. Mancuso says plant behaviour here on Earth can teach humans about low water consumption and low energy use. "The 'intelligent' solutions that plants found in these fields deserve to be carefully studied and, if possible, imitated," he says.

Yet many people tend to underestimate plants, placing them somewhere near the bottom of the evolutionary tree.

"We have a widespread view of plants as simple objects and, therefore, that something like an old-growth forest is no different from a stack of toilet paper rolls because it's just a thing," says Dr Virginia Shepherd, a research associate in the department of biophysics at the University of New South Wales. "But it's not just some mechanism that blows in the wind like a windmill … I think we underestimate how profound this relationship is."

Like many keen gardeners, Shepherd admits feeling affection for particular pot plants. A duck orchid, which grows near her home in the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney, is "like an old friend", she says. But there is a difference between what people might believe and what science can prove, she adds.

"I know many people who are gardeners who swear blind their plants have feelings, or they talk to their plants. I have a friend who played Mozart and heavy metal to his plants and said they moved towards Mozart … But science can only deal with things it can test."

Scientists in Tuscany did test the effect of music on grapevines, finding Bach, Mozart and Vivaldi promoted the growth of foliage, while Beethoven and Mahler aided in the ripening of the fruit — and in scaring away predators, according to a Wired report from last year.

 

 

Flower Power Fiats Take to the Streets
This district in Milan has become known for housing the hottest young designers for the week of the Salone di Mobile and many of the key parties and events take place here.

This year, The Flower Council of Holland will also be taking up residence in Zona Tortona.

Set up to promote the use of cut flowers and plants, the Flower Council has invited five influential designers to create a team of Flower Power Fiats which will be based there.

Each designer has created a design using flowers to decorate the Fiat 500, arguably one of Italy's most iconic cars, and visitors to the Zona Tortona will be able to admire and may even be able to hitch a lift in one of the floral Fiats.

Add hibiscus to your heart-friendly diet
Travel through Jamaica or Mexico and you're likely to be offered a hibiscus-flavored soda. Ill in China? If it's your liver or blood pressure that's the problem, a traditional healer might treat you with hibiscus. Although, it's not found in many foods or medicines in the United States, new research suggests Americans might want to warm up to the flower to improve their health.

What the researchers wanted to know: Can hibiscus flowers help prevent the build-up of cholesterol?
What they did: The scientists boiled the flowers and filtered the solution to obtain concentrated hibiscus extract. First, they tested the effects of the extract on cholesterol in samples of human blood. Then, they used two groups of 24 rats each; they fed one group a high-sugar diet and one a high-fat diet. Within each group, some rats were given hibiscus in addition to their unhealthy diet. (Some rats in each group were also fed a normal diet as controls.) The scientists compared the cholesterol levels of the rats given hibiscus with those who ate just an unhealthy diet.

What they found: For rats on the high-sugar diet, hibiscus significantly reduced triglyceride levels in the blood. (Triglycerides are a reflection of fat intake and can contribute to high cholesterol levels.) For the rats on a high fat diet, hibiscus reduced the levels of total cholesterol in the rats' blood and especially reduced the amount of LDL or "bad" cholesterol. Based on their experiments with human blood in the lab, the scientists think that hibiscus makes it harder for LDL cholesterol to bind to artery walls, inhibiting the build-up of cholesterol that can cause blockage and heart disease.

Anti-cancer flower power
Could a substance from the jasmine flower hold the key to an effective new therapy to treat cancer?
Prof. Eliezer Flescher of The Sackler Faculty of Medicine, Tel Aviv University thinks so. He and his colleagues have developed an anti-cancer drug based on a decade of research into the commercial applications of the compound Jasmonate, a synthetic compound derived from the flower itself. Prof. Flescher began to research the compound about a decade ago, and with his recent development of the drug, his studies have now begun to bear meaningful fruit.

"Acetylsalicylic acid (aspirin) is based on a plant stress hormone," says Prof. Flescher. "I asked myself, 'Could there be other plant stress hormones that have clinical efficacy?' While various studies have suggested that aspirin can prevent cancer, especially colon cancer, I realized that there could be a chance to find a potent plant hormone that could fight cancer even better. I pinpointed jasmonate."

A Natural Leap to the Drugstore Shelf

Both blood cancers and solid tumors seem to be responsive to the jasmonate compound, known also as methyl jasmonate. Prof. Flescher refers to it as the "jasmonate scaffold," a basis for developing a series of chemical derivatives. In terms of bioavailability and safety, early first-in-man studies have proven successful, and Prof. Flescher is hopeful that an anti-cancer drug based on jasmonate could be on the shelf in America within four years through the activity of Sepal-Pharma which licensed his research from Ramot, the technology transfer arm of Tel Aviv University.

Normally drug development takes much longer. "The jasmonate compound is used widely in agriculture and in cosmetics," says Prof. Flescher. "Proven to be non-toxic, it has the same regulatory status as table salt. That and the fact we are working on a natural chemical gives us a good starting point for launching a new drug."

 

 

The evolutionary triumph of flower power
While flowers originally came on the scene to attract potential pollinators like bugs and birds, it is their appeal to humans that accounts for the incredible variety of shapes and colors we see in domesticated flowers today. McGuire suggests that nature's prettier flowers got to survive and thrive because people didn't destroy them when they cleared land for agriculture. Instead, they cultivated them and have been doing so for more than 5,000 years.

Ironically, many domesticated flowers have been so selected by humans that nature's pollinators - the bugs and birds - no longer find them attractive. So the job of propagating the species depends mainly on us.

An article in the journal "Evolutionary Psychology" by McGuire; Jeannette Haviland-Jones, a professor of psychology at Rutgers; and others, states that in spite of some basic survival uses such as edible or medicinal flowers, most flowering plants grown in the flower industry today are not used for any purpose other than emotional satisfaction.

"Our hypothesis is that flowers are exploiting an emotional niche. They make us happy," McGuire says. "Because they are a source of pleasure - a positive emotion inducer - we take care of them. In that sense they're like dogs. They are the pets of the plant world."