Every so often I go to the Conservatory of Flowers in San Francisco when I’m feeling creatively stagnant. I find myself walking around with my sketchbook in hand and jaw on the floor, buzzing like a bee in a super-bloom. Dripping vines, towering palms…it’s a tangle of color and texture that’s delightfully over the top. Like some oxygenated drag show.
The Conservatory sits within a large Victorian greenhouse in Golden Gate Park that dates back to the 1800’s. To float from room to room, past the Bat Flower, the Corpse Flower, and the carnivorous pitcher plants, is to witness the strange and sensory dance of biology. Like the Victoria Water Lilies from South America, with their king-sized lily pads that grow up to 6 feet wide. When their flowers bloom in the evening, they emit a fragrant pineapple scent to attract beetles. These flowers are female and white in color. The next morning the petals close, entrapping the beetle inside. The flower then turns pink and transforms into a male, producing pollen. When it opens up again that evening, it releases the pollen-covered-beetle, ready to pollinate a new flower. The Victoria Water Lily is also considered "thermogenic” which means that it creates its own heat while budding, to further entice the beetles.
To spend an afternoon in the conservatory leaves me fluttery and light headed. Like a first crush. Like a beetle enveloped within a warm, pineapple scented Lily. I’m reminded of the Ecosexual movement, a term I learned about from a recent Atmos article written by Jake Hall. The concept was coined by Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens in 2008, and has since grown into an academic discipline, a sexuality, and an environmental strategy. As Hall explains, rather than depending on Earth as a Mother, extracting endlessly but offering little in return, we can care for the Earth like a lover, taking a pleasure-centric approach to climate justice. It’s fun, it’s queer, and despite its inception as a joke, it’s important. In a time when climate work is so often saddled with paralytic guilt and doom, Ecosexuality provides an alternative framework that’s rooted in joy, pleasure, and intimacy.
Waking through the humid embrace of the conservatory certainly fills me with pleasure, and a good deal of creative inspiration. But it summons a feeling of smallness as well. A smallness rooted in the knowledge that nothing I create as an artist will ever grace the beauty of even the simplest flower, let alone the magnificence of the Victoria Lily. I feel this at the conservatory among the plants, but also in the forest, or walking the coastline at sunset.
I used to call this getting ego-checked (eco-checked?!) but now I call this creative liberation. The buoyant truth that instead of striving for best we can strive for good enough. And in doing so, affirm the fact that our enoughness is innate, just like a flower or a sunset. And not, as our culture would have us believe, contingent upon the greatness of what we produce. Our worth is intrinsic, as is our creativity. And without the constricting binds of best, our art and lives can flourish in unexpected and permissive ways, born from periods of rest, “bad art”, mistakes, and collaborations.
There’s a plaque in the conservatory about the Madagascar star orchid and the Wallace’s sphinx moth and their unique relationship. The orchid has a foot-long nectar spur, which is pollinated by the Wallace’s sphinx moth, whose uniquely long tongue can unfurl to the same length. The plaque explains how they gradually co-evolved in tandem, with spurs and tongues slowly lengthening in response to one another. Partners across time.
When we strip ourselves of the quest-for-best, other humans become collaborators instead of competitors. We can and must co-evolve, like the orchid and the moth. Nourishing each other, helping each other grow, fortifying one another.
A recurring lesson I encounter as a naturalist is that nature is, in simplified terms, one big ecological massage train. A web of the most complex, interconnected relationships, full of nuance and mutual care. As I researched the sphinx moth and the star orchid, I read that Charles Darwin was the first (European) to hypothesize this relationship. Which prompted some reflection on Darwin’s theory of evolution that so many of us learned in middle school science class. What if Survival of the Fittest is not some evolutionary IronMan competition, an interpretation perpetuated by Social Darwinists and Eugenicists to sanction racism and cut-throat capitalism. But instead, the ability for an organism to survive in relation to its environment, in collaboration with a diverse community of other species.
To practice this collaboration is to prioritize mutualism over hierarchical power dynamics, and collective wellness above extractive growth. It prompts us to ask how we can nurture the communities of our own human ecosystems, learning the art of reciprocity from the plants, animals, and bugs all around us. Essentially, learning to adapt together.
In today’s world, adapting together means protecting the earth, and those most vulnerable, from unfettered capitalism and the rampant greed of a select few. But it also means making art. Art as a pathway to new conversations and new modes of being. Art as a mechanism to build community and reexamine history. Art as a conduit to process grief, enact change, spark revolution, and cultivate delight. Like Sprinkle and Stephens, the creators of the Ecosexual movement, artists can shift paradigms.
I often hear artists grappling with the feeling that their art is too small or too insignificant. Not a contribution to the world unless it’s expressly political, or actionable in some measurable way. That age old feeling of not enoughness. But I can’t help but feel that the flowers are proving us wrong.
To truly learn a flower…its evolution, its reproductive cycles, its environmental context….is to learn that what we perceive as artful, pleasurable, and intriguing is more often than not, a function of survival. A creative solution that’s co-evolved in tandem with a complex, living system. Like the colorful lips of a petal that lure a bee. Or the warm, pineapple scent of the lily.
I posit that art plays the same role for us: a vital necessity. The pursuit of beauty and intrigue in the name of art is just as much an act of survival as the roots that stretch for water and the leaves that grow towards the light.
I’m not immune from moments of despair. There are days when what I make and how I spend my time feel undeniably small. But again and again, the curl of a petal calls me back, like a bee to the fold. A reminder that art and pleasure are not frivolities but the stuff of survival.
A commitment to delight, an expression of aliveness, a contribution to the creative ecosystem that feeds us all.
I think the flowers would agree.
Happy blooming,
Tess
I’ll be hosting a free life drawing meet-up in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco on Sunday September 24th. This is not a class, but a time to gather and draw together. We’ll be meeting at the Dahlia garden, just adjacent to the conservatory. I’ll provide an optional worksheet, but the time will be yours to go where you like and draw what you see. Please RSVP here if you’d like to join :)
I made some small paper-pulp pieces inspired by plants at the conservatory. They’ll be for sale on my Instagram on Wednesday September 20th at 10:00 am PST. I’ll also be selling some little sumi ink landscape paintings. All pieces will be framed.
As someone who clearly loves a greenhouse full of plants, I think it’s important to learn about the history of botanical gardens and their roots in colonialism. Many of the “exotic” species that were first “discovered” and brought back to Europe and the US were done so on slave ships. These curated gardens were then utilized as testing sites for colonialist expansion and the plantation industry. Jamaica Kincaid writes about the colonial legacy of botany in her book My Garden (Book). Historian and scholar Sria Chatterjee also addresses this in her article The Long Shadow of Colonial Science.
What a sweet, loving reminder of the necessity of our togetherness and the entanglement of our literal and proverbial roots <3 thank you for your words!
What a fine week-developed piece showing us through art and evolution we can and hopefully will co-exist with our world and each other. Every flower and species is unique and purposeful. Thank you Tess for your insights and beautiful art through your gentle soul. Bonnie R