Strange Flowers: Pluto's Rose

[...an excerpt from Dr. Sieber's illustrated field guide to the strange flowers of the dark recesses of this world...]

Pluto's Rose (Amorphophallus infernum)

The flower of the Amorphophallus infernum is hideous. The leaves: grotesque. The fruit: unsightly and poisonous. And yet, without question, the Amorphophallus infernum is the most beautiful and wondrous plant that the author of this manuscript has encountered in his long and distinguished botanical career.

The secret to the Amorphophallus infernum’s mystery is this: the plant hides its beauty beneath the soil. The plant’s ornate and elaborate root system, when viewed from below, constitutes one of the great natural wonders of our world.

There is no known scientific reason why the plant should have evolved to display such a peculiar and incongruous appearance. But, perhaps, the answer to such puzzles is best sought not in the calculations and tabulations of scientists, but in the words of poets and theologians. It is speculated that Amorphophallus infernum was not designed by the creator for the enjoyment of the living; rather, the beauty of Pluto’s Rose faces downwards, toward the underworld, as a small concession to the damned souls who dwell there.

About this Strange Flower

For quite some time I've been making these arrangements, using chicken feet "petals" and cow trachea "stems" to sculpt a kind of fleshy, macabre version of those baroque floral still life paintings that we've all seen at the art gallery.

In time, I got the idea of treating each of these strange flowers as its own unique species, complete with a Latin name and botanical description. Here, the Latin name for Pluto's Rose stitches together two distinct bits of inspiration. The second half of the name, infernum, comes from the Latin word for "inferno," which makes sense given the botanical backstory above. The first half of the name is borrowed from Amorphophallus titanium, the Latin name for the so-called Corpse Flower which apparently smells like rotting flesh and was voted least attractive plant by the British horticultural society because, apparently, that's a thing.

The botanical stories associated to each Strange Flower were something I struggled with. I wanted to find a balance where the stories were very short and placed the flower itself as a central part of the narrative, but at the same time I didn't want to just write up a bunch of boring dry facts about imaginary flora. In the end–inspired by experimental works like Calvino's Invisible Cities, Burroughs' Exterminor, and Ballard's Attrocity Exhibition–I opted to treat these field guide entries as being something more like poetry than prose. Each entry is supposed to evoke a mood or touch on one very specific theme, without really conveying much sense of plot or narrative arc.

Here, in this story, I was thinking a lot about the myriad ways in which we tend to find beauty, even in the midst of ugliness and cruelty and violence and death. This is a theme that permeates all of my photography and it seemed very natural to me to have at least on Strange Flowers field guide entry that addresses this idea head on.

At the same time, this poetic and atmospheric approach to story-telling in Strange Flowers is also consistent with the bigger picture framing device of the work. The magazine presents itself as being the final notes of famed botanist Franz Sieber, who suffered from some undiagnosed mental illness and died, disgraced and broken, in a Prague insane asylum. I imagine that Sieber would have spent many hours there, in the asylum, thinking about his celebrated botanical career and how much he had, in the end, lost. And I imagine he might have struggled to find some cause for celebration, some source of beauty, in those grim final years.

The story of Pluto's Rose, then, imagines that perhaps Franz Sieber found, amidst his despair, a way of looking at the world that allowed him to find beauty even as he suffered.

Coming soon!

Strange Flowers: An Illustrated Field Guide will be completed and ready for purchase as a fine art magazine in the next month or two. Stay tuned!