Unfurling Prayer. Calathea 'Helen Kennedy', Garfield Park Conservatory, Chicago, Illinois, USA
Appropriately on the Green Line just west of the inner City Loop of Chicago, is Garfield Park Conservatory. It's an immense place and one of the largest conservatories in the USA. Very much worth a visit (and a donation, for it is free to enter but struggling for survival). How the small staff manage such a large place so well is truly a miracle.
Perhaps that miracle is caused by the many kinds of Prayer Plants (Marantaceae) cultivated with great diligence here. This particular one is a Calathea 'Helen Kennedy' (named for the famous botanist of the same name [1941-], an expert on these plants, who works in British Columbia, Canada).
This Calathea - like many Marantaceae - comes from Brazil. The name 'Calathea' comes from the Greek for 'basket'. The leaves of the plant can be made into leakproof containers. 'Prayer Plant' derives from the fact that the leaves of Marantaceae often fold in the dark, but I don't know if those of this particular plant do so.
Charles Plumier (1646-1704) of Frangipani fame on the king of France's orders traveled as a botanist to South America. Here he was the first European to describe Marantaceae. He named them for Bartolomeo Maranta (ca. 1500-1571), a great Italian botanist but also a fine literary critic and rhetorician. Poetics - not to be confused with poetry - was for him precisely the stuff of life because he thought it to be specific and direct and not general and abstract like philosophy. Whatever the poetics of prayer, this particular Prayer Plant unfurls very specifically and beautifully...
Unfurling Prayer. Calathea 'Helen Kennedy', Garfield Park Conservatory, Chicago, Illinois, USA
Appropriately on the Green Line just west of the inner City Loop of Chicago, is Garfield Park Conservatory. It's an immense place and one of the largest conservatories in the USA. Very much worth a visit (and a donation, for it is free to enter but struggling for survival). How the small staff manage such a large place so well is truly a miracle.
Perhaps that miracle is caused by the many kinds of Prayer Plants (Marantaceae) cultivated with great diligence here. This particular one is a Calathea 'Helen Kennedy' (named for the famous botanist of the same name [1941-], an expert on these plants, who works in British Columbia, Canada).
This Calathea - like many Marantaceae - comes from Brazil. The name 'Calathea' comes from the Greek for 'basket'. The leaves of the plant can be made into leakproof containers. 'Prayer Plant' derives from the fact that the leaves of Marantaceae often fold in the dark, but I don't know if those of this particular plant do so.
Charles Plumier (1646-1704) of Frangipani fame on the king of France's orders traveled as a botanist to South America. Here he was the first European to describe Marantaceae. He named them for Bartolomeo Maranta (ca. 1500-1571), a great Italian botanist but also a fine literary critic and rhetorician. Poetics - not to be confused with poetry - was for him precisely the stuff of life because he thought it to be specific and direct and not general and abstract like philosophy. Whatever the poetics of prayer, this particular Prayer Plant unfurls very specifically and beautifully...