Becky and I went to a place where I haven’t been in a long time, though I once spent about a couple cumulative weeks a year there. It’s the UC Berkeley Botanic Garden, nestled among the live oaks in the upper reaches of Strawberry Canyon in the Berkeley Hills. 23 years ago, my getting to the Bot Garden took just an easy if lengthy hike up from the flatlands of Berkeley. Now it involves driving through the East Bay’s worst traffic, parking in a dollar-an-hour lot.
Above the canyon, a row of Monterey Pines lined the top of a ridge. When I was a young man I walked beneath them in thin Chinese shoes, struggling to keep my footing on the steep trail. The trees were noticably taller today.
We went to the botanic garden to see the fabled corpse flower, the five-foot inflorescence of Amorphophallus titanum that attracts pollinating insects — beetles, in this case — by exuding an odor remarkably like that of a decaying dead animal. The beetles fall into the flower, are coated wiith a pollenaceous mucilage whose texture the botanists refer to as “snotty,” and then the flower dies and falls over. The beetles crawl out coated with snotty pollen and head for the next smelly flower. The snot pollinates the second flower: the species is maintained.
We were disappointed: it didn’t stink.
But we spent a few happy hours walking around, looking at flowers, Becky asking me what they were and me saying I didn’t know. The UCB bot garden’s labels are oddly placed and often eiither inconsistent or incorrect in some particular or both. It’s not at all uncommon to see a prominent shrub in flower, with nothing else nearby, and the only label anywhere around describes a bulb currently dormant. Or the name on the tag was revised by botanists long dead. I identified a few dozen plants to genus, a few of them to species. Column cacti towered thirty feet overhead.
I laid on my back on the ground to better photograph the nodding orange lilies. Pipevine swallowtails flitted in and out of view.
When the fog rolls in next month, I’m going back with a tripod to spend the day.
