(assiduously tended to by Miranda, who frankly has nothing better to do than to sleep or tend to the garden)
Adenium socotranum
she loves me–she loves me not
Prospero, can’t you grow daisies like everybody else?
The short answer, predictably, is no. It’s not that the beauty of a wildflower doesn’t terrify me; it’s just that the mind of a collector, to whose fraternity I belong, is generally predisposed to seek the unusual and, dare I say, the grotesque–like a huckster at a carnival seeks to surround himself with nothing but the tallest and shortest of the splendid (though sometimes maligned) homo sapiens genus: in short, he dines in a wind ruffled tent with wise giants and wily dwarfs.
Amorphophallus paeoniifolius
Our story began…
Gabon. Moyen-Ogooué. 1960. Dans la forêt sanglotante, abrité sous l’aile du soir… A beaded curtain rustled in the wind, its wooden jewels producing a delightful tintinnabulation, mainly, it would seem, for the sinistraural enjoyment of black beetles, now scouring the floor for moldy bits of couscous. In a stuffy corner of the room, under the indolent sway of a rusty ceiling fan, the helter-skelter disarray of clutter, hastily piled on a roundwood table, proved irresistible for a band of marauding capuchin monkeys that collected, among other things, cherry-scented pencil erasers, shiny chocolate bar wrappers, and, under a babel-like stack of papers, a dull blue passport. Then, as unexpectedly as a nosebleed, a herd of forest elephants shook the ground, forcing the slinky thieves to scamper. Thus, in the steamy jungle of Gabon, our story began.
Noir
I look out of the window and see a city whose giant tentacles in equal measure smother the unbridled and the unfit.
Prospero's Island 