Ferrebeekeeper?

Honey Bundt Cake (Wayne Ferrebee, 2013, oil on panel)

OK, I need some help from you. It’s necessary to build Ferrebeekeeper into a more consolidated online platform which combines my twitter feed, my art gallery, my Etsy store, and, above all this blog. The question is whether I should build outward from this extant brand or do I need to start afresh with a new name? Come to think of it, are you all even out there or am I talking to some nefarious WordPress algorithm that generates a random number of “views” every day?

The cropped version of William Hogarth’s “Gin Lane” which I have used as a banner forever

OK, let’s not get distracted by meta-questions and stick with the fundamental naming issue: Ferrebeekeeper is a sort of play on words concerning my surname “Ferrebee” and a place to keep things like a “file keeper”. Best of all, the roots combine together to evoke beekeepers! Long ago, my webmaster was crafting a site for the now defunct line of toys I designed. She randomly typed my name into a website which was selling names and it corrected her: “did you mean FERREBEEKEEPER?” Obviously that was no good for selling toys, but later on I adopted it as a provisional name for my personal blogging project and it has stuck…until now.

Oh gosh! Oh gosh! [hyperventilating from generalized business anxiety]

According to marketing MBAs, when it comes to branding, shorter is always better. Maybe they are on to something: ”Zoomorphs” (the name of the aforementioned toys) was two syllables long and a real English word and yet people still got completely lost on how to pronounce it or say it. I had friends who called the toys “zoomers” for years. Erudite classicists would ask about Zoo-O-morphs as though inquiring about the state of the world’s phytoplankton. People would look at it and give up and just say “uh these zoo things…” Now think of how much worse it is with a 5 syllable name! Ferr-e-bee-kee-per…might as well be an obscure village in Wales or a metabolic pathway that nobody talks about. So MBAs would hate this name…but that doesn’t mean it’s wrong. After all, the world they have made is catchy & easy to remember but ever so meretricious.

Ferrebeekeeper Mascot?

On the positive side of Ferrebeekeeper, everyone knows what beekeepers do and they are well liked. Beekeeping is an ancient useful art stretching back to prehistory. It says something about the blog itself too: handling ideas is a complex craft which can yield sweet sweet results, but which can also result in mass attack by a stinging swarm. “Ferre” is a prefix which means iron. Iron beekeeper sounds pretty amazing. I could even have my own iron beekeeper mascot! Also I don’t risk losing fans and followers by making a transition to…to what exactly? Some tech-sounding one syllable name? They must all be gone by now.

The tech names WERE all gone other than “eferrebeekeeper” Hmm…people DO like the letter “e”

Anyway, please let me know what you think! I know how smart everyone is from all of your clever comments: now would be a good time to help out with your opinion…

The Hades Flower

Dactylanthus taylorii

In grade school biology class we learned that plants use photosynthesis to manufacture their own food from light, water, and air.  In almost every familiar ecosystem, the plants are somewhere down there at the bottom, dutifully turning out food for every herbivore (and thereby ultimately for everything).  It makes the green kingdom seems so virtuous. The plants I wrote about this week as “underworld plants” are no exception–they provide us with nutrition, beauty, drugs, a way to get rid of lackluster emperors, even natural-looking color for unusually pallid shrimps! And it all comes from air, water, and sun.

However the grade school biology explanation does not provide a full picture.  There are indeed plants out there that do not pull their full weight.  Like a big dirty city, the plant kingdom has its own underworld filled with creepers and stranglers and suckers—and at the very bottom there are outright parasites.  Some plants do not “make their own food” and indeed do not contain chlorophyll at all.  They leach nourishment out of other vegetation.  One of the strangest and darkest of these parasitic plants is Dactylanthus taylorii, the Hades flower, which comes from the forest undergrowth of New Zealand.  Naming it after Hades might be unduly generous—the plant should probably be called the cancer flower.

Dactylanthus taylorii: close-up of male flowers (Photo by Helen Jonas)

Dactylanthus taylorii is the only species in the genus Dactylanthus and the taxonomical relationships of that family to other plants are anything but clear.  The Hades plant grows on the roots of various indigenous trees.  It has not roots and no leaves but is connected to its host via a stem.  The tree tissue where this stem attaches to the host becomes horribly distorted into a weird burl-like structure.  Plants can be male or female and they are most often pollinated by the lesser short-tailed bat, (Mystacina tuberculata) (a strange and evocative creature which the native Maori call by the name of “Pekapeka-tou-poto”).  The flowers produce a nectar which smells like mammalian sweat–which apparently attracts the bats which then carry pollen between male and female plants.

The Lesser Short-tailed Bat pollinating Dactylanthus taylorii

Like many parasites, the Hades flower is cryptic—it makes itself difficult to find.  Because of this characteristic, there are aspects of the flower’s life and lineage which remain unknown.  However the modern world does not seem to suit Dactylanthus taylorii : botanists estimate there are only a few thousand left in the wild.  The plant’s decline is exacerbated by the fact that collector’s value the freaky wooden excrescences which they create.  In the future the hades flower may indeed exist only in the hereafter.