Mutability

We went to see an orchid nursery Saturday. I’m really not a flower guy. To me flowers have always been these things my wife plants by the mailbox. And then they die. Or they are these things she loves for me to get for her. She puts them in a vase. And then they die. I like the flowers all right. They are pretty and smell nice. The “then they die” part is what has always put me off them. It’s like you can’t really own them. You can only rent them until they die. So I was really surprised to learn that if well cared for, orchids can easily outlive their owners. They get put in people’s wills and handed down for generations. Interesting. A little bit of permanence there. Then there’s the variety. I never had in my head what an orchid looked like. Now I know why. There are something like 25,000 species of wild orchids and about 100,000 hybrids. That’s not an exaggeration. There really are that many. It’s the largest family of flowering plants and they grow on every continent except Antarctica. Even within one type of orchid there are wild variances of shape, size, color, and fragrance. I would never have guessed so many different types of flowers were all orchids. That is one of the things that makes them fascinating. You can never really get your head around all of them. It’s that mountain/hummingbird thing again. They can be cross-bred to produce unending variation. They are so amazingly changeable. But that change takes patience. A new plant takes seven years from seed to first blossom. That’s a long time to wait to see if your experiment yields a show winner or a dog. Once a desirable combination is achieved, it can be cloned to produce millions of identical flowers. I don’t really want to get into a big bioethics conversation, but I couldn’t help think about the differences and flaws in people. I often wish my personal combination of genes would have had some of my junk bred out of the mix. But the changes most of us seem to need most can only happen after we’re born. That’s hard. Not even the mutable orchid can do that.