Spathe with flowers – 3rd January 2012

The days are short and often dark, but my office is being brightened up by a Bird of Paradise flower, Strelitzia reginae.

I first saw pictures of this flower in 1980, on the cover of New Musik‘s album “From A to B”, which I owned on cassette tape.

The following year I had my first holiday job as a tourist guide at Crathes Castle, a National Trust for Scotland property a few miles from my home near Aberdeen. Here I showed tourists – often parties of Americans and the elderly – around the castle. I also sold tickets to the magnificent gardens at the garden gate, from a small booth in the middle of one of the garden’s ancient yew hedges.

One of my favourite rooms was the Room of the Nine Nobles, with its late sixteenth century painted ceiling and a lovely four poster bed from Orkney, dating from 1641. One of the prints on the wall featured the Bird of Paradise flower.

I found out that the print came from Thornton’s Temple Of Flora, a magnificent book produced by Dr. Robert Thornton in the first years of the nineteenth century, whose plates combine scientific accuracy with high drama. Dr. Thornton commissioned some of Britain’s finest painters and engravers to produce the illustrations and wrote the text himself. Ultimately he was bankrupted by the cost of the project. There are two versions of the Bird of Paradise flower plate – “The Queen” (from 1804) and “The Queen Flower” (an inferior version from 1812). I can’t remember which version was on the wall at Crathes Castle. The Latin name of the flower, and Thornton’s “The Queen” come from Queen Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, the wife of King George III.

Anyway, I was fascinated by the strange flower and soon found the real thing growing in a Botanic Garden. About five years ago I bought a small plant for 50p and I have nurtured it, growing it in the loft until it became too big, when it was moved to the conservatory.

Bird of Paradise flower – acrylic by Vanna Bartlett (from cut flowers from a local florist)

The conservatory is frost free but not very sunny so this summer we stood the plant outside in the garden and it is probably this, combined with its pot-bound state, that made it produce a flower stalk in late summer.

We brought it indoors before the first frosts and it began to flower in mid December.

The plant was introduced from South Africa in 1773, where it is often known as the Crane Flower. In its native land it is pollinated by sunbirds. The three orange, upright parts of the flower are sepals and the blue/purple structures are petals. Two of these petals form a hollow spear-head and a third, at the back, is short and blocks the entrance to the nectar cavity. When a sunbird perches on the spear-head it pushes it down to expose the stamens and styles enclosed inside. Pollen sticks to its feet and the bird then transfers the pollen to the next flower it lands on. But sadly there are no sunbirds in Norfolk…

Flowers are produced at intervals of several days along the length of the flower’s spathe and we now have five flowers after three weeks.

Read more about this plant on Wikipedia and on Dr. Phil Gates’ blog “A Digital Botanic Garden“.