A Visit To The Des Moines Botanical Center

Outside looks like everywhere: great slabs of white snow marbled with dirt and gravel. Gray pavement glazed over with pitted, grimy ice. Colourless, cold sky. Everything is flat, blank, bleak. The geodesic panes of the greenhouse rise from the parking lot with science-fiction strangeness.

Inside the dome: whorls and curlicues and tendrils. The air is exuberant, heavy with pollen and the lemony smell of growth. Green unfolds and uncurls itself, presses into every centimeter of space. Fullness of stems and fronds and buds and lacebitten leaves. Cursive scribbles of moss fill the spaces on the treestems; aggressive ferns push up beneath broad, spiral palms. The flowers are profuse and jubilant. They lack the decorous beauty of garden flowers, exploding in unnatural, chemical-bright splashes of scarlet, orange, fuchsia, magenta. Their shapes are exotic: frilled, curled, spider-legged, flat alien disks. Not ornamental, but aggressively, unmistakably sexual: anatomy-book closeups, unshy, flamebeautiful.

We few refugees from winter wander two-by-two, wide eyed. Unconsciously our fingers hover near jewelbright leaves and petals (don’t touch!). Human sparrow-pairs, drab in this peacock garden.

An elderly, besuited gentleman, very round of shoulder, very pink of skin, very white of hair. His fluting tulip-wife beside him, immaculately groomed, tastefully brooched and suited. 

The longhaired child, elflike even in her denim jumper, darting and peering: purple orchids (look mom! my favorite color), scary cactus, goldflashing carp. Mom, dumpy and solicitous, smiles.

A peroxide mane, 1980s smear of eyeshadow, cell phone glued to her ear. This woman is ludicrously obese, triple-chinned. Her stretch leggings (look twice, three times: still true!) painted over her lumpy, enormous behind. Thirty years ago she was smacking her gum, gossiping with the same girlfriends about the same (white—harmless?) trash. Ah—behind her, the longtime biker boyfriend, his badboy looks settled now into grizzled, shaggy self-confidence, stuffed into the same Harley tshirt and acidwashed jeans. These two belong together: middle-aged, unglamorous now, unbeautiful. They hardly look at one another; she smacks into her cell phone (she what? Gawd!), he strides behind his proud beerbelly, jingling in his boots. Leaving the greenhouse their arms drift around one another in an unplanned, habitual tenderness.

A thin girl, roundfaced and spectacled, in a little boy's black tshirt. She links hands with her boyfriend, listens as he crouches down to peer at the variegated undersides of leaves, points out the bunch of infant bananas (we had a banana tree once, the fruits fingerlength, thickskinned and bitter). Near the artificial stream there is a creaking, unsteady bench, baking in the sunwarmth trapped by the glass ceiling. Turtle-like, she sits and closes her eyes. Green presses through the thin skin of her eyelids: in great lime-coloured whorls, in sharpedged blades, in saucers and curls and chartreuse tendrils.