ATDTDA (43): R. damascena [and] R.alba (949.11)

[Mark Kohut]

Even the plants are alive.....
  

Tim Strzechowski <dedalus204 at comcast.net> wrote:
  "Their mother, Zhivka, turned out to have a way with roses, and kept a private patch out in back of the house where she carried on hybrid experiments, having begun years ago by crossing R. damascena with R. alba and gone on from there" (p. 949).


According to the Pynchon Wiki:

Species of roses. The species most used in attar-making is Rosa damascena. 

R. damascena is named after the Syrian city of Damascus, which, in 1912-13, was still part of the Ottoman Empire. R. alba is the white rose. Cross-breeding these makes the perfect Bulgarian flower, part Ottoman, part Christian; the blending of two worlds.

http://against-the-day.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=ATD_946-975#Page_949

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damascus


Rosa damascena Mill. is the most important rose species for rose oil production. The main rose oil producers in the world are Turkey and Bulgaria and they obtain the rose oil almost exclusively from R. damascena. In spite of coming from the same original populations, R. damascena plants grown in Turkey show some morphological differences. In this study, it was aimed to investigate the genetic relationships among R. damascena plants grown in Turkey by using microsatellite and AFLP markers. Twenty three AFLP and nine microsatellite primer pairs were used for this aim. No polymorphism could be detected among the plants, as the marker patterns obtained from different plants are identical. The conclusion from these data is that all R. damascena plants under study are derived from the same original genotype by vegetative propagation. Furthermore, the observed morphological differences originate from point mutations not detectable by molecular markers. Therefore, they are
 equivalen!
t to sp
ort mutations frequently observed in cut and garden rose varieties. [...]

http://tinyurl.com/4ormov


http://www.rdrop.com/~paul/damasks/semperflorens.html

http://www.rdrop.com/~paul/albas/maxima.html


Here, Pynchon works the image organically into the content as the birth of baby Ljubica is immediately preceded by Zhivka's cross-pollination of rose varieties. Like tending children, Zhivka "had names for each one, she talked to them, and after a while, when the moon and the wind were right, Cyprian heard them talking back," eventually "discussing [Yashmeen] and the baby" with Zhivka.



       
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20080609/ec9b9fb6/attachment-0001.html>