The Bird That Never Lands: On the Bird of Paradise Flower

A Flower Shaped Like Flight

Stand in front of a bird of paradise for a moment and the eye does what it cannot help doing: it turns the flower into a bird. A green bract rises at an angle like a beak or the prow of a boat. From its ridge, orange sepals fan out like a crest, and between them a single blue arrow points forward, sharp as a tongue. The plant seems caught mid-launch, wings half open, deciding whether to stay. Few flowers are so plainly a likeness of something else, and few have carried so many borrowed names because of it.

The Footless Bird

The name came to the flower second-hand. Long before any European saw Strelitzia, sailors returning with Magellan's expedition in 1522 brought to Spain the preserved skins of birds from the islands near New Guinea, plumed in gold and cinnamon, unlike anything in a European cabinet. The skins had no feet. Local hunters had simply removed them in the curing, but Europe drew a lovelier conclusion: these were birds that never landed, that lived on air and dew, and touched the ground only in death. When Linnaeus catalogued the species in 1758 he preserved the legend in Latin. Paradisaea apoda, the footless bird of paradise. A scientific name that is, in truth, a small poem about a misunderstanding.

Two centuries later, when gardeners at Kew watched a South African plant open a blossom that looked like one of those fabled birds in flight, the old name settled on it as if it had been waiting. The bird of paradise flower is therefore named after a bird that was named after a paradise nobody had seen. Names, like seeds, travel farther than their origins.

A Queen's Name for a Riverbank Plant

The botanical name is more grounded but no less courtly. The plant reached Kew Gardens in 1773, collected on the Eastern Cape of South Africa, where it grows wild along riverbanks and coastal scrub. Sir Joseph Banks named the genus Strelitzia in honour of Queen Charlotte, wife of George III, who had been born a princess of Mecklenburg-Strelitz and who loved botany enough to make Kew her particular care. The species name, reginae, simply means of the queen. A flower that had spent millennia beside African rivers arrived in England and was at once given a German duchy and an English crown to wear.

The queen, however, was not who the flower was built for. In its native country the bird of paradise is pollinated by sunbirds, small iridescent nectar-feeders that fill the role hummingbirds play elsewhere. The blue arrow at the centre of the bloom is not a petal for display but a perch. When a sunbird lands on it to reach the nectar, the bird's weight springs the two fused petals apart and the hidden anthers brush pollen onto its feet. The bird carries that pollen to the next flower on its toes. This is a blossom engineered for a bird's grip rather than a bee's tongue, and it explains why the flower looks the way it does. It is not imitating a bird so much as answering one.

Outside Africa the sunbirds never come. In the greenhouses of Europe, in Korean flower markets in January, in the front yards of Los Angeles, which adopted the bird of paradise as its official flower, the perch waits empty. Gardeners who want seed must pollinate by hand. There is something quietly moving in that: a flower shaped for a visitor who cannot arrive, holding its posture anyway, week after week. Cut stems last a fortnight or more, and I have come to think the two facts are related. Patience keeps well.

What the Flower Is Said to Mean

In the Western language of flowers the bird of paradise stands for joy, magnificence, and freedom, and it has become the flower of the ninth wedding anniversary, a year that asks for faithfulness with a little splendour. Georgia O'Keeffe, painting in Hawaii in 1939, chose the white bird of paradise for one of her canvases and let its beak fill the frame. She once said that nobody really sees a flower because it is so small, so she would paint it large and people would be startled into looking. The bird of paradise hardly needed her help. It arrives already enlarged, already insisting on being seen.

The Korean name deepens the meaning in an unexpected direction. In Korean the flower is called geungnakjohwa, the flower of the bird of geungnak. Geungnak is not the paradise of the European legend but the Pure Land of the Buddha Amitabha, the Western realm of utmost bliss. The Amitabha Sutra describes the birds of that land: white geese, peacocks, parrots, and the kalavinka, a creature with a bird's body and a human face whose song is said to begin while it is still inside the egg. The kalavinka sings on ancient Korean roof tiles and temple bells, wings spread, mouth open.

In that land there are always rare and many-coloured birds, which six times in the day and night sing forth harmonious and elegant sounds.

So when a Korean speaker names this flower, two paradises are called at once: the sky where a footless bird drifts forever, and the lotus pond where a singing bird has never known sorrow. It is a great deal of myth for one stem to carry, and the stem carries it upright.

A Flower for Beginnings

All of this makes the bird of paradise the natural gift for a threshold. A shop opening its doors, a colleague taking a new post, a friend finally starting the thing they have long prepared for. To hand someone this flower is to say, without saying it, may your wings stay open. It has no scent, so it does not crowd a room. Its petals are thick and its stem is stubborn, so it does not wilt on the second day. It is the congratulation of a person of few words, which is to say the kind that lasts.

A footless bird, in the end, needs someone else's hands to come down to earth. At the Arrive in Bloom atelier each stem is arranged by hand on the day it arrives, tied with a free calligraphy ribbon in Korean or English, and delivered the same day anywhere in Korea for orders placed before 5 p.m., with later orders leaving after 10 a.m. the next morning and deliveries made between 8 a.m. and 8 p.m. A photograph is sent to you the moment the flowers are handed over, and a 24-hour concierge at 1666-6584 answers at any hour. The bird that waited so long for a visitor finally lands at someone's door, carried there by Arrive in Bloom (flowername.co.kr).