Ingrid Andersson
Phalaenopsis
In the Botanical Garden
Artist Statement: Talking & Listening to Plants
Icon: a person or thing regarded as a representative symbol or as worthy of veneration (Google definition). You see them on television, in homes, schools, offices, conference and waiting rooms – for sale at a garden center, grocery store or mass merchandiser near you. Sales of Phalaenopsis top the charts in the international industry of potted plants. I used to view the ubiquitous orchid the way I viewed the acres of baby Jesuses and Marys haggled over in Bethlehem when visiting there once.
Plants can boost your well-being and make the home feel more vibrant, coaches the Ikea catalogue, like a self-help manual. This plant blooms several times per year if you are nice to it. Four Phalaenopsis grace my bay window, icons of different stages of life: a pastel for pubescence, then a Rubenesque come-hither white, followed by a quietly seductive ivory, and finally a vermilion-veined vixen with a vanishing heart. Since I was a child, low to the ground, plants have been a part of me. Call me biased – a midwife pulled like an orchid bee to the promise of passages year-round – I believe that Phalaenopsis is homing us to her like a memory, or a mystery: some spreading desperation in us wants her sovereign body, her centered hope.
INGRID ANDERSSON has practiced as a home-birth nurse midwife for over 20 years. She studied poetry and literature in Swedish, German, French and English, as well as anthropology, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, before mixing that fertile ground with the art and science of midwifery. Ingrid’s poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net and has appeared in Ars Medica, Eastern Iowa Review, Midwest Review, Minerva Rising and elsewhere. She lives in Madison, Wisconsin with her husband, son, dogs, chickens and bees. Her debut collection, Jordemoder: Poems of a Midwife, will be available May, 2022 from Holy Cow! Press.