In which I reluctantly admire nature
The most important man in my life takes pictures of flowers wherever he goes.
Our family would be trudging along a Beijing sidewalk after a long day of errands when he’d burst out, “oh, look at these colours, you two!” Then, he’d get up close to some bushes I hadn’t even noticed and zoom in on their bright petals with his phone lens, stooping and tiptoeing, squinting and lifting his thick glasses above his head to examine each shot.
It was a futile exercise to convince him to keep walking.
And me?
The first time I took an oil painting class, my assignment to depict a vase of roses nearly had me seething with boredom. Several years later, when I tried to sketch a bouquet given to me by people I loved, I never got past the flowers’ stems. I thought I was being rebellious, even brave, by rejecting celebrations of the natural world, especially the more flamboyant ones. My art, focused on social commentary, remains black and white.
This year, I figured my dad deserved something more. Here’s just one reason: he reads all of my writing, even that which I try to hide, and critiques my work with the necessarily stern eye of a news editor. If my sentence structure or word choice hasn’t given you a headache, he is the reason why. And when that work gets published, he’s the first one to get excited — it’s been a long time since I first wrote for an audience, but that’s never changed.
So this is my gift on Father’s Day: an icon map of flower species in NYC, a city that has its unfair share of botanical gems from the annual beds of Flushing to the endless expanse of Central Park.
When I started this project, I envisioned a New York covered with flowers, so dense in their distribution that no roads or housing complexes would be visible — something that he would be delighted about. That seems no longer plausible, so I went for something simple instead: each flower illustration below marks an area or location where that species is commonly found. You can zoom in and click on each flower to learn more.
You may have noticed that this map is incomplete. Soon after beginning my process a month ago, I realised that it would take a few hundred hours to include all the species mentioned by the extensive NYC Parks Citywide Bloom Guide. I have Queens and Staten Island done; I hope that the rest of the boroughs will follow soon.
In the meantime, Dad — I hope you’ll use this when we finally go back to New York. Maybe I’ll be the one with the insatiable camera then.
Thank you for reading, and Happy Father’s Day to you and your loved ones. If you’re finding this day difficult, whatever the reason, I’m thinking of you.
