Flowers Journal
Candleblossoms
The tall, stiff, stately Candleblossoms grow in temperate to boreal marshlands and resemble delphiniums or purple loosestrife. They are abundant in the wet field and sodden riverbank in the sheltered bend of the Great River near Betuun, just above the Southern Gorge where the river narrows, hastens its flow, and forms rapids. Natural stands can also be found along the Tapuk River between Honkai and Chenkor.
Candleblossoms prefer full sun and grassy companions such as rushes and reeds. Fuzbees and Birdieflies are drawn to their sweet nectar (they smell like apricots mixed with cinnamon and vanilla), and Beasts relish them. They are the first flower Suki sees a Beast eat.
Dangle-Dits
Dangle-dits are one of the most widespread flowers in all the lands, growing in marshes, damp hay-fields – even in the formal gardens of King Pundoor. The blossoms dangle and nod (hence the name), and are vivid orange with black spots, a black pistil with a green stigma, and black anther filaments. The pollen itself is rusty-gold. They grow from a small, blackish bulb, and usually produce two blossoms at a time, one opening as the other is budding. The stems are watery, juicy, and succulent – much like Impatiens or jewelweed – but they have fibers growing through the xylem and phloem and do not snap off that easily.
Except, of course, for the powerful jaws and big blunt teeth of a Beast….
Heart-Stains
“Petals of crimson three,
A sweet, small Heart unfurled for thee”
Heart-stains are denizens of river floodplains and lake countries. They grow best in cold climates – they are the first flower to appear through the snow – yet they grow in warm temperate lands like Chenkor if they are kept cool and moist. These odd little flowers capture the Beasts’ attention, not with scent or taste, but with eye-popping color. The plants grow knee-high to a tall man (thigh-high on an adult woman) and are particularly leafy, with the brilliant flowers standing out in sharp contrast to the deep-green foliage.
Sky-Cups
Cross a fringed gentian with a velvety gloxinia bloom and you have a sky-cup. Their four-petaled flowers have been described by a nature-teacher of Honkai as “the brightest blue found in all the lands” and the nectar, as rich and sweet as orange-blossom honey, pools in the bottom of these delightful chalices. Children, in particular, have made a ritual of drinking the nectar and then eating the sweetly flavorful cups.
The inch-long, awn-shaped, blue-tipped seeds germinate easily, travel well, and keep indefinitely. The original wild populations were found near Honkai, Rozu, and the city of Dulcek in the South Hemisphere, and they were the first flower to be cultivated and put to use… for dye in Rozu, as confectionery in Dulcek, and to lure Beasts out of the grain-fields in Honkai.
Sugar-Stars
Among the most useful of Chenkor’s plants are the versatile sugar-stars. From the wild prairie to the palace garden, these ubiquitous thorn-bushes beautify the landscape, feed creatures as diverse as fuzbees and the giant Beasts, and are prized by gardeners both rich and poor. A type of rose with five long, sharply-pointed petals, sugar-stars are pale-pink in their wild form and covered with sugary crystals, making them both pretty to look at and delicious to taste. Despite this property, they are only rarely used by confectioners.
Plant breeders have created over a hundred horticultural forms, ranging from dwarf miniatures with crystalline-white blooms to giant, almost flavorless reds (these are not as likely to be eaten by the Beasts). The great-grandfather of Abo Jihn, King Pundoor’s gardener, bred a large, pure-white variety which is still grown in the Royal gardens as a grafted tree.
The Queen’s Flower
From a fat ovoid bulb, like a woman’s closed fist sheathed in a tunic of brown paper… to long green leaves like the swords of Honkai… to tall, stiff stems and colorful buds furled like flags… these burst forth to six silken petals apiece, the lower three adorned with a stripe of gold “like a Fuzbee crossed with a measuring worm.”
They are the Queen’s Flowers, the royal flowers of Chenkor… beloved by King Pundoor’s daughters… exported to the gardens of the
great Qin-Li. Lovingly raised by the young gardener Suki, they bloom wherever Travelers have taken them as symbols of royal majesty and authority. Even the Beasts treat these flowers with reverence. Instead of grinding the plants with their powerful jaws, they delicately bite off the shimmering blossoms one by one, by one.
Honey-Horns
On leeward slopes of the volcanic mountains, watered by steaming mineral springs, grow the most exacting flowers of all… the exquisite honey-horns.
Their small, scaly white bulbs send wiry roots deep into the heated, rocky soil; their basal crowns of hairy leaves curl tight against the bitter cold of the air. By the light of Day-Season sun and Night-Season auroras, slim trumpets of pale, shimmering gold open and close with the weather; when they are open, they overflow with rich, thick, gooey-sweet nectar. They reproduce from tiny bulblets that drop off the plant, and these bulblets have survived volcanic eruptions.
Good thing, too. A Beast will travel from the farthest reaches to eat just one of these delicious blooms.
Eternity Flower
Fabled and bizarre, the odd, wheel-like Eternity Flower is found in the Equatorial latitudes. These pure-white blossoms grow from a tough, woody vine, opening their eight-petaled, showy blooms either flat on the ground, tangled through shrub thickets, or hanging from the canopies of tropical trees. The people of the lands where these curiosities grow named them Eternity Flower because the petals form a perfect, repetitive, endless circle – an image of Eternity itself.
A traditional saying of the region plays on this similarity:
“Time and change rule the Universe.
If a Beast can devour Eternity in a single bite,
how can anything last forever?”
Sunfaces
“Twelve heads high and cheery gold
The bright Sunfaces stand
They laugh, they dance, they smile and nod
O’er each and every land”
The most widespread flower in all the lands, found in every country and known by all peoples, is the common Sunface. They grow wild on uncultivated grasslands, forming small “forests” through which men must hack with a machete and which hold irresistible fascination for children. Suki and Albard spend the night in a field of Sunfaces after a Beast leaves them stranded far from Albard’s parents’ hay-farm.