RHYS BOWEN: I’ve never been good with orchids. People give me lovely plants. Eventually the flowers die and I can never make them flower again. I have read all the suggestions. I’ve done all the right things. Water with three ice cubes every week. No direct sunlight. Feed as directed. Every type of tender care and… nothing.
So I had this one orchid that stood on a sideboard and was carefully tended for months but no more flowers. At last I tired of coaxing it. I put it on the deck, left it there and forgot about it. Full sun. Scorching hot. And I didn’t water it. Its leaves got burned and I was about to throw it out in a deck cleanup when I noticed a tiny shoot coming straight up. I brought it inside, gave it some water, cut away the dead leaves, and the shoot turned into a flower stem. Within two weeks this had happened.
Amazing, right?
This was the roots a few days ago
and now this is the roots.
So I’m looking at it as a metaphor. A symbol of rebirth? Of hope coming from despair? When all seems lost a tiny shoot can emerge and blossom?
Or
If you want to coax something or someone to do their best you ignore and punish them to the extent that they want to impress you? I don’t like that one. But maybe it is true concerning the writing of our characters. When we create a character in our books we make them suffer, we imagine what would be the worst thing that could happen to them and we make them experience it. When I was writing Constable Evans I found out he was claustrophobic and then in the next book I sent him seven stories down a slate mine! We are quite sadistic. But then they come to life, show us their true grit, and they bloom, like my orchid.
Here it is now:
And the flowers are twice the size they were previously.
So what do you think is the right message that this is giving? At the moment I want it to be one of hope.
