Ivana Miloš, The Man Who Made Cacti Bloom (2022), monotype, gouache, and collage on paper.
HOME IS WHERE THE PLANT GROWS
“His spirit responds to his country's spirit....he incarnates its geography and natural life and rivers and lakes.“
—Walt Whitman, Preface
In Europe, most people dislike the highly invasive Himalayan balsam. It is spreading aggressively across the continent, suffocating potential plant diversity while suffusing whole areas with a sweet and musty smell. My response to the plant is quite different. I adore everything about it. Its pink-purple flowers bending to the ground like little bells, its toothlike glands, rain dropping from its leaves, and especially the way its oval-shaped seed pods impatiently explode when I touch them with my fingers. And then the way my fingers smell afterwards—I could go on and on. This plant grew right in front of my family home. It was everywhere: Next to the pathway, in the garden, around my father’s garage. When I was a child I thought this is how nature looks and smells like. That’s the outside world, that’s summer!
Whenever I see an Impatiens glandulifera today, I am transported back to my childhood and, even if the effect decreases over the years, a peaceful enthusiasm still remains inside of me. It’s nothing to be ashamed of, it’s just hard to communicate in a world indifferent to such matters. Marcel Proust wrote about similar sentiments regarding hawthorns and I am of the opinion that most people growing up in the countryside have such a plant or landscape inhabiting a place in their soul or whatever else you want to call it. Hallie Stoddard (Vera Miles) would know what I mean. She is the wife of U.S. Senator Ransom Stoddard (James Stewart), and although she had to adapt to the restless life of a politician, she carries the spicy memory of a plant with her, a plant reminding her of home and a life left behind.
The opuntia, or prickly pear, or rose cactus, as it is referred to in John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), is a cactus even the least floraphile cinephile will notice when watching the classic western. It has been commented upon by scholars and critics like few other plants in the history of cinema. Ford even gave it its own musical cue. Naturally, it was mostly looked at metaphorically, representing certain aspects in Ford’s cinema such as the “master antinomy” between garden and wilderness, as Peter Wollen put it. But for Hallie it means much more than that.
When she, together with her husband, returns to her hometown of Shinbone in order to attend the funeral of her former love, Tom Doniphon (John Wayne), she first visits the remains of his house in the desert. “Well, you said you wanted to see the cactus blossoms. There’s his house down there, what’s left of it, blossoms all around it,” says former sheriff Link Appleyard (Andy Devine). It soon becomes clear that everybody and everything is a “former” in this desert. Later, we learn how Tom once gave such a prickly pear in full bloom to Hallie as a sign of his love. Pompey (Woody Strode), Tom’s helpmate at the time, planted it in Hallie’s garden. But instead of moving in with Tom, Hallie fell for Ransom, a man who speaks of real roses and a world without guns.
It’s easy to see how she not only decided between two men but two ways of being in the world. Here, progress and culture, words and order. There, tradition and rootedness, deeds and survival. Returning home, she remembers a love that never blossomed like the cactus representing it. Famously, at the end of the film she puts another blossoming cactus rose on Tom’s coffin, the soil from its roots scattering over the wooden lid. Few other shots succeed so effortlessly in containing such a multitude of emotions as the close-up of this opuntia on the coffin. Tag Gallagher sums them up: “The duality of order and liberty, the better dream, the loss of innocence, youth, perfection, beauty, the loss of a wilderness for a garden, of the physical for the verbal, the loss of what Tom would have given Hallie and which Stoddard has not.”
As true and definite as that may sound, it’s worth having another look at the type of wilderness Gallagher, Wollen, and others refer to. The West! The rough and lawless land of promise. The place of longing and nostalgia, legends and wilderness. The space inhabited by heroes like Tom. Tragic, masculine, quiet cowboys. Mythological figures, priestlike existentialists sleeping with a gun under their pillow, reactionary machos bordering fascism while supporting the genocide of Native Americans. They are often racist, violent, hostile, and indeed thorny characters. It’s easy to see why Tom can be related to the prickly pear (ignoring the fact that James Stewart looks much more like a cactus than John Wayne!) and Ford makes sure to not show them in another context throughout the film.
However, such a prickly pear might be native to the desert but those settlers are not. It’s telling that the opuntias, referred to as nopals in Mexico, grow next to the house Tom is building in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. This plant has been cultivated for centuries and up to this day you can often find it close to houses and in gardens. It has even long served as a natural fence (in 1961 Cuba planted the so-called “Cactus-Curtain“ to stop people from escaping to the USA), which explains the abundance of prickly pears next to Tom’s house when they can’t be found anywhere else. Native Americans ate the fruits of the nopal and understood its healing powers, for example when treating open wounds.
Although this beautiful and commercially important cactus is surely native to the fictional ground on which Tom and Hallie lived and can be invasive, it doesn’t exactly represent the wilderness. Quite the opposite, it represents the possibility of life close to a forbidding place. In other words, cultivation. Or, if you care for a more critical approach, life in a place where you don’t belong. There is not one character native to this place in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance with which the settlers have to learn to share their lives except for the prickly pear. To use such a plant, growing in a place one decides to settle down in against all odds, as an ornamental flower is an idea typical of white conquerors. They try to make their lives more livable. In that sense there is a huge difference between the Himalayan balsam of my childhood and the prickly pear in Hallie’s life. In my case, the plant is a foreigner settling down in front of my house, in Hallie’s case, she is the foreigner settling down in front of the plant. The feelings remain the same because in nature it’s never about who came first, it’s about who can stay.
Ford claims a certain persistence, if not eternity of the wilderness: “Everything changes except for the desert,” we hear in the film. It might seem quite a naïve and sentimental claim to some. Landscapes are transformed and destroyed, plants are constantly disappearing off the face of the earth. Everything changes, full stop. I am quite sure Himalayan balsam no longer grows where I grew up. Even the most persistent plant will sooner or later move or vanish. Wilderness will prevail but it will also change. There is another side to this, however. The desert is not only a landscape. It’s a way of life, a memory, a condition. And that really doesn’t change in Hallie’s heart. It’s the same for me. The Himalayan balsam will be a part of my life until I die. We can try to progress and change and invent as much as we like, but there is always a cactus rose reminding us of our truth. In a film obsessed with truth, such a plant becomes much more than a metaphor. It’s a sign of hope—yes, hope. That’s something that existed in those days. There were actually filmmakers able to show hope. And when in the last scene Ransom expresses his wish to move back to the West, back to the prickly pear, back to where Hallie comes from, this hope becomes legend in a way only Hollywood could manage. As Gallagher put it: “For her the cactus rose represents Tom Doniphon and represents as well hope for the future, hope perhaps that held a dream finer than the one fulfilled.”
Full Bloom is a series, written by Patrick Holzapfel and illustrated by Ivana Miloš, that reconsiders plants in cinema. Directors have given certain flowers, trees, or herbs special attention for many different reasons. It’s time to give them the credit they deserve and highlight their contributions to cinema, in full bloom.