IN Ian Fleming’s 1963 novel On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, James Bond visits M at his home, ‘a small Regency manor-house on the edge of Windsor Forest’. Entering the study, he finds his chief at a ‘painting-table up against the window, his broad back hunched over his drawing-board, with, in front of him, an extremely dim little flower in a tooth-glass full of water.’ Giving ‘the flower one last piercingly inquisitive glance’, M rises ‘with obvious reluctance’. He has been disturbed in the depths of his hobby: painting meticulous watercolours of one group of plants exclusively, ‘the wild orchids of England’.
M greets Bond with a tirade about the novels of Rex Stout, whose detective-protagonist Nero Wolfe keeps tropical orchids in a glasshouse on top of his New York brownstone: ‘“How in hell can a man like those disgusting flowers? Why, they’re damned near animals, and their colours, all those pinks and mauves and the blotchy yellow tongues, are positively hideous! Now that”—M waved at the meagre little bloom in the tooth-glass —“that’s the real thing. That’s an Autumn Lady’s Tresses—Spiranthes spiralis”.’
この記事は Country Life UK の June 17, 2020 版に掲載されています。
7 日間の Magzter GOLD 無料トライアルを開始して、何千もの厳選されたプレミアム ストーリー、9,000 以上の雑誌や新聞にアクセスしてください。
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この記事は Country Life UK の June 17, 2020 版に掲載されています。
7 日間の Magzter GOLD 無料トライアルを開始して、何千もの厳選されたプレミアム ストーリー、9,000 以上の雑誌や新聞にアクセスしてください。
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