When I was a child, I sat cross-legged on my bed poring over old books depicting curious plants in a faraway land. One contained a black and white photograph of a curious flower growing in the jungles of Southeast Asia. I can still picture it: an astonishingly large, slightly grotesque-looking pentagon, draped over the floor like a starfish. This was the largest flower in the world, the book said, spanning over a metre. I was possessed by it and wanted to see one growing in the wild more than anything. Rafflesia had cast its spell on me.
But Southeast Asia may as well have been the moon to me back then. There was no way in which I could see the plant that haunted me from the other side of the planet. So I conjured it up in a pretend rainforest. We lived next to an old cemetery where I scrambled up yew trees and swung from the branches, pretending I was in the jungle. I made a life-sized Rafflesia replica out of papier mâché and clay, then in a wild corner of the cemetery I sat on a fallen gravestone in the thicket, staring at it. This was the closest I could get to the world’s largest flower.
