Word: flora
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...Tennessee Williams, is his first unequivocally symbolic and undeviatingly religious allegory. It will certainly repel devotees of realism. It will equally certainly make Hermione Baddeley the most envied actress on the island of Manhattan, since she has been given another of the playwright's memorable roles for women, Flora Goforth, whom she portrays with blinding blistering brilliance. Playgoers inured to the calculated trivia of Broadway may be infuriated, touched to the quick, or turned stone-deaf at being asked, in all seriousness, to contemplate the state of their souls at the moment of impending death...
This is the condition of Flora Goforth, who must meet not her publisher's deadlines, as she likes to think, but her Maker's, as in her terror-gnawed bones she knows. Flora is a vulgar, bawdy, explosive clown in her 60s, an eternal show girl, who has buried six husbands and who, fingers warty with jewels, is still desperately, greedily, and somehow gallantly grabbing at life in a mountaintop villa in Italy. Indeed, she has three villas, pink, blue and white, all wired up in a walkie-talkie intercom system into which she dictates at all hours...
Grass & Pooches. Then there is the famed Rose Garden. It is still the setting for many ceremonial occasions. The only thing is, it is no longer very rosy. Many rose plants have been removed and replaced with other flora; the idea is to keep the area in bloom all year round. The South Lawn, once a classic mixture of crab grass, Kentucky bluegrass and good old American weeds, has been plowed up and resodded with as deep a green carpet of bluegrass as ever a presidential helicopter dripped oil upon...
...moonlight, though he produces a myriad other effects to order. His work has taken him to both East and West coasts and as far north as Canada, but most of his clients are in the Southwest. For, quite aside from the pleasure an oil baron gets from seeing his flora through the picture window, he needs night lighting for another reason. The incinerating Texas sunshine discourages bosky browsing in the landscaped areas; southwestern millionaires take their ease among the trees as the gods once did-during the cool of the evening...
...hiding out there, 28 years before, of Bonnie Prince Charlie, the Young Pretender. Many who had risked their lives for him had tales to tell, such as Malcolm MacLeod's: "I went to London to be hanged and came [back] down in a chaise with Miss Flora Macdonald." That young girl, immortalized for helping the Prince escape, became the travelers' hostess-"a little woman" of 51, married to a Macdonald kinsman and about to emigrate to North Carolina. She gave Dr. Johnson the same bed that the Prince had slept in. It inspired in him, he announced afterwards...