Many gardeners in Mississippi are familiar with Jewels of Opar, though with varying degrees of fondness. While the plant—native to tropical America—isn’t a noxious invader since this year’s plants and roots are eradicated by a substantial frost, Jewels of Opar (Talinum paniculatum) seeds lavishly, and once established, persists.
The plant was discovered on the “sea cliffs of Martinique and Santo Domingo” by Dutch botanist Baron Joseph von Jacquin during his travels to the Americas in the mid-18th century. Jacquin described the flowers as “small, numerous, red, and odorless,” likely the source of its common name in other parts of the world, “flame flower,” which brings us to our riddle. How did this modest little flower acquire a name so closely associated with one of literature’s greatest adventure heroes, Tarzan of the Apes.
Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar (1916) is a novel by American writer Edgar Rice Burroughs, the fifth in his series of twenty-four books about the title character Tarzan. As conceived by Burroughs, Opar is a lost colony of Atlantis located deep in the jungles of Africa, in which incredible riches have been stockpiled down through the ages. Tarzan first visits Opar in Burroughs’ second Tarzan novel, The Return of Tarzan (1913), and returns to the city time and again to replenish his personal wealth, for the second time in The Jewels of Opar, again in Tarzan and the Golden Lion (1923) and Tarzan the Invincible (1930).
If, in his novel, Burroughs had been described the jewels of the lost kingdom of Opar as “small, numerous (and), red” we would have a more substantial link with the plant in my garden, but, alas, he only writes that Tarzan saw only as “a great tray of brilliant stones.” No mention of color, no mention of size, though he does say that some were cut, some not. Perhaps an enterprising nurseryman out to sell dozens and dozens of delicate little flowers that came up in his greenhouses just happened to be a fan of Edgar Rice Burroughs and bestowed the exotic name on them in an effort to make them more appealing to gardeners.
But I find this explanation far too mundane. Instead, I prefer that the reason an insignificant flower collected on the volcanic slopes of Martinique became named for a “tray full of brilliant stones” from a fabled Atlantean kingdom remains a mystery we should cherish.
