SUPERSTARstruck: The Nora Aunor Fanatics Blog

The Superstar Gumamela

Imagine a starless night and in place of celestial bodies, we have instead, the most brilliantly colored flowers surreally blossoming in the dark sky.

And if the stars do turn into flowers and their twinkling turn into petals, which of the five new Hibiscus breeds named after Filipina celebrities will be the most dazzling of them all? I asked Vic Chin, Jr., an award-winning ornamental plant grower from Calamba, to tell me which breed and explain why.

Vic had bought the rights to propagate the plants. Crowds flocked to see his exhibition of the flowers at the recent Los Baños garden show. Last week, he flew to Bangkok and as my guest in orchid-growing Thailand, he gave me the most wonderful pasalubong from the islands—my most coveted Hibiscus. In full bloom.

As Vic described it, if the stars would turn into flowers, the biggest star would be Maricel Soriano. Followed by Vilma Santos.

The Diamond Star Gumamela would outsize all the others with its enormous, virginal white petals, which makes its reddish pink center all the more alluring (and strongly suggestive, if I may add) while the Star for All Seasons Gumamela is a majestic mauve, old rose in color and multi-petaled—Rosa Vilma with a crown of petals in the middle.

And Nora Aunor?

Well … she’s the smallest. With its flower only five inches in diameter, the Superstar Gumamela is considered only medium-sized in the family.

So why is it that the most earnest and ardent of flowering plant growers going crazy over the Superstar? Why is it that when Vic went to the Bangkok weekend flower market to have the Superstar potted, the orchid-loving Thais crowded over Nora Aunor and asked Vic to name his price for this diminutive plant? (He refused to sell it.)

As it turned out, a perfect breed, to the most discriminating, is measured by other qualities. And you’d be surprised how they all size up to the same reasons why the Filipinos adore Nora Aunor.

Breeding.

Three years ago, critic Patrick Flores delivered a symposium lecture on Nora Aunor. His lecture reminded me of how historian Renato Constantino once described Nora Aunor as a “purveyor of American culture.”

“Ngunit hindi rin maikakaila,” Flores said as he ruminated on Nora’s early singing career, “na ang ganitong tinig ay isang tinig na dayo, sinapian ng isang kanluraning kultura. Ito ay tinig na pinasigasig ng radyo at pelikula at pinahahalagahan ng media. Sa panulukang ito nabubuo ang kakaibang kalinangan, isang pagkamalikhain na naninimbang sa mga puwersang pinagkakautangan ng loob … Sa pagitan ng Lollipops and Roses at Minsa’y Isang Gamugamo ay isang dagat ng kontradiksiyon na dapat sisirin upang maunawaan ang masalimuot na kondisyon ng pagdanas at ng karampatang pagganap—at kaganapan—nito.”

Two words. Paninimbang to achieve Kaganapan: A tense, creative state of weighing the foreign and the local to achieve perfection.

The Hibiscus Celebrity Series, bred by Reynaldo Pimentel of the University of the Philippines Los Baños Institute of Plant Breeding is a cross between Philippine and Australian breeds. It took incredible genius and patience to perfect it. This involved picking pollen from one breed and placing it to another. Inside, it would harden until a seed would form, small and dark like a “paminta” or shall we say like Nora Aunor and her famous mole.

Sometimes, Vic explained, you would get the qualities of the foreign breed, such as the size of the petals and its colors but you would lose its local qualities. The Philippines’ Hibiscus Rosa Sinensis, are sometimes called “Alaga ng Diyos” or cared for by God because they are very forgiving plants. “They bloom profusely,” wrote John Fontillas for the International Hibiscus Society, “without fertilizer and with very little care.”

The brilliant flowers of the foreign and the resilience of the local: it took Pimentel a thousand trials before he got the right dark seed that would blossom into perfection. The result is Nora Aunor’s namesake, the Superstar Gumamela—a startling deep yellow orange with a pinwheel pattern bursting like a sun in lighter shades. Of all the star flowers, Nora Aunor’s overlapping petals form a stand-out, almost perfect circle.

World-renowned designer Tina Maristela Ocampo paid tribute to Nora Aunor by naming after the superstar one of the luxury items in her Celestina line of clutch bags.

The Celestina Nora Aunor clutch, now priced at ₤426, is described as a “Tiger Pen mosaic shell box clutch with ebony wood edged trim. Celestina clutch has a suede lining and comes with a small wood framed signature mirror. Some natural inclusions may be apparent in the smooth finish, which are characteristic of the natural materials used and simply add to the charm of the piece.”

A former fashion model, Ocampo designs high-end, exquisitely crafted accessories, using indigenous Philippine materials like shells, mother of pearl, wood, metals, crystals, and jewelry. Her creations are sold in posh retail stores in New York, London, and other key cities around the world.

US Vogue magazine, no less, featured Ocampo’s line of purses in its June 2008 issue, and some Hollywood celebrities were spotted wearing her bags on the red carpet.

Superstarstruck suggests that fashionable and well-off Noranians get themselves a piece of this bag. It’s a must-have not only for the Nora Aunor namesake, but also for its investment value.