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210 HOLLYWOOD WITHOUT MAKEUP
ferns are stored. There are 200 kinds of ferns on the lot and 100 kinds of tropical plants. Paramount^ fern collection cost $8500. Holmes' rarest plant is a Dic\sonia antarctica. There are only a few of them in the United States.
Tropical and jungle parasitical plants are grown on rotten logs in Holmes' greenhouses. He puts the spore of the desired plant on the log and it grows. It was because of this spore-impregnation program that Holmes was able to kick through with the proper plant leaf in which to wrap a roast pig when a script called for a native Hawaiian feast. Holmes grows jungle orchids, too, but he goes to the commercial orchid growers for exotic plants with which to deck a jungle set. Most commercial flowers have a larger spread than the ordinary jungle flower, so they photograph better and register a bigger orchid wallop on the audience's eyes. Using three shifts of fifty men each, it takes the greenery department twenty-four hours to put up a jungle.
For underwater shots involving seaweed, kelp and other submarine plants, Holmes and his green-thumbed lads put the plants in a tank before the water is let in. Each plant must be suspended from the top by means of strings or wires. "In real life," Holmes explains, "sea plants have air bulbs at the top, put there by Nature to keep them afloat, but when the plants are removed from their native element to be transported to a movie set, these air-filled globes collapse.
"This song about how 'only God can make a tree' is correct," says Holmes. "I can't exactly make one, but I can whip up a reasonable facsimile, and sometimes I improve on the real thing. The wardrobe department may dress Betty Hutton, but I can take the extremely Spanish San Juan Capistrano Mission between Los Angeles and San Diego and dress it up with gnarled cypresses to look French. I had to reproduce a large section of the famous Middleton Gardens near Charleston right here on the lot for Cecil De Mille's Reap the Wild Wind." De Mille took Holmes with units to shoot background on location. Then, when Holmes got back to the studio, he had to reproduce the scenes from still photos. "I can bring a low, wind-blown cypress in from Monterey Peninsula and have it just as low and