I remember when I was a child gathering daffodils, Lilly of the Valley, Queen Anne's lace and Black Eyed Susan's at my grandparents' farm as the seasons progressed. We'd make bouquets and fill vases. My grandmother had three distinct areas of her home where she cultivated flowers, her greenhouse which later on was expanded with a potting shed, her front porch which was enclosed in the wintertime and felt very much like a walled english garden or solarium and her rainforest garden. She also had a vegetable garden and various patches of flowers on the farm, but from what I recall she had a few distinct loves: orchids, lilies and hibiscus, each cultivated in a specific location. She tended these loves with great attention. Once when I was a child in the summer I remember laying in the rainforest garden just after the hanging orchids had been watered gazing up from a bed of moss as droplets fell on my face and I stared in wonderment at the tangle of hanging roots. She nurtured these plants with a singular devotion and when they were in bloom there was no greater beauty. I remember her moving through her greenhouse, transplanting and watering, on her knees amongst the zucchini, the delicious succulence of her raspberries. She spoke the language of flowers with an abandon and fidelity that few today herald. The natural world enchanted her from birds, to shells to flowers and she found many ways to dive deep into this enchantment. She was curious about the patterns and habits of our earths ecology, intrigued by the myriad ecosystems in our biosphere.
Me, I never used to be a flower person per se. I appreciated floral beauty as much as the next person, but I have spent much of my life in cities and moving from home to home. There has been concrete and uncultivated earth in my midst. When my love and I moved into our first home together I remember scattering seeds and hoping something might grow, transplanting dahlias but knowing nothing about feeding and watering. Some how my grandmother's green thumbs alluded me. Buried inside a curiosity about the botanical world churned, but only now is it bubbling to the surface. And I am enchanted, and I am eager, and I am overwhelmed by the world of botanicals.
This world utters softly and screams, it soothes and prickles. Once when I was in school in Mexico I bought a sick friend calla lilies, having no idea of their association with the resurrection of Jesus and common usage as a funeral flower. I was reprimanded for my foolishness and to this day have not purchased calla lillies again. Truth be told they have a more nuanced meaning then I then perceived, but at that time I came to understand that there is a layered language of flowers that harkens back to eons before now that I might want to explore. During the Victorian Era flowers came to express a symbolic language all their own. If you gave somebody a certain flower you need not accompany it with a lengthy letter explaining yourself, the bloom spoke for itself. Today we have reduced that language to roses equalling undying love, poinsettias having something to do with Christmas, and Lilies beauty, but I don't think we have common cultural knowledge of flowers symbolism much beyond this. Floriography is lost on us.
Despite this fact, there is indeed an intrigue and appreciation of bring fresh flowers home. We might no longer engage in the exchange of Tussie-Mussies, small bouquets ordered around the meaning of particular flowers and herbs then gifted with intention. But, I think we are still eager to absorb the underlying messages, to be amidst such beauty even if it is a forgotten language. It amazes me the voice each flower has, the feelings they conjure both in their fresh from the earth vibrance and as they decay. I am smitten with the plucking, gathering, arranging, selling and decaying of flowers. There is a symphony out their asking to be ordered, asking to be celebrated, asking to be held. And once we have done so, inhaled deeply the fresh perfume, there is a certain scent of flowers decaying on the kitchen table, a pungence plunging toward putrid that tickles the nostrils and urges us to move our blooms into the compost pile. But of late I have wanted to let them linger, see in their loss of life what shape they might take, how their leaves might furl, blooms might brown and stems may crumble. I hope to move ever closer toward an understanding of this language, to plunge my hands into the earth, to coax and nurture blooms into being. Floriography, you intrigue me.
