Blooming Flowers: A Seasonal History of Plants and People

How did the chrysanthemum move through history, associated in its native China as an elixir of youth to symbolizing Japanese imperial power, and then transform into an invitation to join a protest march against the Vietnam war in 1967? Read the delightful Blooming Flowers: A Seasonal History of Plants and People to find out.

Blooming Flowers is a work that documents how horticulture permeates society with both symbolism and literal enthusiasm for colorful displays. Author Kasia Boddy, professor of American literature at the University of Cambridge, takes a deep dive on the historic, cultural, literary, culinary, medicinal, and scientific background on common garden flowers, such as geraniums, and marigolds. She also includes a few less commonly grown flowers like saffron, almond, and lotus. Boddy relates why flowers are so significant to human culture:
“One reason we love flowers is because they help us talk to each other about the big and small questions of life: about love, death, class, fashion, the weather, art, disease, an allegiance to a nation, religion or political cause, the challenges of space and the passage of time.”

Divided into four seasons, each with four representative flowers, Boddy’s book entertains us with literary quotations and color images of flowers in famous paintings and illustrations. She unearths the earliest mentions of each flower and traces how the symbolism of some flowers changed over the centuries in Asian and European cultures. The sheer breadth of her knowledge is engaging, and the pace is steady. Just as she starts to get into details on one example in art history she moves smoothly on to the next example in art or politics. The chapter on the winter blooming almond starts with words from D. H. Lawrence while he lived in Tuscany: “pink houses, pink almond, pink peach and purply apricot, pink asphodels”. Also included is van Gogh’s painting of a blooming almond twig in a glass inside his modest room in Arles, France. The chapter concludes with observations of how much water California’s million acres of almond orchards require and notes that despite how toxic bitter almonds are to human health, internet quacks peddle the poison as a cancer cure.

I’ve grown twelve of the sixteen flowers explored in Boddy’s book and I now appreciate the hidden meanings and cultural connections lurking in my garden. I found Blooming Flowers pleasurable reading that provides many interesting tidbits of lore.

Published in The Leaflet for Scholars, December 2020, Volume 7, Issue 12