Arizona’s state flower, the bat- and bee-pollinated saguaro blossom (Carnegiea gigantea)
Arizona’s state flower, the bat- and bee-pollinated saguaro blossom (Carnegiea gigantea)
Regardless of time or place, all literate cultures have used flowers as the subjects for poetic imagery of people and their environments. Some storytellers and poets enjoy flowers as they are, while others use them as metaphors for the brevity of pleasure, beauty, and life itself. Yet flowers are immortal; gardens grow in poems about love and death.
A full recounting of the flower in literature would require thousands of pages, so instead, a sampling—or my selected bouquet if you will—will have to do. The oldest preserved writing, from ancient Sumer, as cuneiform marks gouged into clay tablets, are records of daily business transactions. An exception is the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh (predating 2000 BC), the earliest known surviving literary work. This tale recounts King Gilgamesh’s attempt to find the plant of immortality at the bottom of a freshwater ocean. The lyrics describe the specimen as a boxthornlike plant bearing flowers that give a wonderful fragrance. Gilgamesh finds and picks the flower, but loses the prize to a hungry vegetarian snake.
The Western tradition of rich and diverse flower poetry does not flow from this early masterpiece. But what about the Bible? As Christianity spread throughout Europe, those famous “lilies of the field” lines inspired generations of authors, right? While scripture is a wonderful place to learn about the economics of plants (crops versus weeds), in the earliest days of the Middle East, biblical verses about flowers are rare. In 1952, Harold and Alma Moldenke published Plants of the Bible to explain and reinterpret its many plant references, of which the vast majority were about seeds, leaves, resins, and wood. Relatively few mention flowers, and the species are not well identified in most translations. Even today, Israeli botanist Amots Dafni is exploring the Bible, extracting similar botanical and elusive floral inferences. Examples of biblical verses mentioning flowers are:
“I am the rose of Sharon, The lily of the valleys. Like a lily among the thorns, So is my darling among the maidens.”
Song of Solomon 2:1–2
“Like a flower he comes forth and withers. He also flees like a shadow and does not remain.”
Job 14:2
“As for man, his days are like grass; As a flower of the field, so he flourishes.
Psalms 103:15
“The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them; and the desert shall rejoice and blossom as the rose.”
Isaiah 35:1.
“My beloved has gone down to his garden, To the beds of balsam, To pasture his flock in the gardens And gather lilies. I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine, He who pastures his flock among the lilies.”
Song of Solomon 6:2–3
These quotes reveal that scripture sets the recurring theme of flowers, but specific references to lilies and roses probably represent deliberate mistranslations. Why? Because the genus Rosa is not native to that part of the world. The Moldenkes thought that these were in fact references to the gaudy flowers of rockroses (Cistus, not in the rose family) or even rose of Sharon (Hibiscus syriacus), both shrubs of waste places and abandoned fields. Lilies can refer to all sorts of spring wildflowers that arise from bulbs or tubers, including hyacinths, cyclamens, red buttercups, daffodils, and jonquils. In fact, members of the genus Lilium are relatively uncommon in that part of the world today. When Hebrew and Aramaic words are carefully examined, some modern Israeli scholars suggest that the “lilies” in Matthew and again in Luke 12:27–28, surpassing the glory of King Solomon, were really the ubiquitous, hardy, and vivid blossoms of spring anemones (Anemone coronaria). Most are red, but some populations mix crimson flowers with blue, purple, and cream. All have the same, striking centers of clusters of nearly black stamens.
Certain linguists insist that there is an ancient tradition in the Bible of naming cities after flowers. The metropolis of Shushan may take its name from an anemone or chamomile, while Tirzah (another name for Jerusalem) could refer to an autumn or winter crocus. Nevertheless, floral references in the Bible are infrequent. If we want to find the origin of flower-based poetry in Western civilization, we need to stay in the Mediterranean, but travel north of the Holy Lands.
A word is hiding in plain sight to take us to that first garden of poetry. Since seventeenth-century English, we have called organized collections of short stories, poems, plays, and other works of creative prose and poetry anthologies. Why? The reason has its roots in ancient Greece. The Greeks had a word, ἀvθoλoγία, which meant a collection of flowers, a direct reference to one of the earliest Greek anthologies, The Garland. Its compiler, Meleager of Gadara, was a first-century BC poet. The Garland is a collection of poems by Meleager and other poets, and its introduction compares each of the anthologized Greek poets to different flowers. Before anthology entered the English language in the seventeenth century, earlier writers referred to miscellanies to describe collected short literary works. In medieval Europe, where Latin was the lingua franca, a book of compiled excerpts from other writings was better known as a florilegium.
And who was the poet who ultimately made flower analogies tradition in the Greco-Roman world? One sees references to flowers in the works of Sappho of Lesbos, Cynaethus of Chios, and Pamphos of Attica, but the man or men we know as Homer from the eighth or ninth century BC still receives credit as the fount of floral poetry for early Western civilization. Consider his hymn to the grain goddess, Demeter, hinting at the rape and abduction of her daughter, Persephone, by Hades, when she picked the first narcissus, probably one of the flowers we know as jonquils (from Homeric Hymns, III):
Apart from Demeter, lady of the golden sword and glorious fruits, she was playing with the deep-bosomed daughters of Oceanus and gathering flowers over a soft meadow, roses and crocuses and beautiful violets, irises also and hyacinths and the narcissus, which Earth made to grow at the will of Zeus and to please the Host of Many, to be a snare for the bloomlike girl—a marvelous [sic], radiant flower. It was a thing of awe whether for deathless gods or mortal men to see: from its root grew a hundred blooms and it smelled most sweetly, so that all wide heaven above and the whole earth and the sea’s salt swell laughed for joy. And the girl was amazed and reached out with both hands to take the lovely toy.
Ultimately, most of the references to flowers in the Greco-Roman world go back to the stories sung by Homer and his contemporaries. In the Iliad, Gorgythion, one of Hector’s half brothers and his charioteer, dies of an arrow wound, and his demise is compared to a drooping poppy-seed head heavy with dew. Hera plots the Greek victory by distracting Zeus upon Mount Ida. As the two deities copulate, the earth sends up fresh flowers of clovers, crocuses, and hyacinths. In the Odyssey, Odysseus carries a plant called moly to resist the enchantments of Circe. It has a white flower and black roots and may have been wild garlic or perhaps a cyclamen.
Who could resist such adventurous tales? Certainly not the Roman poet Publius Ovidius Naso (43 BC–AD 18), better known as Ovid. His fifteen-book mythological narrative, The Metamorphoses, contains twelve thousand verses reinterpreting hundreds of myths derived from Greek, Etruscan, and Latin traditions. This and other works by Ovid had strong and lasting effects on Western literature and art long after Rome fell. Here, for example, is Ovid’s commentary on flowers that emerged purportedly from the death of two handsome men (Ovid, Fasti 5, 193ff, translation by A. J. Boyle, in Roman Poetry C1st B.C. to C1st A.D.):
As soon as the dewy frost is cast from the leaves and sunbeams warm the dappled blossom, the Horae [Seasons] assemble, hitch up their coloured dresses and collect these gifts of mine in light tubs. Suddenly the Charites [the Graces] burst in, and weave chaplets and crowns to entwine the hair of gods. I first scattered new seed across countless nations; earth was formerly a single colour. I first made a flower from Therapnean blood [Hyakinthos, the hyacinth], and its petal still inscribes the lament. You, too, narcissus, have a name in tended gardens, unhappy in your undivided self. Why mention Crocus, Attis or Cinyras’ son, from whose wounds I made a tribute soar?
All Princess Dryope wanted was to pick a flower to please her infant son, but Ovid relates her shock and horror in Book IX of The Metamorphoses (as translated by A. D. Melville):
. . . when I saw drops
Of blood drip from the blossoms and the boughs
Shiver in horror. For this shrub, you see
(Too late the peasants told us), was a nymph
Lotis who fled Priapus’ lechery And found changed features there but kept her name.
Dryope tries to pray her way out of the situation but is transformed into a tree. Her son, Amphissos, grows up in her shade and warns all never to pick flowers, but “fancy every bush a goddess in disguise” (Metamorphoses, Book II, 846–75).
Rome fell but Latin lived on as the language of the educated elite as the empire had established colonies throughout much of Western Europe, allowing the Romance languages to evolve. Italian Durante degli Alighieri, usually simply referred to as Dante (1265–1321), is recognized as the major Italian poet from the Middle Ages, and his greatest work is the Divine Comedy. We don’t expect to see flowers in hell but Dante and his guide, the soul of the Roman poet Virgil, leave the underworld and emerge into a terrestrial paradise leading to purgatory. Here Dante beholds an innocent and virginal woman, known later as Matelda, and he compares her to Ovid’s goddess Proserpina (Persephone) and to Venus (Aphrodite). She is outdoors picking wildflowers. More flowers fall from the heavens, and the soul of Beatrice, Dante’s great unrequited love interest, steps out of the cloud of blossoms. Alas, Virgil vanishes as he lacks a saved soul and can’t progress farther.
Beatrice remains unobtainable and rejects Dante’s earthly sentiments. She says, “ ‘Why does my face so entrance you that you do not turn to the lovely Garden that flowers below the rays of Christ? There is the Rose, in which the Divine Word made itself flesh: there are the Lilies within whose perfume the good way is taken.’ And I, who was eager for her wisdom, surrendered again to the struggle of my weak vision” (translation by A. S. Kline).
The rose is one of the most omnipresent and powerful symbols in all literature, in addition to being one of the most complex for us to understand, especially across the mists of time. Seemingly, for Dante, the rose is no less than his solution to the riddle of the universe. In the final cantos of the “Paradiso,” finally purged of sin and perfected, he is permitted a mystic vision of eternal glory. The poet first perceives a huge white rose on whose petals rest many saints. Finally, Dante lifts his eyes to the sun, then a primary symbol of God, shining down upon the rose. The symbols of the sun and the rose are inseparable during this period.
By the time of the Italian Renaissance from the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries, flowers return again with renewed emphasis and impact on literature, where they come to represent both sacred and profane issues. For those of us who speak English as our first language, the great poet of posies is always William Shakespeare (1564–1616). By reading his diverse works, we come away with a personalized yet broad glimpse of the English countryside, with its wildflowers, cottage gardens, and hedgerow floras. Shakespeare would have been familiar with the splendid formal gardens of the great houses of Warwickshire, as well as the more famous public ones sloping down to the bank of the river Thames in London.
As a poet, Shakespeare was indebted to surviving verses in Latin for narrative, myth, and metaphor. Consider his long poem “Venus and Adonis” as an Englishman tipping his cap to Ovid. As usual, Adonis is killed by the boar he hunts, and his gore will become a flower as the love-struck goddess looks on:
By this, the boy that by her side lay kill’d
Was melted like a vapour from her sight,
And in his blood that on the ground lay spill’d,
A purple flower sprung up, chequer’d with white,
Resembling well his pale cheeks and the blood
Which in round drops upon their whiteness stood.
Is it possible that Shakespeare never saw a red, living Anemone coronaria, commonly found throughout the Mediterranean? In fact, he influences future generations of poets in his sonnets and plays by mixing the Anemone species favored in Greece and Italy with those native to his chillier British homelands. Here’s one of his most famous passages from A Midsummer Night’s Dream (2.1.255–60), with a few botanical and geographical asides:
I know a bank where the wild thyme [domesticated Thymus; Mediterranean] blows,
Where oxlips [Primula elatior] and the nodding violet [wild Viola species throughout Europe, including England] grows,
Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine [Lonicera periclymenum; throughout Europe, including England].
With sweet musk roses [domesticated Rosa moschata; western Himalayas] and with eglantine [wild Rosa rubiginosa; throughout Europe, including England]:
There sleeps Titania sometime of the night,
Lull’d in these flowers with dances and delight.
Shakespeare’s Oberon sends the hobgoblin Puck to the west to find the flower “love-in-idleness.” That’s one of the many common names English cottagers gave to their wild and garden pansies (Viola tricolor).
Perdita may live in Bohemia in The Winter’s Tale, but she seems overly fond of the spring wildflowers found alongside English lanes and their adjacent hedgerows. She names daffodils and primroses but insists, “The fairest flowers o’ the season are our carnations.” Was she referring to the native cheddar pink (likely Dianthus gratianopolitanus)? The cheddar pink is now domesticated and cultivated all over the world, but the English depleted their native populations over the centuries, and wild plants now only cling to higher cliffs and ledges of limestone in remote areas.
As a final Elizabethan example, in agreement with our earlier discussion of Greek and Roman burial beliefs and customs, here is one of the most famous Shakespearean quotes, from a scene in act 5 of Hamlet (5.1.237–43). We find Hamlet and Queen Gertrude expressing the common belief (in this case, for Hamlet’s beloved Ophelia) that violets would spring forth and grow on her grave, the grave of a truly good person:
Lay her i’ the earth:
And from her fair and unpolluted flesh
May violets spring! I tell thee, churlish priest,
A ministering angel shall my sister be,
When thou liest howling.
HAMLET: What, the fair Ophelia!
QUEEN GERTRUDE: Sweets to the sweet: farewell!
(Scattering flowers).
Shakespeare wasn’t the only Elizabethan poet to usher in native plants and marry them to once-favored Greco-Roman species. However, once Shakespeare departed, new trends of anthophily developed in English verse. Editor Sarah Maguire notes in her anthology, Flora Poetica: The Chatto Book of Botanical Verse (2001), that most poems in English that include flower imagery do not stick to a single plant species or even a genus, with the exception of poems about roses. The poems in her collection do leave you with the impression that solitary odes to lilacs, lilies, and legumes become respectable and desirable as Shakespeare’s literary children and grandchildren multiply. We gradually see a shift in those flowers favored and extolled by writers and poets alike.
For example, poems including daffodils (most likely the English native, Narcissus pseudonarcissus) begin with British poet laureate Robert Herrick (1591–1674), especially with his love poems. Herrick retains, once again, the metaphor of fast-fading beauty: “Faire Daffadills, we weep to see / You haste away so soone [sic].”
These traditions were kept alive by many others, and the romantic poet William Wordsworth (1770–1850) leads the narcissophiles in the opening stanza of his notable poem “Daffodils”:
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
Let’s not forget that the British not only admire gardens but are often inveterate gardeners, in ink, at least. In John Milton (1608–74), we have an English poet, polemicist, and man of letters. He wrote of a chaste water nymph, Sabrina, knitting together the sinuous stems of water lilies. His poem “Lycidas” (1637) is a brief pastoral elegy. It was hailed in his life as Milton’s best poem, and some consider it the greatest lyrical poem in all the English language. An excerpt:
Bring the rathe Primrose that forsaken dies.
The tufted Crow-toe, and pale Jasmine,
The white Pink, and the Pansie freakt with jeat [sic],
The glowing Violet.
The Musk-rose, and the well attir’d Woodbine,
With Cowslips wan that hang the pensive hed,
And every flower that sad embroidery wears:
Bid Amaranthus all his beauty shed,
And Daffadillies fill their cups with tears,
To strew the Laureat Herse where Lycid lies.
In the works of Alfred Tennyson (1809–92) we see many nature poems describing flowers amid the lives of his characters and natural landscapes. Like Milton, he had a thing about water lilies and what they represented. Tennyson imagined his Lady of Shalott under a spell of solitude forced to gaze into a mirror in her castle on a lonely island. “Half sick of shadow” she breaks the spell, but it’s fatal. Before she dies “she saw the water-lily bloom.” One of Tennyson’s best-known poems is “Maud.” The setting is a garden where the author waits for his beloved, Maud. Even the garden flowers discuss their love for her and impatience to see her:
There has fallen a splendid tear
From the passion-flower at the gate.
She is coming, my dove, my dear;
She is coming, my life, my fate.
The red rose cries, “She is near, she is near”;
And the white rose weeps, “She is late”;
The larkspur listens, “I hear, I hear”;
And the lily whispers, “I wait.”
Ah, but be careful when you allow the flowers to speak!
The Reverend Charles Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll, 1832–98) was a contemporary of Lord Tennyson’s. Once Alice takes her fateful first step through the looking glass, she finds a pleasant garden where the flowers talk, as well, but have only the least regard for her. Instead, they await the arrival of the Red Queen, and their conversation imitates the taxonomy of the blossoms in the poem “Maud” with one big exception. When Martin Gardner (1914–2010) annotated the Alice books in 1960, he noted that Carroll decided to change the tearful passionflower into a tart, a talking tiger lily. Carroll learned that the passionflower was a potent symbol of the Passion of Christ, and as an Anglican deacon, he wasn’t about to poke fun at it.
While the nineteenth century showed the blossoming of flowers in English fairy tales, it wasn’t restricted to England, and much of it derives from earlier French authors and German folktales. The Countess d’Aulnoy (1650–1705) wrote of Felicia and her pot of pinks (carnations). That flowerpot is enchanted and turns into a fairy prince who will marry Felicia. Meanwhile, in Grimms’ version of “Little Red Riding Hood” (1812), the wolf delays the little girl’s arrival at her grandmother’s house by telling her to gather up pretty woodland flowers.
The Brothers Grimm also revised (1812) the much-earlier Charles Perrault story (1697) of the beauty sleeping in the wood (“La Belle au bois dormant”). Some of the translations of the Grimm tale named the princess Rosamond. After she touches the spindle and falls asleep, thorny branches cover the castle until a prince appears a century later searching for “this beautiful Briar Rose.” The thorny branches kill knights who arrive too soon, but they burst into bloom the moment the curse ends, allowing the prince to safely pass. Some of the other enchanted flowers in the Grimm tales are not benign at all. When a maiden gathers a dozen lilies for her twelve brothers, they are transformed into ravens.
Hans Christian Andersen (1805–75) was a prolific writer, playwright, novelist, and poet. Flowers appear in some of his children’s stories and do strange and unexpected things. A childless woman plants a seed in a pot. It grows into a flower resembling a tulip, and Thumbelina emerges when its petals unfurl. When a swallow carries the tiny girl to the warm southlands, she meets and marries a fairy prince whose people live inside flowers. Why do the flowers in “Little Ida’s Flowers” hang their heads the day after they are picked? After all, they aren’t wilted. Instead, they’re exhausted after spending all night dancing at the flowers’ ball. Once the elf of “The Rose Elf” leaves his rose, he becomes witness, judge, and executioner of a man who has killed his sister’s lover. His head is buried inside a potted jasmine, but the elf rouses the jasmine spirits to kill the murderer with their poisonous spears. This is a children’s story?
Similar stories stimulated a charming tradition in children’s literature from the late nineteenth century through the early 1960s. A new generation of author/illustrators humanized common garden and wildflowers, and often depicted them as anthropomorphic flower people or flower fairies. Sometimes these characters must deal with equally humanized and caricatured insects.
The master of this genre was the socialist artist and poet Walter Crane (1845–1915), who produced at least three books of flower people. Flora’s Feast: A Masque of Flowers (1889) is the most often reprinted. We follow a march of England’s garden and woodland flowers from early spring until winter including “Great Peonies in crimson pride, and budding ones in green that hide.” Later in the season, “Wide Oxeyes in the meads that gaze on scarlet poppy-heads a-blaze.”
Some regard Cicely Mary Barker (1895–1973) as the English queen of floral fantasy for the nursery set. Her first book on the topic, Flower Fairies of the Spring, was published in 1923, followed by seven more volumes, all of which attracted a huge popular following. Her illustrations dressed each sprite (depicted as a child) in the petals and sepals of a flower, and this picture was accompanied by a poem about the appropriate plant species in nature or planted in gardens.
Continuing in the flower-fairies and garden-flowers tradition, we have American author Elizabeth Gordon (1866–1922), whose flower-people books reflect the uses of plants and their natural histories. Often, she gives her readers scientific names of the plants, while “flower persons” dance with a pollinator, as in the following:
Wild Columbine (Aquilegia canadensis)
“I keep my sweets,” said Columbine,
“For Humming Bird, a friend of mine;
He comes at sun-down every night,
And is so grateful and polite.
Walt Whitman (1819–92) gave us wonderful imagery of garden lilac blooms in his poem “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.” The poem is about the untimely death of beloved president Abraham Lincoln, affectionately symbolized in the poem as the “great star early droop’d,” and it became one of the most famous eulogies in American history. A few lines from Whitman’s lengthy, praise-filled poem follow:
When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d,
And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night,
I mourn’d, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.
Ever-returning spring, trinity sure to me you bring,
Lilac blooming perennial and drooping star in the west,
And thought of him I love.
The poet most responsible for promoting a modern aesthetic is American Ezra Pound (1885–1972). He used floral imagery in his 1913 imagist poem “In a Station of the Metro,” talking about “the apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough.” Pound seems to be describing the faces in a crowded New York subway station, and the “wet, black bough” is likely the background subway walls or the pressing crowd. By calling the faces in the crowd petals, their fragile beauty in the metaphor also captures the beauty of the human individual.
The Australian author, cartoonist, and illustrator May Gibbs (1877–1969) produced a trio of books with a delightfully different twist about the adventures of the gumnut brothers Snugglepot and Cuddlepie, usually accompanied by Little Ragged Blossom. The characters are only a few inches high and have stamens for hair (no eucalyptus flowers have petals), and their bush land is run like a city. Flowers of other Australian plants are animated as well, but the greatest enemies of the gumnut babies are the “big bad banksiamen,” based upon the fruits of Banksia serrata.
In the twentieth century, a husband-and-wife poetic team, American Sylvia Plath (1932–63) and the British Ted Hughes (1930–98), separately write of daffodils. Plath’s “Among the Narcissi” describes the daffodil’s petals as “vivid as bandages” and unites them with the figure of a man in a blue pea jacket recuperating from a lung ailment.
Ted Hughes was appointed Britain’s poet laureate in 1984. Hughes, considered a nature poet, was described as one of the twentieth century’s best poets writing in the English language. Plath and Hughes were married from 1956 to 1963. Following her death by suicide, Ted Hughes penned a poem called “Daffodils” about their life, and poignant family memories with their children, the opening lines of which are:
Remember how we picked the daffodils?
Nobody else remembers, but I remember.
Your daughter came with her armfuls, eager and happy,
Helping the harvest. She has forgotten.
Pulitzer Prize–winning and US poet laureate Louise Glück (b. 1943) has written several engaging poems about flowers, death, and lifelong memories including “The Wild Iris” and especially “Nostos,” whose opening lines are:
There was an apple tree in the yard—
this would have been
forty years ago—behind,
only meadows. Drifts
of crocus in the damp grass.
Thus ends thousands of years of flower poetry and lively stories from across Western Europe and America. Half a world away, the Asian tradition, though, often reflects a different sensibility, philosophy, and appreciation of different flowering plants among their flower cultures.
Certainly, flower-infused literature in Asia is as old or older than in Western cultures. But unlike the prose and poetry of the West, where flowers are largely about ephemeral life, lust, and love, poetry from ancient China and Japan is mainly concerned with themes of symbolic beauty, landscapes, and love.
Unlike in most cultures, the earliest literary forms in China were not narratives, but beautiful lyric poetry. Chinese poems of earlier centuries focused on patterns of daily rural life, often with unstated hidden emotions and meanings that these poets knew their readers would understand. English translations of Chinese lyric poems are challenging to interpret and often imprecise. Love is a common theme of these poems, along with nature (flowers) and politics. The earliest collection of lyric poems is the Book of Songs, from about 600 BC. The Han, Tang, and Song Dynasties produced exquisite lyrical poems from their most renowned poets, especially Li Po, Tu Fu, and Su Shi.
Chinese poet Li Po (701–762) wrote of a professional courtesan who has fallen in love with an absent man. Conjugal affection is symbolized by his mentioning mandarin ducks, and a dancing girl might gain a man’s attention via a sidelong glance. The yin mist, flower petals, damp silk, and the white moon are all symbols understood at the time as emblems of her tears:
Misted the flowers weep as light dies
Moon of white silk sleeplessly cries.
Stilled—Phoenix wings.
Touched—Mandarin strings.
Chinese poet, calligrapher, and gastronome Su Shi (1037–1101) was a major influence of the Song Dynasty in China. Su Shi writes about falling date-flowers and flowering crab-apple trees in the following two short poems, often poorly translated. The date-flowers in this poem are more likely to belong to a persimmon (Diospyros lotus), known as the Chinese date plum. The berries are tasty, but the Chinese appreciate it as a magnificent courtyard tree because its twigs and older boughs become covered in fleecy, tiny, white blossoms in spring. It’s as if the old wood on the tree is wearing a crust of snow. The same species grows as far west as the Middle East and probably appears in some classic poetry as well. Here is one poem by Su Shi:
Date-flowers fall in showers on my hooded head,
At both ends of the village wheels are spinning thread,
A straw-cloaked man sells cucumber beneath a willow tree.
Wine-drowsy when the road is long, I yawn for bed;
The widespread printing of books, using ink on paper, first began in the Tang Dynasty (618–907). The earliest Chinese inks, like modern ink sticks, are themselves highly decorated and often embossed with elaborate floral motifs. Ink, called mo, is used in Chinese calligraphy. It was developed around 256 BC using carbon black (soot) and fish glue, which was later replaced with pine-tree resin. The Diamond Sutra, a Buddhist text, was printed in 868 and is likely the oldest known printed book, using block-printing methods. Flower poetry spread widely in villages across ancient China with the adoption of block-printing methods and of aesthetically pleasing, handmade mulberry paper, called kozo (from the bark of the paper mulberry tree).
In Japan, the waka poem is one of the most ancient and beloved forms in all of Japanese literature. Waka have thirty-one syllables, arranged in five lines of five, seven, five, seven, and seven syllables. A flower poem by the famous Heian-period female poet, one of Kinto’s thirty-six immortals of poetry, Ono no Komachi (825–900), follows:
The flowers withered,
Their color faded away,
While meaninglessly
I spent my days in the world
And the long rains were falling.
Beautiful, short Japanese poems have been used to express feelings for centuries, often written to celebrate special occasions. Many Americans are familiar with and may have tried writing another form of Japanese poetry: haiku. Like the first three lines of any waka, they follow a syllable count of five, seven, and five. Haiku reached their greatest height of expression in seventeenth-century Japan, but are still extremely popular today. Authentic early examples of Japanese haiku appear in the writings of Sōgi (1421–1502), but Matsuo Bashō (1644–94) is considered by many Japanese as their finest haiku poet. Although haiku are internationally fashionable, even among young children, authentic haiku have concerned themselves with wit or rhetoric, gimmicks, or pretense. The best haiku are deceptively difficult to write. Three examples of early poems by haiku master Matsuo Bashō are:
Come on let us see
all the real flowers of this
sorrowful world
how real
this iris!
Cherry blossoms?
in parts like these the grass
always bloom as well
The early-tenth-century Kokin Wakashū (“collection of Japanese poetry ancient and modern”) was the first of twenty-one poetry anthologies compiled by imperial decree, under the rule of Emperor Uda (867–931). This extensive collection of 1,111 waka was compiled from 915 to 920. Their topics range widely, including the natural world of spring-blooming flowers, autumn seasons, love, mourning, death, travel, and other concerns.
Poet Ariwara no Narihira (825–80) is considered one of the six so-called immortal poets of ancient Japan. Narihira was mentioned in the preface to the Kokin Wakashū, which include thirty of his poems, such as:
If cherry blossoms
One day ceased to exist
In this world of ours,
Perhaps our hearts in spring
May know some tranquillity.
Supposedly, in this introspective poem, cherry blossoms are metaphors for Narihira’s amorous affairs. Another classic Japanese waka poet, also included in the Kokin Wakashū, is Wani Kishi, a legendary scholar who came to Japan from Korea around the later third century. One of his flower poems is:
Nanywa Bay, now the flower
blooms, but for winter. Here
comes spring, now the flower
blooms.
You don’t have to move to Italy to read or hear lyrics (librettos) sung about flowers. New York music-publishing houses and songwriters dominated the popular-music industry in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Song lyrics from now-popular classics emerged in a small area, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, in Manhattan. This area is now part of Manhattan’s NoMad neighborhood, and part of the Flower District, where flowers are bought and sold. Later, this area came to be known as Tin Pan Alley, supposedly because a New York Herald article about the sounds of out-of-tune pianos being struck like tin pans banged in an alleyway. The colorful nickname stuck and generally came to refer to everything about the US music industry. From musical comedies and songs born in Tin Pan Alley, to the extensive use of flowers and their symbolism in operas including Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, to modern popular—including rock-and-roll—songs, many lyrics rely upon the magic of flowers to move their audiences.
I have found at least ninety modern American and British songs that describe flowers in their titles and lyrics. Roses are a dominant song element, whether as plastic, wild, red, tattooed ones from Tokyo, or those found in everyday rose gardens. Other common garden blooms finding their way into contemporary songs include amaryllis, apple and cherry blossoms, buttercups, columbines, daisies, edelweiss, hyacinth, lilies, lotus, magnolias, marigolds, morning glories, orchids, sunflowers, and tulips.
One of the oldest modern flower songs is certainly “My Wild Irish Rose” (1899) by Chauncey Olcott (1858–1932). Olcott’s wife, Margaret, visited Ireland, his mother’s homeland, in 1898, where a young boy gave her a flower. She asked him what kind of flower it was and he replied, “A wild Irish rose.” She saved the pressed flower in an album. Later, when Chauncey needed a title for his latest song, she remembered the pressed flower. Some of the lyrics of “My Wild Irish Rose” are:
If you’ll listen, I’ll sing you a sweet little song,
Of a flower . . . that’s now drooped and dead,
’Twas given to me . . . by a girl that I know,
And I call her my wild Irish Rose.
Many examples could be given of contemporary musicians singing about flowers, or having lyrics mentioning flowers in their songs. Who could forget the classic Beatles song lyrics from the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album with their “cellophane flowers of yellow and green,” or “on a bed of roses” from the song by Jon Bon Jovi. Another popular song weaving flowers into love, pain, and other human emotions is “Desert Rose,” sung by Sting. The opening lyrics are:
I dream of gardens in the desert sand . . .
Her shadows play in the shape of man’s desire
This desert rose
The dark-themed but wildy popular countrylike rock ballad “Dead Flowers,” written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, is track number nine on the Rolling Stones album Sticky Fingers. The song includes these now-classic Stones lyrics:
And you can send me dead flowers every morning
Send me dead flowers by the mail
Send me dead flowers to my wedding
And I won’t forget to put roses on your grave. . . .
Or finally, leaving roses aside, we have the popular song “Sugar Magnolia,” from 1970, written by Robert Hunter and Bob Weir and sung by the Grateful Dead, with these opening lyrics:
Sugar magnolia, blossoms blooming, heads all empty and I don’t care,
Saw my baby down by the river, knew she’d have to come up soon for air. . . .
She’s got everything delightful, she’s got everything I need.
Roses and magnolias end our sentimental journey, one that began millennia ago with a mythical Sumerian flower blooming at the bottom of a sea, and now we turn to an equally rich tapestry and canvas of flowers depicted in the world’s fine and decorative arts, where we explore the meaning of flowers in art.