Flowers are the sexual organs of plants. To cut a blossom from a bush is to deflower it. A bouquet proffers a veritable orgy of genitals, making flowers a classic courtship gift. Hostesses like bouquets, too, which are ready to be thrown out just when one’s getting tired of them.
Potted plants and artificial blooms offer more permanent pleasures. Yet potted plants are burdened by too much reality, while fake flowers suffer from too little. An African violet soon shrinks if left unwatered, while its silk facsimile requires dusting. Both saddle their recipient with responsibilities that far outweigh the importance of the occasions that elicit flowers in the first place: a major dinner, a minor birthday, a post-coital forget-me-not.
The melancholy of flowers lies in their mortality. We expect the blooms in a bouquet to fade; transience is part of their charm. A potted plant, however, perishes because you have killed it. As for artificial flowers, they positively refuse to die. Promising eternal youth, nothing ages a room, or its hostess, sooner than an urn of silk peonies. Claiming squatters’ rights on a side board or coffee table, fake flowers soon collect yesterday’s mail-order catalogs and tomorrow’s disappointments around their sullen basketry. Tossing a browning bouquet into the trash is a refreshing routine, like flossing your teeth. Throwing out a dusty clump of silk blooms, on the other hand, requires both will and courage, like scheduling a root canal.
The potted plant, its roots stolidly sucking up water from its matronly basin, is positively impervious to erotic imaginings. A foil-swathed chrysanthemum suits a Mother’s Day table, but it deals death to the tender shoots of desire sought on Valentine’s Day; its appearance as a spousal birthday gift is the sure sign that a marriage has entered its late, chaste stages.
No one even pretends that fake flowers carry an erotic scent. Men rarely buy them, since their florid stems are native to the shelves and buckets of craft stores. Artificial ficus trees thrive on the equally artificial light of middle-management office suites, where their charm is as short as their tenancy is long. JL
The Language of Flowers
For centuries, flowers carried symbolic
meanings whose waning scent
can still be detected today.
meanings whose waning scent
can still be detected today.
| Then | Now | |
|---|---|---|
| CARNATION | Short for “Incarnation,” the red ones signified Christ’s Passion. These gentle flowers never recovered from the heavy symbolism, but they managed to survive by attaching themselves to Mother’s Day (America), Parents’ Day (Korea), and final exams (Great Britain). | “I just couldn’t stop thinking about you while I was at the grocery store.” |
| ROSE | Love and passion. | “I knew you’d be angry if I didn’t buy you roses.” |
| ALSTROMERIA | Devotion and friendship. | “Sorry, but you don’t rate roses.” |
| DAISY | Innocence, but also dissembling (just to keep those Renaissance courtiers on their toes). | “You really don’t rate roses!” |
| NARCISSUS | The Greeks fancied that a young man who fell in love with his own reflection turned into this heavy-headed shore-dweller. | “I bought these for myself, because I am so fabulous.” |
| CALLA LILY | Favored in Diego Rivera murals and upscale wedding bouquets, Katherine Hepburn said of them, “Such a strange flower—suitable to any occasion.” | “I don’t really like flowers, so I got you these weird things instead.” |
GAWKY
VOLUPTUOUS
Avoid depositing a store-bought bouquet directly into a vase, where the tight, upright chunk of flowers resembles a guy on a blind date. Instead, cut all the ends to increase water draw, and then place each bloom into the vase separately. The result will be fuller and more relaxed, like a good friend after a fine meal.
GIFT HINT: Giving your hostess flowers already arranged in a vase will save her needless flurry when she is finishing dinner and greeting guests. Better yet, bring wine or chocolate.
While you’re at it, consider cutting the stems quite short, and then arrange them in a low, wide-mouthed vase. Store bouquets come tall so that they can catch your attention in the check-out line, but compact arrangements last longer and won’t block the view on a dinner table.
DON’T SAY IT WITH FLOWERS
TABLE ARRANGEMENTS can be made out of anything: fruits and gourds; stones and seashells; lemons and light bulbs.
NOTE: The day’s mail and the morning paper don’t count as table arrangements.
MEAL PLAN. Flowers are often brought to sick rooms, where they are meant to cheer people up, yet their funereal associations can be a downer, and they require maintenance and disposal. If a household you know is dealing with illness, consider bringing a meal (home-cooked or carry-out) to the house instead.
OPEN-CASKET BUFFET The funeral bak’d meats did coldly furnish forth the wedding table.
