Flower Power
“ With freedom, books, flowers, and the moon, who could not be happy?” Oscar Wilde
Crossing Sloane Square in the seventies on a drizzly summer evening, I was hailed by a handsome stranger, who thrust a vast and extravagant bouquet into my arms.
“Please will you enjoy these? I’ve waited over two hours for my girlfriend and I guess it’s finally over. Because I did a very stupid thing. I wanted to apologise and to propose. But I know I’ve lost her, so I decided to give these to the next kind and beautiful woman to pass by. I knew you were kind when you smiled at those pigeons.”
Flustered, I expressed my sympathy, and failed to persuade him to wait a little longer. I protested too: “How will I explain these to my husband when I get home?”
“Just tell him he’s a very lucky man - goodbye.”
I recall the huge tears in his eyes before he fled, more than I do the dark suspicion in my man’s eyes when I got home and my tale was scornfully dismissed.
Every faith and culture has embraced and celebrated flowers for ritual or for symbolism, representing as they do, purity, beauty, fertility, fragility, transience and not a little Earth Magic. Flora was the Roman goddess of flowers, of spring and of youth. The Victorians created a whole language of floriography to express a plethora of repressed emotions. Then along came the sixties and the Vietnam war, and the beat poet Alan Ginsberg introduced the protestation concept of Flower Power. The abiding image of jazz-eyed hippies poking flowers into gun barrels spawned the lasting legacy of the decade of Peace and Love.
Inevitably, such innocent beauties were to acquire a commercial value. Initially local and seasonal, flowers could only travel short distances. Then they roamed further afield as seeds and bulbs with soldiers and pilgrims. In the 1630’s, Europe witnessed the first recorded speculative economic bubble, with ‘Tulipmania’, when a mystery virus transformed the standard flower to a ragged multicoloured freak. A single bulb could change hands for the value of an average house, until the secret finally escaped and the commercial bubble popped spectacularly.
Latterly air travel has extended the survival of cut flowers. Blossoms reared intensively in Ethiopia, Kenya, Colombia, Ecuador, and Holland now flood freshly into a global market worth hundreds of billions of dollars.
It seems we can do little to stop the wheels of greed and exploitation, but in a world full of sorrow and despair, we can use flowers to speak for us: to say please & thank you, good luck, congratulations, welcome, I’ve been such a shit, I like you, forgive me, get well soon, I love you, I don’t know what to say, farewell, and forget-me-not. Or sometimes, just because.
In recent weeks, we’ve adopted the sunflower to identify with the pride and the suffering of a nation at bay. Sunflowers grew rapidly popular around Europe, Russia and Ukraine in the 1700s as the Russian Orthodox Church banned all foods that contained oil during Lent. Except sunflowers! Ukraine became the world’s second-largest producer of sunflower oil. According to Ukrainian culture, it is believed that sunflowers could be used to repel against evil spirits, bad fortune, and illness. Embedded in national folklore, sunflowers are deeply sown into traditional Ukrainian art, poetry, and songs.
Its spiritual symbolism derives from its constantly turning to follow the rays of the sun. It has no perfume, yet its glorious colour attracts multitudes of eager pollinators. A tough and mighty plant that thrives in inhospitable soils, each flower can produce up to 2,000 seeds. The centre of each bloom is actually composed of thousands of tiny flowers, arranged in the mind-boggling Fibonacci mathematical sequence: the Golden Ratio (check it out).
I have received many beautiful flowers bearing a multitude of messages - some of them questionable - but my Sloane Square surrogate love bouquet left a lasting impression. How also could I ever forget the first ragged fistful of buttercups offered up by my son’s pudgy little hand.
Then last summer, another bountiful and unexpected gift joined the list. During the winter, somebody had stolen my greenhouse sunflower seed stash. I had to forgive the small and resourceful guilty mouse who had sought winter refuge and sustenance. In early spring, I noticed large numbers of unplanned anonymous seedlings popping up in all my bulb and cactus pots. Out of curiosity I transplanted them to see what they were. Suffice it to say I had the earliest and most heartily abundant display of sunflowers ever, courtesy of a very grateful little refugee mouse.
