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To Victorians, every day is bloomsday

January 18 2003

The "divine benevolence" of flowers has endeared them to society for centuries, writes Chris Wallace-Crabbe.

There is a peculiarly close relationship between humans and their lovely flowers. Not only are blossoms everywhere to be found in poetry and lieder, but they lift our everyday life in a host of ways.

They are special. An ardent young man will bring his girlfriend a bunch of red roses. He would not consider bringing her a bunch of carrots or parsnips, nor even a small packet of fillet steak.

It is a peculiar, intense, and certainly aromatic relationship, and it goes back a long way. In a prehistoric grave in dry eastern Turkey, a man's bones have been found, laid down in a bed of flowers. Remains of ancient pollen have even suggested that the sturdy Neanderthals strewed flowers around the dead, on occasion.

Admittedly, I like everything nice I can hear about the Neanderthals. They seem to have been far better than our species, less viciously organised. But Homo Sapiens is in danger of doing a really bad job indeed at present. It's more comforting to turn back to the vegetable world, with its fluttering, scented petals.

Even the word, anthology, so important to us writers, originally meant a collection of flowers. And the Bible asks us to "consider the lilies of the field. They toil not, neither do they reap, and yet our heavenly Father rewards them". This is probably not an invitation to laziness, but an example of divine benevolence. Why it chose lilies proves to be another matter: some recent scholars have suggested asphodel as the likely equivalent.

Within the boundless English language, the names of flowers can be wonderfully exotic. From childhood I have rejoiced in seeing such names as eggs-and-bacon, cuckoo-pint, morning glory, ragwort, columbine, and bachelor's buttons. Then, what was the one in Shakespeare to which "liberal shepherds give a grosser name"? As a boy, I found that the exotic Englishness of such names oddly resembled those of Crystal Palace, Aston Villa, West Bromwich Albion and Charlton Athletic - all more exciting than the knights of the Round Table in their silly tin armour, by far.

Poetry hasn't done quite as well by blooms as you would think. Apart from that wretched Wordsworth poem we "did" at school, the only top candidates are Herrick's comparison of our brief lives to those of the daffodil, William Blake's yearning sunflower and Lawrence with his wonderfully savage "Bavarian Gentians". Maybe flowers are richer and more expressive than anything art can do with them.

Teasingly, the Victorians had a semi-private code, the so-called language of flowers, a series of meanings plucked out of folklore. Most of its vocabulary is forgotten in our late age, though you wouldn't give anyone dead-horse lilies, as my family used to call those big white things.

Now, in the height of summer, our flowers are fewer than the profusion of spring-flowering that we actually enjoy in winter, time of the greatest wattles and of old-worldish bulbs. These are the slow hours of hibiscus, democratic plumbago and our nation's glorious crown, the scarlet flowering gum. Also of densely flowering oleander bushes, under which you must not go to sleep. If you do, says the old story, you will never wake. You shouldn't even stir your billy tea (who has billy tea nowadays?) with an oleander twig.

On the street at night, you may well wander into a zone of remarkable flavour, something between vanilla and lilac. This is a plant that surely wasn't around in my childhood, the night-flowering jessamine. Hardly noticeable by day with its serviceable leaves and narrow yellowish-green trumpets, it turns on the charm at night like a good party-goer. It can just about turn your head.

In the big general, though, there is a puzzle about why flowers appeal so strongly to human aesthetics. On fruit trees, certainly, they signal the coming of something edible. A few species may flag honey. Yet there seems to be something about non-green colours, bright hues, where the attraction exceeds any functional meaning. Certainly visual artists and advertising bods know what power colours can exert. It's all about pleasure, I can't help feeling. No wonder Marcel Proust had two of his characters use that vulgarly baroque flower, the tropical orchid, as a synonym for sex: for the big one, Odette, tonight.

As almost any Melbourne garden will tell us, a colourful array of flowers is a definite plus, even if we can't for the hell of us say why. Leis, eyefuls, buttonholes, bouquets and living-room vases all call for blooms, and the virtuous florists flourish. And yes, a dozen deep red roses should do very well indeed.

Chris Wallace-Crabbe is a Melbourne poet, essayist and academic.



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