Seven Flowers
ALSO BY JENNIFER POTTER
Non-fiction
The Rose: A True History
Strange Blooms: The Curious Lives and Adventures of John Tradescants
Lost Gardens
Secret Gardens
Fiction
The Angel Cantata
After Breathless
The Long Lost Journey
The Taking of Agnès
Published in Great Britain in 2013 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.
Copyright © Jennifer Potter, 2013
The moral right of Jennifer Potter to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
The author and publisher wish to thank the following for permission to reproduce copyright material: The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler © 1939. Reprinted by kind permission of the Estate of Raymond Chandler; Approximately 6 lines (page 146) from Collected Poems 1947–1997 by Allen Ginsberg (Penguin Books, 2009). Copyright © Allen Ginsberg, 1956, 1961. Reproduced by permission of Penguin Books Ltd; ‘The Bitter Smell of Tulips’ by Zbigniew Herbert. From Still Life with a Bridle, Copyright © 1993, used by permission of The Wylie Agency (UK) Limited; Approximately 60 words from Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys (First published by Andre Deutsch 1966, Penguin Books 1968, Penguin Classics 2000). Copyright © Jean Rhys, 1966. Reproduced by permission of Penguin Books Ltd; Rainer Maria Rilke, excerpt from ‘The Roses: II’ from The Complete French Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by A. Poulin. Translation copyright © 1979, 1982, 1984, 1986 by A. Poulin Jr. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc. on behalf of Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota, www.graywolfpress.org; ‘Rosa Sancta’ taken from Tender Taxes © Jo Shapcott, 2001, and reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd.
Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright holders.
The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-85789-164-8
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-78239-037-4
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-85789-165-5
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For Ros
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.
WILLIAM BLAKE, ‘Auguries of Innocence’
Contents
Foreword
1 Lotus
2 Lily
3 Sunflower
4 Opium Poppy
5 Rose
6 Tulip
7 Orchid
Afterword
Acknowledgements
Main Sources and Select Bibliography
List of Illustrations
Note on the Author
Index
Foreword
ALL MY LIFE, flowers have been creeping up on me.
My early childhood was oddly flower-free, aside from memories of threading daisy chains in the Silverdale garden of my maternal grandfather, and the lemony sweetness of Philadelphus flowers pinned to the fairy costume I wore to a local show. The flowers of Malaya, where we moved when I was eight, naturally came as a shock: frangipani, flaming cannas, hibiscus, the night-blooming Keng-hwa cactus, Spider orchids and Flame of the forest trees. These were flowers bold as brass but I took them entirely for granted. They were simply there, part of the given, like the bad-feet smell of the durian fruit and the flickering lights of the Hindu Diwali festival; I cannot claim foreknowledge of the way flowers would come to govern my life.
Returning to the English Lake District, I began to pay flowers more attention. My mother had turned into an assiduous gardener, determined to reclaim a derelict garden high above the town of Ambleside, on a hillside that had also sheltered the émigré artist Kurt Schwitters at the end of the war. Springtime is the time I remember best, when the garden filled with the flowers that still remind me of my Cumbrian home: tiny wild daffodils, Himalayan rhododendrons and, in late summer, banks of the saffron-coloured South African import montbretia (Crocosmia), which have escaped into the wild.
Everything changed when I went to university in the late sixties. Flowers became my emblem and the power of flowers my mantra. Like many of my contemporaries, I was drawn to eastern religions, and after graduating travelled westwards around the world, paying an obligatory visit to Haight Ashbury in San Francisco, which still functioned as the faintly beating heart of the Flower Power generation. While I never wore flowers in my hair, I slept on somebody’s floor, ate a macrobiotic diet of brown rice and adzuki beans, and imagined – like everyone else – that I was changing the world. It is easy with hindsight to deride such facile optimism, but the flowers we embraced represented a sincerely held belief that peace would prevail if we could only disinherit the past, counter guns with guerrilla theatre and let a thousand flowers bloom.
Ten years after leaving university, I acquired a garden of my own. Seeking refuge above all, I created a lushly green urban jungle where I could pretend to be somewhere else and where the sole flowers I allowed were white lilies and tobacco plants, because of their heavenly fragrance after dark. The space was small, no more than ten metres by ten, and its illusion of other worlds persisted until a neighbour chopped through the stems of my rampant Russian vine, exposing the fragility of my gimcrack Eden.
After jungles, my interest turned to landscapes, imaginatively recreated in fiction and later studied at London’s Architectural Association, then to books about gardens, secret and lost. These were followed by a biography of Britain’s first celebrity gardeners and plantsmen, the John Tradescants, and most recently a cultural history of the rose, which re minded me once again of the power of flowers to express our inner selves.
For five long years I tracked the rose’s evolution as a flower and as an idea, struck by how central it has been to so many cultures around the world. My conclusions were disarmingly simple: that who you are dictates how you see the rose; and that each age and each society has reinvented the rose in its own image. Through the rose we tell our stories, both personal and collective, and I wondered: if the rose can do this, what about other flowers? Can they also tell us something about who we are and where we have come from? Can they codify our aspirations, help to diffuse our fears? Can they speak to us, in other words, about things other than themselves?
Out of such questions came this book. While it cannot emulate The Rose’s breadth of enquiry undertaken for a single flower, it uses the same approach to interrogate seven flowers that have exerted power or influence of one kind or another, whether religious, spiritual, political, social, economic, aesthetic or pharmacological. I have chosen my flowers carefully; they are the lotus, lily, sunflower, opium poppy, rose, tulip and the orchid. Each has shaped our lives in some way, for better or worse, and each has some connection with my life, from the stylized lotuses of a Tibetan monastery in the Scottis
h Borders to the Spider orchids of a tropical childhood. I want to know where my flowers originated, when and how they gained their powers, what use men made of them in gardens, and how – or more truly why – their powers transmuted into art.
Although the book was conceived and written in Europe, I have looked further afield wherever possible, tracking the ‘Aztec’ and ‘Inca’ sunflowers through Central and South America, for instance, and tulip fever into the flower’s Turkish heartlands where its consequences were particularly brutal. Some flowers are inevitably missing; had space permitted, I would like to have included western carnations, eastern peonies and chrysanthemums, and plants endemic to the southern hemi sphere, such as banksias, proteas and the waratah.
As in The Rose, I wanted to look beyond the usual stories to untangle the flowers’ botanical and cultural evolution. Writing for me is a form of detection; I like to be taken by surprise. One of my least favourite flowers – the orchid – beguiled me the most, but all seven took me to unexpected places. Here are the flowers of healing, delirium and death; of purity and passion; of greed, envy and virtue; of hope and consolation; of the beauty that drives men wild. All seven demonstrate the power of flowers to speak metaphorically, if we would only care to listen. It isn’t enough to let the flowers bloom; we must also decode what they have to say.
Jennifer Potter, London, 2013
1. ‘The Summer Garden’, drawn and engraved by Crispin de Passe the Younger, Hortus Floridus (1614).
1
Lotus
Om mani padme hum
Tibetan Buddhist mantra, traditionally translated as ‘the jewel in the heart of the lotus’
2. Nelumbium speciosum, Curtis’s Botanical Magazine, vol. 23–24, 1806 (Image provided by Peter H. Raven Library, Missouri Botanical Garden, http://www.missouribotanicalgarden.org/)
OF ALL THE flowers that have inflamed human societies, the lotus has to come first. Natives of the tropics and subtropics, true lotuses (Nelumbo nucifera) do not flower outdoors in Britain and my first sight of them was a revelation. I had driven from Pennsylvania into New York State to look at gardens along the Hudson Valley and stopped at the Chinese-inspired Innisfree Garden at Millbrook, north of New York City. I remember climbing the low hill from the entrance and catching sight of these remarkable flowers stretching far into the lake like airborne water lilies, their fat pink buds and star-shaped flowers poking stiffly out of upturned skirts of leaves held high above the water.
Until then, the lotus had been for me a flower of Buddhist contemplation, familiar from youthful visits to a Tibetan monastery near Lockerbie in the Scottish Borders, but so abstracted that I scarcely thought of it as a flower at all. Here were lotuses in the landscape, thousands of them, and I wanted to know more about them. Where had they come from, these perfectly formed flowers that develop strange, triffid-like seed pods, and what were they doing in this ornamental landscape created in the 1930s by the American painter Walter Beck and his wife Marion, daughter of a nineteenth-century iron baron?
My search took me first to ancient Egypt, since the pink lotuses I had seen flowering in the lake at Innisfree are not the only flowers to bear the name ‘lotus’. Egyptologists call the water lilies of ancient Egypt ‘lotuses’, although they belong to a very different plant family: the tropical blue water lily (Nymphaea caerulea) and the white water lily (Nymphaea lotus), native to Central and North Africa. Both sorts of lotus made their mark at roughly the same time, nearly five thousand years ago, and both demonstrate the fundamental power of flowers in helping early civilizations to grasp and express the world around them.
IMAGINE THE STILL waters of the Nile at dawn. The surface is covered with the shiny egg-shaped leaves of the blue lotus (Nymphaea caerulea) from which rise conical buds, held some twenty to thirty centimetres above the water. As the sun climbs into the sky, the buds open into sharp-pointed stars, their petals – up to twenty in number – a startling violet blue at the tips fading to white near the cluster of bright yellow stamens at the base. The opening flowers release a delicate fragrance that lingers until the flowers close at noon, when they sink back into the water. They will open and close on two more days, flowering for a little longer than they did on their first day. The fruit, too, will be held above the water until it ripens and disappears into the Nile. The flowers of the night-blooming white lotus (Nymphaea lotus), by contrast, open around dusk and close mid- to late morning on four successive days. Also delicately scented, the white has rougher-edged leaves and rounder petals – details that the decorators of ancient tombs captured more than three and a half thousand years ago.1
Like all the flowers of this book, Egyptian lotuses are of a rare beauty – the blue lotus in particular – but beauty on its own does not account for their enduring fascination. Linked by their Nile habitat to ancient Egypt’s extraordinary fertility, attributable to the river’s annual flooding, they were adopted as the insignia of Upper Egypt in contrast to the papyrus reed of Lower Egypt’s Nile delta, whose simplified shape it resembled. Lotus and papyrus came together around 3000 BCE, when the two kingdoms were united, a political union celebrated in the intertwined lotus and papyrus plants carved into King Khafre’s massive black funerary throne in his valley temple near the Great Sphinx. Even greater than its political power was the lotus’s close association with two of ancient Egypt’s most powerful deities, the sun god Ra and Osiris, lord of the afterlife, which gave the flower a leading role in the very mystery of creation.
In the early cosmogonies of ancient Egypt, it was naturally the day-blooming blue lotus that appeared at the beginning of creation, arising from the dark, watery chaos (Nu or Nun) on the morning of the first day to produce the sun god, Ra or Atum. As Ra travelled across the sky by day, he brought life to the people on earth, experiencing a symbolic death at sunset and journeying back through the netherworld to re-emerge from the horizon at dawn – just like the blue lotus.
The beginnings of Egypt’s dynastic period brought another of the gods into prominence: Horus the falcon, god of the sky and the infant sun in early cosmogonies, who is shown emerging from an opening lotus flower with the sun disc balanced on his head. Later accounts made Horus the son of Isis and her husband-brother Osiris, firstborn son of Geb (earth) and Nut (the overarching sky). Osiris ruled on earth but was treacherously killed by his brother Set, who cast his dismembered body into the Nile. Briefly brought back to life through Isis’s know ledge of magic spells, he was able to beget Horus before returning to rule over the netherworld. Just so did the blue water lily flare briefly in the calm waters of the Nile before setting seed and returning to the deep, Osiris incarnate.
Blue lotuses were naturally included in propitiatory offerings to Osiris as lord of the afterlife, and they later blossomed in the collections of spells known as Egyptian Books of the Dead, commissioned by the wealthy elite to empower, protect and guide them on the perilous journey to the afterlife. Surviving Books of the Dead contain tantalizing glimpses of the many lotuses you might encounter on your journey through the afterlife – in offerings laid before Osiris and other deities; as lotus stands displaying the four sons of Horus; as hair adornments for women and sometimes for men. You might even choose to turn yourself into a lotus – or a falcon, heron, swallow, snake, crocodile, god or mythical being – through one of the transformative spells empowering you to move freely about the universe and return, like Osiris, from the underworld. The lotus’s associations with rebirth and regeneration made it especially apt.
3. A funerary banquet of offerings topped with Nile lotus flowers, from an Egyptian Book of the Dead, c.1070-945 BCE.
Among those choosing to transform themselves into a lotus was Nu, an official of the eighteenth dynasty (c.1400 BCE), who opted also for a mythical benu-bird and a snake; and the scribe Ani, whose lotus spell shows a human head emerging from an open blue lotus flower flanked by buds. ‘I am this pure lotus which went forth from the sunshine, which is at the nose of Re,’ reads the accompanying text
. ‘I have descended that I may seek it for Horus, for I am the pure one who issued from the fen.’
The Egyptian elite also took lotus flowers with them into their burial chambers, which they crammed with objects intended to sweeten their journey into the afterlife. Among the most celebrated was Tutankhamun’s burial chamber in the Valley of the Kings, west of Thebes, discovered by the English Egyptologist Howard Carter and his team in November 1922 and renowned ever since as the best preserved and most intact of all the pharaonic tombs. Piled around gilt couches carved into monstrous animals and life-sized figures of the king was a jumble of exquisitely painted inlaid caskets, alabaster vases, strange black shrines, bouquets of leaves, beds, staves, chairs, overturned chariots. There, in the doorway to the burial chamber, stood a beautiful cup of pure semi-translucent alabaster, carved with the rounded petals of the night-blooming white lotus, its lotus-flower handles supporting the kneeling figures that represent eternal life.
An avid lotus lover, Tutankhamun had blue lotuses and chamomile flowers embroidered on his sandals. He took with him into the grave an exquisitely carved alabaster lamp combining the rounded petals of the white lotus with the smooth leaves of the blue, and two extra ordinary silver trumpets, fashioned into long-stemmed lotus flowers like Victorian post-horns. They were still in working order when played by a military bandsman in Cairo’s Egyptian Museum more than three and a half thousand years later, although reputedly mellower in tone.
More lotus petals – real ones, this time, dried to a crisp – adorned the boy king’s funeral wreath laid on his golden mummiform casket, along with olive leaves and cornflowers, and the great floral collar draped around Tutankhamun’s face on the innermost casket. Tied together with papyrus and date palm strips, its nine rows of ornaments included blue-green pottery beads, berries of Indian ginseng, willow and pomegranate leaves, blue water-lily petals, corn flowers, bristly ox-tongue and persea fruits, a gorgeous combination of colours that must have glowed brightly in the flickering torches held by the priests.
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