Seven Flowers

by Jennifer Potter

  In his Enquiry into Plants, Theophrastus discusses lily flowers in vol. 2, pp. 37–9 and 45 (from Book 6, Chapter 6), and lily perfume in ‘Concerning Odours’, vol. 2, p. 365. Dioscorides’ instructions for making lily ointment come from De Materia Medica, pp. 59–62. The Roman sources include The Natural History of Pliny, vol. 4, pp. 314–16 and 366–7 (from Book 21, Chapters 11 and 74); Jashemski and Meyer (eds), The Natural History of Pompeii, pp. 121–2; John Henderson, Hortus: The Roman Book of Gardening (London, Routledge, 2004); Ovid’s Fasti, trans. Sir James George Frazer (London, William Heinemann, 1931), p. 139; Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. A. D. Melville (Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 231; and Marcel de Cleene and Marie Claire Lejeune, Compendium of Symbolic and Ritual Plants in Europe (2 vols, Ghent, Man and Culture, 2002), vol. 2, pp. 321–3. Nicander’s description of the lily appears in Joris-Karl Huysmans, Against Nature, trans. Margaret Mauldon (Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 136.

  The lily in early Christian and medieval Europe draws on Goody, The Culture of Flowers; John Harvey, Mediaeval Gardens (London, B. T. Batsford, 1981); Jennifer Potter, The Rose: A True History (London, Atlantic Books, 2010); Marilyn Stokstad and Jerry Stannard, Gardens of the Middle Ages (Kansas, Spencer Museum of Art, 1983); Walahfrid Strabo, Hortulus, trans. Raef Payne (Pittsburg, Hunt Botanical Library, 1966); Marilyn Stokstad, Medieval Art, second edn (Boulder, Westview Press, 2004); and Luigi Gambero, Mary in the Middle Ages: The Blessed Virgin Mary in the Thought of Medieval Latin Theologians (San Francisco, Ignatius Press, 2005). For the lily in Byzantium, see A. R. Littlewood, ‘Gardens of Byzantium’, Journal of Garden History, vol. 12, no. 2 (1992), pp. 126–53; Margaret H. Thomson (ed. and trans.), The Symbolic Garden: Reflections Drawn from a Garden of Virtues, A XIIth century Greek manuscript (North York, Ontario, Captus University Publications, 1989), p. 38; and for the lily in scenes of the Annunciation, see Helene E. Roberts (ed.), Encyclopedia of Comparative Iconography: Themes Depicted in Works of Art (2 vols, Chicago, Fitzroy Dearborn, 1998); and Mancoff, Flora Symbolica, pp. 32–3. Lily crucifixes are discussed by E. J. M. Duggan, ‘Notes concerning the “Lily Crucifixion” in the Llanbelig Hours’, National Library of Wales Journal, vol. 27, no. 1 (Summer 1991), pp. 39–48; W. L. Hildburgh, ‘An alabaster table of the Annunciation with the crucifix: a study in English iconography’, Archaeologia, vol. 74 (1925), pp. 203–32; and W. L. Hildburgh, ‘Some further notes on the crucifix on the lily’, The Antiquaries Journal, vol. 12 (1932), pp. 24–6. Henry Hawkins’s lily meditation appears in Partheneia Sacra, pp. 28–37; and for biblical lilies see Ariel Bloch and Chana Bloch, The Song of Songs: A New Translation (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1995), especially pp. 148–9.

  Virtually all my information on the fleur-de-lis comes from the French medievalist, Michel Pastoureau. See especially his Heraldry: Its Origins and Meaning, trans. Francisca Garvie (London, Thames & Hudson, 1997), pp. 98–191, ‘Do historians fear the fleur-de-lis?’

  In addition to the works of John Gerard and John Parkinson, my sources on Elizabethan and Stuart lilies include B. D. Jackson, A Catalogue of Plants Cultivated in the Garden of John Gerard in the Years 1596–99 (London, 1876); Prudence Leith-Ross, The Florilegium of Alexander Marshal in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen at Windsor Castle (London, The Royal Collection, 2000); and Rev. Henry N. Ellacombe, The Plant-Lore & Garden-Craft of Shakespeare (London, W. Satchell & Co., second edn, 1884), pp. 140–6.

  For early North American lilies, I turned to John Josselyn, New-Englands Rarities Discovered (London, 1672), pp. 42 and 54; Timothy Coffey, The History and Folklore of North American Wildflowers (New York, Facts on File, 1993), pp. 305–6; Patrick M. Synge, Lilies: A Revision of Elwes’ ‘Monograph of the Genus Lilium’ and its Supplements (London, B. T. Batsford, 1980); Denis Dodart, Mémoires pour servir à l’Histoire des Plantes (Paris, 1676), p. 91; Mark Catesby, The Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands (2 vols, London, 1731–43); André Michaux, Flora Boreali-Americana (2 vols, Paris, 1803); and Curtis’s Botanical Magazine, vol. 108, third series (1882), tab. 6650.

  Sources for Chinese lilies in gardens and pharmacology include: Hui-lin Li, The Garden Flowers of China (New York, Ronald Press, 1959), pp. 115–20; Dan Bensky and Andrew Gamble, Chinese Herbal Medicine: Materia Medica, revised edn (Seattle, Eastland Press, 1993); Herbal Pharmacology in the People’s Republic of China: A Trip Report of the American Herbal Pharmacology Delegation (Washington, National Academy of Sciences, 1975), pp. 163–4; Jane Kilpatrick, Gifts from the Gardens of China (London, Frances Lincoln, 2007); Potter, The Rose, pp. 217–29; Curtis’s Botanical Magazine, vol. 132 (1906), tab. 8102, for Wilson’s Lilium regale; and E. H. Wilson, The Lilies of Eastern Asia: A Mono graph (London, Dulau & Co., 1925), p. 8. The Tiger lily appears in Gertrude Jekyll, Lilies for English Gardens: A Guide for Amateurs (Woodbridge, Suffolk, Antique Collectors’ Club, 1982, first published Country Life, 1901), p. 6; and Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-glass, And What Alice Found There (London, Macmillan, 1872), p. 28.

  For Japanese lilies (including the early history of Deshima Island), see K. Vos, Assignment Japan: Von Siebold, Pioneer and Collector (The Hague, SDU, 1989); Reginald J. Farrer, The Gardens of Asia: Impressions from Japan (London, Methuen, 1904), p. 2; Dandra Knapp, Potted Histories: An Artistic Voyage Through Plant Exploration (London, Scriptum, 2003), pp. 272–5; Engelbert Kaempfer, Amoenitatum exoticarum politico-physico-medicarum fasciculi V (Lemgoviae, 1712), pp. 870–2; Botanical Register, vol. 23 (1837), tab. 2000; Richard Gorer, The Growth of Gardens (London, Faber & Faber, 1978), pp. 158–6; Philipp Franz von Siebold and J. G. Zuccarini, Flora Japonica (Lugduni Batavorum, 1835), pp. 31–5, 86–7; Gardeners’ Chronicle, 5 July 1862, p. 623, and 12 July 1862, p. 644; and Du Cane, The Flowers and Gardens of Japan, pp. 95–100.

  My sources on the lily in late nineteenth-century art and poetry include: Georgiana Burne-Jones, Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones (2 vols, London, Macmillan and Co., 1904), vol. 1, p. 225; Edward Burne-Jones, The Flower Book (London, The Fine Art Society, 1905); Ono, Japonisme in Britain; Richard Dorment and Margaret F. MacDonald, James McNeill Whistler (London, Tate Gallery Publications, 1995); H. C. Marillier, Dante Gabriel Rossetti: An Illustrated Memorial of His Art and Life (London, George Bell and Sons, 1899); Dresser, Japan, pp. 286–316; ‘Love and sleep’, in The Poems of Algernon Charles Swinburne (6 vols, London, Chatto & Windus, 1904), vol. 1, p. 272; Stéphane Mallarmé, Les Noces d’Hérodiade (Paris, Gallimard, 1959), p. 64 (author’s translation); Poems by Oscar Wilde, Together with his Lecture on the English Renaissance (Paris, 1903), pp. 215–16; Peter Raby, Oscar Wilde (Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 22; Sarah Bernhardt, My Double Life: Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt (London, William Heinemann, 1907), pp. 297–8; Marina Henderson, ‘Women and flowers’, in Ann Bridges (ed.), Alphonse Mucha: The Graphic Works (London, Academy Editions, 1980), pp. 9–14; and David M. H. Kern (ed.), The Art Nouveau Style Book of Alphonse Mucha (New York, Dover, 1980).

  The lily in the garden returns to Jekyll, Lillies, pp. 7, 96 and 103; Synge, Lilies, pp. 25–6; Helen Morgenthau Fox, Garden Cinderellas: How to Grow Lilies in the Garden (New York, Macmillan, 1928); and Henry John Elwes, A Monograph of the Genus Lilium (London, 1880) and later supplements.

  Sunflower

  Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Sunflower Sutra’ appears in his Collected Poems 1947–1980 (London, Penguin, 1987), pp. 138–9; Edward Burne-Jones’s comment on sunflowers in Burne-Jones, Memorials, vol. 1, p. 225; and the ‘creepy’ sunflowers in the poem ‘Fragment’ by June English, Sunflower Equations (London, Hearing Eye, 2008), p. 66.

  My sources on the origin and domestication of the sunflower include: Charles B. Heiser Jr, The Sunflower (Norman, Okla., University of Oklahoma Press, 1976); David L. Lentz et al., ‘Sunflower (Helianthus annuus L.) as a pre-Columbian domesticate in Mexico’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS), vol. 105, no. 17 (29 April 2008), pp. 6232–7; Charles B. Heiser Jr, ‘Taxonomy of Helian
thus and origin of domesticated sunflower’, in Jack F. Carter (ed.), Sunflower Science and Technology (Madison, Wis., American Society of Agronomy, no. 19, 1978), pp. 31–53; David L. Lentz et al., ‘Prehistoric sunflower (Helianthus annuus L.) domestication in Mexico’, Economic Botany, vol. 55, no. 3 (July–Sept 2001), pp. 370–6; Jonathan W. Silvertown, An Orchard Invisible: A Natural History of Seeds (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2009), pp. 135–54; William W. Dunmire, Gardens of New Spain: How Mediterranean Plants and Foods Changed America (Austin, University of Texas Press, 2004), pp. 32–4; Charles B. Heiser, ‘The sunflower (Helianthus annuus) in Mexico: further evidence for a North American domestication’, Genetic Resources and Crop Evolution, no. 55, 2008, pp. 9–13; and David L. Lentz et al., ‘Reply to Reiseberg and Burke, Heiser, Brown, and Smith: molecular, linguistic, and archaeological evidence for domesticated sunflower in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, PNAS, vol. 105, no. 30, (29 July 2008), consulted online 3 April 2013.

  On the search for Mayan, Inca and Aztec sunflowers, see V. S. Naipaul, The Loss of El Dorado (Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1973), pp. 38 and 18; Elizabeth H. Boone, ‘Incarnations of the Aztec supernatural; the image of Huitzilopochtli in Mexico and Europe’, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, vol. 79, part 2 (1989), pp. 1–107; Alan R. Sandstrom, ‘Sacred mountains and miniature worlds: altar design among the Nahua of northern V eracruz, Mexico’, in Douglas Sharon (ed.), Mesas & Cosmologies in Mesoamerica (San Diego Museum Papers 42, 2003), pp. 51–70; Zelia Nuttall, ‘Ancient Mexican superstitions’, reprinted from the Journal of American Folk-lore, vol. 10, no. 39 (Boston, Mass., 1897), p. 271; Sabine MacCormack, Religion in the Andes: Vision and Imagination in Early Colonial Peru (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1991); Zelia Nuttall, ‘The gardens of ancient Mexico’, in Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution, 1923 (Washington, 1925), pp. 453–64; Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, Florentine Codex, General History of the Things of New Spain, Book 9 – The Merchants (Santa Fe, The School of American Research and the University of Utah, 1959), no. 14, part X, pp. 33–5; Codex Ixtlilxochitl, Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris (Ms. Mex. 65–71) (Graz, Akademische Druck, 1976), 108r., and p. 31; and Joseph Acosta, The Naturall and Morall Historie of the East and West Indies, trans. E. G. (London, 1604), Book 4, Chapter 27, pp. 282–4.

  My main sources on the sunflower’s introduction to Europe are: Nicolas Monardes, Joyfull Newes out of the Newe Founde Worlde . . . Englished by John Frampton (2 vols, London, Constable, 1925, from an original of 1577), vol. 2, p. 23; John Peacock, The Look of Van Dyck: The Self-Portrait with a Sunflower and the Vision of the Painter (Aldershot, Ashgate, 2006); Rembert Dodoens, Florum et Coronariarum Odoratarumque Nonnullarum Herbarum Historia (Antwerp, 1568); Gerard, The Herball (1597), pp. 612–13; Simon Varey et al. (eds), Searching for the Secrets of Nature: The Life and Works of Dr Francisco Hernández (Stanford, Calif., Stanford University Press, 2000), pp. 106–7; Simon Varey (ed.), The Mexican Treasury: The Writings of Dr Franciso Hernández (Stanford, Calif., Stanford University Press, c.2000); Parkinson, Paradisi in Sole, pp. 295–7. For more on Fibonacci spirals in the sunflower, see Ryuji Takaki et al., ‘Simulations of sunflower spirals and Fibonacci numbers’, Forma, vol. 18 (2003), pp. 295–305; and John A. Adam, Mathematics in Nature: Moulding Patterns in the Natural World (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2003), pp. 216–21.

  Here are my main sources for North American sunflowers: Thomas Hariot, A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia, a facsimile edition of the 1588 Quarto (Ann Arbor, The Clements Library Associates, 1951); Kim Sloan, A New World: England’s First View of America (London, British Museum Press, 2007), pp. 110–11; Theodore de Bry, A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (Frankfurt, 1590), plate XX, ‘The Towne of Secota’; Samuel de Champlain, Voyages to New France, trans. Michael Macklem (Ottawa, Oberon Press, n.d.), pp. 40–41; and Daniel E. Moerman, Native American Medicinal Plants: An Ethnobotanical Dictionary (Portland, Timber Press, 2009), pp. 228–9.

  For the strange beauty of the sunflower to European eyes, see Blunt and Stearn, The Art of Botanical Illustration, pp. 102–6; Basilius Besler, Hortus Eystettensis (2 vols, Nürnberg, 1613), vol. 2, Quintus Ordo., fols 1 and 2; Crispin de Passe, Hortus Floridus (1614–17); Emanuel Sweert, Florilegium (Frankfurt, 1612); E. F. Bleiler (ed.), Early Floral Engravings (New York, Dover Publications, 1976); Leith-Ross, The Florilegium of Alexander Marshal, p. 137, ‘Large Sun-flower – Liver-colord Dog in miniature’; and Gloria Cottesloe and Doris Hunt, The Duchess of Beaufort’s Flowers (Exeter, Webb & Bower, 1983), pp. 54–7, plate 29.

  To track the sunflower’s emblematic power, I turned to Erika von Erhardt-Siebold, ‘The heliotrope tradition’, Osiris, vol. 3 (1937), pp. 22–46; Ovid, Metamorphoses, p. 82; Peacock, The Look of Van Dyck, p. 146; E. de Jongh, ‘Bol vincit amorem’, Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art, vol. 12, no. 2/3 (1981–2), pp. 147–61; Hawkins, Partheneia Sacra, pp. 48–58; Sir Kenelm Digby, A Late Discourse . . . Touching the Cure of Wounds by the Powder of Sympathy (London, 1658); Daniel de la Feuille, Devises et Emblemes (Amsterdam, 1691); and Emblems for the Entertainment and Improvement of Youth (London, 1750). For William Blake’s sunflower, see Mary Lynn Johnson, ‘Emblem and symbol in Blake’, The Huntington Library Quarterly, vol. 37 (February 1974), pp. 151–70; William Blake, Poems and Prophecies (London, Everyman’s Library, 1991), p. 29; Albert S. Roe, Blake’s Illustrations to the Divine Comedy (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1953), pp. 193–6, and plate 99; and Potter, The Rose, pp. 89–91.

  My sources for the sunflower in British gardens through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries include Philip Miller, The Gardeners Dictionary; Thomas Fairchild, The City Gardener (London, 1722); Robert Furber, Twelve Months of Flowers (London, 1730); Jane Loudon, Gardening for Ladies; and Companion to the Flower Garden, first American edn, ed. A. J. Downing (New York, 1848); and William Robinson, The English Flower Garden, eighth edition (London, John Murray, 1900), pp. 583–5.

  For the sunflower in the ‘language of flowers’, see Beverly Seaton, The Language of Flowers (Charlottesville, University Press of Virginia, 1995); Potter, The Rose, pp. 422–6; B. Delachénaye, Abécédaire de Flore ou Langage des Fleurs (Paris, 1811), pp. 154 and 95; Charlotte de Latour, Le Langage des Fleurs, Nouvelle édition augmentée (Brussels, 1854); and Taxile Delord, Les Fleurs Animées (Paris, 1847).

  For the sunflower in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century art and decoration, see Walter Hamilton, The Aesthetic Movement in England (London, Reeves & Turner, 1882); Wilde, Poems, p. 215; William Morris, ‘The story of the unknown church’, Oxford and Cambridge Magazine (January 1856), pp. 28–33; Debra N. Mancoff, Sunflowers (Chicago, The Art Institute of Chicago, 2001); Burne-Jones, Memorials, vol. 1, p. 225; Elizabeth Aslin, The Aesthetic Movement: Prelude to Art Nouveau (London, Elek, 1969); Lillie Langtry (Lady De Bathe), The Days that I Knew (London, Futura, 1978), pp. 74–5; Punch, vol. 80 (25 June 1881), p. 298; and The British Architect (10 November 1882), p. 534.

  My discussion of van Gogh’s sunflowers draws on these main sources: Judith Bumpus, Van Gogh’s Flowers (Oxford, Phaidon, 1989); the website vangoghletters.org/vg, letters 657, 665, 666, 668, 721, 739, 856, 881; The Real Van Gogh: The Artist and His Letters (London, Royal Academy of Arts, 2010); and Douglas W. Druick and Peter Kort Zegers, Van Gogh and Gauguin: The Studio of the South (New York, Thames and Hudson, 2001).

  For the twentieth-century history of the sunflower, see Putt, ‘History and present world status’, in Carter (ed.), Sunflower Science; Norma Paniego et al., ‘Sunflower’, in C. Kole (ed.), Genome Mapping and Molecular Breeding in Plants, vol. 2, Oilseeds (Berlin, Springer-Verlag, 2007), pp. 153–77; Silvertown, An Orchard Invisible, pp. 135–54; Andrew Evans, Ukraine (Chalfont St Peter, Bradt Travel Guide, second edn, 2007), pp. 37–8; http://www.hort.purdue.edu/newcrop/afcm/sunflower.html: D. H. Putnam et al., ‘Sun flower’, in Alternative Field Crops Manual (University of Wisconsin-Madison,
WI 53706, November 1990), accessed 6 April 2011; http://www.netstate.com/states/symb/flowers/ks_wild_native_sunflower.htm; Kansas Statutes, Chapter 73, Article 18, Sections 73–1801; Craig Miner, The History of the Sun-flower State, 1854–2000 (Lawrence, Kan., University Press of Kansas, 2002), pp. 13–15; and http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/exhibition/unilever-series-ai-weiwei-sunflower-seeds.

  Opium Poppy

  Othello’s words are from The Arden Shakespeare’s Othello, third edn, ed. E. A. J. Honigmann (Walton-on-Thames, Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1997), Act 3 Scene 3, lines 334–6, p. 230. Verdicts on the poppy are taken from John Ruskin, Proserpina: Studies of Wayside Flowers (2 vols, Orpington, George Allen, 1879–82), vol. 1, p. 86; Gerard, The Herball (1597), pp. 295–8; Parkinson, Theatrum Botanicum, pp. 365–9; and Friedrich A. Flückiger and Daniel Hanbury, Pharmacographia: A History of the Principal Drugs of Vegetable Origin Met with in Great Britain and British India (London, Macmillan, 1879), pp. 40–43.

  My main sources for the domestication of the opium poppy are Sir Ghillean Prance and Mark Nesbitt (eds), The Cultural History of Plants (New York, Routledge, 2005), pp. 199–200; and Daniel Zohary and Maria Hopf, Domestication of Plants in the Old World, second edn (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1993), pp. 128–31. Further detail can be found in Mark David Merlin, On the Trail of the Ancient Opium Poppy (Cranbury, NJ, Associated University Presses, 1984). For the opium poppy among the Sumerians, Assyrians and Egyptians, see R. Campbell Thompson, A Dictionary of Assyrian Botany (London, The British Academy, 1949); R. Campbell Thompson, The Assyrian Herbal: A Monograph on the Assyrian Vegetable Drugs (London, Luzac, 1924); Manniche, An Egyptian Herbal; Abraham D. Krikorian, ‘Were the opium poppy and opium known in the ancient Near East?’, Journal of the History of Biology, vol. 8, no. 1 (Spring 1975), pp. 95–114; Hepper, Pharaoh’s Flowers, pp. 10 and 16; Professor Dr P. G. Kritikos and S. P. Papadaki, ‘The history of the poppy and of opium and their expansion in antiquity in the eastern Mediterranean area’, Bulletin on Narcotics, vol. 19, no. 3 (July–September 1967), pp. 17–38.