Seven Flowers

by Jennifer Potter

  Potter, The Rose, examines the gradual emergence of the Christian rose in Chapter 5, ‘The Virgin’s Bower’, pp. 73–91. St Cecilia’s story is taken from Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend: Selections, trans. Christopher Stace (London, Penguin Books, 1998); and Dorothy’s story from David Farmer, The Oxford Dictionary of Saints, fifth edn (Oxford University Press, 2003). Other sources include Goody, The Culture of Flowers; Beverly Seaton, ‘Towards a Historical Semiotics of Literary Flower Personification’ in Poetics Today, vol. 10, no. 4 (Winter 1989), pp. 679–701; Eithne Wilkins, The Rose-Garden Game, The Symbolic Background to the European Prayer-beads (London, Victor Gollancz, 1969); Harvey, Mediaeval Gardens; Eliza Allen Starr, Patron Saints (1871, republished 2003 by Kessinger Publishing, Whitefish, Montana), p. 100; Alcuin, ‘Farewell to his cell’, in Frederick Brittain, The Penguin Book of Latin Verse (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1962), pp. 137–8; Strabo, Hortulus, pp. 61–3; and Barbara Seward, The Symbolic Rose (New York, Columbia University Press, 1960), pp. 43 and 51.

  For sources on the rose in Islam, see Annemarie Schimmel, And Muhammad is His Messenger: The Veneration of the Prophet in Islamic Piety (Lahore, Vanguard, 1987), pp. 159–75; and for roses in Persian poetry, Annemarie Schimmel, A Two-Colored Brocade: The Imagery of Persian Poetry (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1992), pp. 169–76.

  Illuminating my discussion of the Tudor rose is S. B. Chrimes, Lancastrians, Yorkists and Henry VII, second edn (London, Macmillan, 1966), pp. xi– xiv. See also Mortimer Levine, Tudor Dynastic Problems 1460–1571 (London, George Allen & Unwin, 1973); and W. J. Petchey, Armorial Bearings of the Sovereigns of England (London, Bedford Square Press, 1977), pp. 18–19. The Gerard quotations are taken from Thomas Johnson’s revised edition of his Herball; and see Potter, The Rose, pp. 139–43, for more on Robert Devereux and Queen Elizabeth I’s Eglantine. Sources for other political roses include US President Ronald Reagan’s Proclamation 5574, filed with the Office of Federal Register 21 November 1986 (see Pub.L.99-449, Oct 7, 1986, 100 Stat.1128); http://www.lours.org, ‘le poing et la rose’; and for New Labour’s red rose, see Bob Franklin, Packaging Politics, Political Communications in Britain’s Media Democracy (London, Edward Arnold, 1994), pp. 132–3.

  My sources on the dark rose include Homer, Iliad, trans. A. T. Murray and revised by William F. Wyatt (2 vols, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1999), vol. 2, p. 507; Percy E. Newberry, ‘On the vegetable remains discovered in the Cemetery of Hawara’, in W. M. Flinders Petrie, Hawara, Biahmu, and Arsinoe (London, Field & Tuer, 1889), pp. 46–53; Frederick Stuart Church’s painting of ‘Silence’, in David Bernard Dearinger (ed.), Paintings and Sculpture in the Collection of the National Academy of Design, vol. 1, 1826–1925 (Manchester, Vermont, Hudson Hills Press, 2004), pp. 104–5; C. G. Jung, Mysterium Coniuncionis, vol. 14 of The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, trans. R. F. C Hull, second edn (London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970), pp. 305–7; and C. G. Jung, The Practice of Psychotherapy, in The Collected Works, vol. 16, pp. 244–5; William Blake, ‘The sick rose’ from Songs of Experience, in Blake, Poems and Prophecies, p. 27; Huysmans, Against Nature, p. 72; Georges Bataille, ‘The Language of Flowers’, in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939, ed. Allan Stoekl, trans. Stoekl et al., in Theory and History of Literature, vol. 14 (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1985), pp. 10–14; Gertrude Stein, ‘Sacred Emily’, in Geography and Plays (Boston, Mass., Four Seas Co, 1922), p. 187; and Umberto Eco, Reflections on the Name of the Rose, trans. William Weaver (London, Secker & Warburg, 1985), pp. 1–3.

  For the Rosicrucian rose, see Potter, The Rose, pp. 112–28 and pp. 474–6. Much of the background comes from Frances A. Yates, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972), supplemented by Christopher McIntosh, The Rosicrucians: The History, Mythology, and Rituals of an Esoteric Order (San Francisco, Weiser Books, 1998). See also Johann Valentin Andreae, The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz, trans. Edward Foxcroft (London, Minerva Books, n.d.); and Richard Ellmann, Yeats: The Man and the Masks (London, Faber & Faber, 1961).

  Peter Harkness summarized research on the spread of the Cherokee rose in ‘Ancestry & Kinship of the Rose’, Royal National Rose Society, Rose Annual 2005, pp. 72–3; and Gerd Krüssmann discussed the Cherokee rose in Roses, trans. Gerd Krüssmann and Nigel Raban (London, B. T. Batsford, 1982), p. 46. Rilke’s epitaph comes from George C. Schoolfield, Rilke’s Last Year (Lawrence, University of Kansas Libraries, 1966), pp. 16–17.

  Tulip

  The chapter’s epigraph comes from Zbigniew Herbert, ‘The Bitter Smell of Tulips’ in Still Life with a Bridle, Essays and Apocryphas (London, Jonathan Cape, 1993), pp. 41-65. Michael Pollan writes about tulips in The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World (New York, Random House, 2001), pp. 59–110. In addition to more modern works on the tulip, I went back to these early authors: Pierre Belon, Les Observations de Plusieurs Singularitez et Choses Memorables (Paris, 1553), pp. 206v.–7r.; A Treatise on Tulips by Carolus Clusius of Arras, trans. W. Van Dijk (Haarlem, Associated Bulb Growers of Holland, 1951); Gerard, The Herball, pp. 116–20; Charles de la Chesnée Monstereul, Le Floriste François: traittant de l’origine des tulippes (Caen, 1654), pp. 13–14; and Alexandre Dumas, The Black Tulip, trans. Robin Buss (London, Penguin, 2003), p. 43. For the number and distribution of species, I consulted Richard Wilford, Tulips: Species and Hybrids for the Gardener (Oregon, Timber Press, 2006), pp. 13–14; J. Esteban Hernandez Bermajo and Expiracion Garcia Sanchez, ‘Tulips: an ornamental crop in the Andalusian Middle Ages’, Economic Botany, vol. 63, no. 1 (2009), pp. 60–6; L. W. D. Van Raamsdonk et al., ‘The systematics of the genus Tulipa L.’, Acta Horticulturae, vol. 430, no. 2 (1997), pp. 821–8; and Dr Mark Nesbitt at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.

  Much of the background to the Ottoman tulip comes from Turhan Baytop, ‘The tulip in Istanbul during the Ottoman period’, in Michiel Roding and Hans Theunissen, The Tulip: A Symbol of Two Nations (Utrecht and Istanbul, M. Th. Houtsma Stichting and Turco-Dutch Friendship Association, 1993), pp. 51–6. See also: Yanni Petsopoulos (ed.), Tulips, Arabesques & Turbans: Decorative Arts from the Ottoman Empire (London, Alexandria Press, 1982); Nurhan Atasoy and Julian Raby, Iznik: The Pottery of Ottoman Turkey (London, Alexandria Press/Thames and Hudson, 1989); John Harvey, ‘Turkey as a source of garden plants’, Garden History, vol. 4, no. 3 (Autumn 1976), pp. 21–42; Walter G. Andrews, Najaat Black and Mehmet Kalpakli, Ottoman Lyric Poetry: An Anthology (Austin, University of Texas Press, 1997); and C.-H. de Fouchécour, La Description de la Nature dans la Poésie Lyrique Persane du XIe Siècle (Paris, Librairie D. Klincksieck, 1969), pp. 73–6. The story of the dervish preacher comes from Yildiz Demiriz, ‘Tulips in Ottoman Turkish culture and art’, in Roding and Theunissen, The Tulip, p. 57. For a discussion of the tulip’s religious significance, see Annemarie Schimmel, ‘The celestial garden in Islam’, in Elizabeth B. Macdougall and Richard Ettinghausen (eds), The Islamic Garden (Washington DC, Dumbarton Oaks, 1976), p. 25; and for Süleyman the Magnificent’s tulip embroidery, see Anna Pavord, The Tulip (London, Bloomsbury, 1999), p. 35; her source is possibly Arthur Baker, ‘The cult of the tulip in Turkey’, Journal of the Royal Horticultural Society, vol. 56 (1931), pp. 234–44.

  De Busbecq’s tulip letter appears in The Turkish Letters of Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, trans. Edward Seymour Forster (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1927), pp. 24–5; and the description of Councillor Herwart’s red tulip in Valerius Cordius, Annotationes in Pedaci Dioscorides (Strasbourg, 1561), fol. 213, r. and v. A partial translation of the latter appears in W. S. Murray, ‘The introduction of the tulip, and the tulipomania’, Journal of the Royal Horticultural Society, vol. 35 (1909), Part I, pp. 18–30. See also Sam Segal, ‘Tulips portrayed: the tulip trade in Holland in the 17th century’, in Roding and Theunissen, The Tulip, pp. 9–24; and Anne Goldgar’s painstaking cataloguing of early botanical writings on the tulip, in Tulipmania: Money, Honor, and Knowledge in the Dutch Golden Age (Chicago, Universi
ty of Chicago Press, 2007). Clusius’s A Treatise on Tulips usefully brings together all his writings on the tulip, which helped me to track their introduction into Europe.

  John Rea writes of breaking tulips in Flora: seu, De Florum Cultura. Or, a Complete Florilege (London, 1665), p. 51. For the causes of their breaking, see Elise L. Dekker, ‘Characterization of potyviruses from tulip and lily which cause flower-breaking’, Journal of General Virology, vol. 74 (1993), pp. 881–7; other authors writing on the phenomenon include: Philip Miller, The Gardeners and Florists Dictionary, or a Complete System of Horticulture (2 vols, London, 1724), and The Gardeners Dictionary; Parkinson, Paradisi in Sole, pp. 62–3; and Henry van Oosten, The Dutch Gardner: or, the Compleat Florist, trans. from the Dutch (London, 1703), pp. 65–6. Richard Hakluyt’s reference to Clusius’s tulip appears in The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation, collected by Richard Hakluyt, Preacher, and edited by Edmund Goldsmid, vol. 5, Central and Southern Europe (Edinburgh, E. & G. Goldsmid, 1887), pp. 300–301. For Clusius’s distress at the commercialization of the tulip trade, see Goldgar, Tulipmania, pp. 58–9.

  For tulips in seventeenth-century florilegia, I consulted these works: Lee Hendrix and Thea Vignau-Wilberg, Nature Illuminated: Flora and Fauna from the Court of the Emperor Rudolf II (London, Thames and Hudson, c.1997); Blunt and Stearn, The Art of Botanical Illustration; Aymonin, The Besler Florilegium, pp. 114–17; Pierre Vallet, Le Jardin du Roy Tres Chrestien Henry IV (Paris, 1608), revised for King Louis XIII in 1623; Crispin de Passe, Hortus Floridus, A Garden of Flowers (Utrecht, 1615).

  The works by Gerard, Parkinson and Thomas Johnson listed under general sources describe the growing number of tulips coming to Britain. For more on the Lime Street community, see Margaret Willes, The Making of the English Gardener (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2011), pp. 88–9 and passim. The Tradescants’ tulips appear in Jennifer Potter, Strange Blooms: The Curious Lives and Adventures of the John Tradescants (London, Atlantic Books, 2006), especially p. 304; for their full plant lists, see Prudence Leith-Ross, The John Tradescants: Gardeners to the Rose and Lily Queen (London, Peter Owen, revised edn 2006), pp. 213–17, 235 and 304–5; and for Alexander Marshal’s painted tulips, see Leith-Ross, The Florilegium of Alexander Marshal. My sources on Sir Thomas Hanmer include Willes, The Making of the English Gardener, pp. 256–9; The Garden Book of Sir Thomas Hanmer Bart (London, Gerald Howe, 1933); John Evelyn, ‘Elysium Britannicum’, f. 286, quoted by Leith-Ross, The Florilegium of Alexander Marshal, pp. 96–7; and John Rea’s Flora.

  For French tulip mania, see Pavord, The Tulip, pp. 82–101; La Chesnée Monstereul, Le Floriste François, pp. 18–19; Potter, Strange Blooms, pp. 159–60; E. S. de Beer (ed.), The Diary of John Evelyn (London, Everyman’s Library, 2006), pp. 72–3 (1–6 April 1644) and pp. 269–70 (21 May 1651); and Pierre Morin, Remarques Necessaires pour la Culture des Fleurs (Paris, 1658), pp. 181–98.

  General accounts of Dutch tulip fever appear in Pavord, The Tulip; Mike Dash, Tulipomania: The Story of the World’s Most Coveted Flower and the Extraordinary Passions it Aroused (London, Victor Gollancz, 1999); Deborah Moggach, Tulip Fever: A Novel (London, Heinemann, 1999); Sam Segal, ‘Tulips Portrayed’, in Roding and Theunissen, The Tulip; and most exhaustively in Goldgar, Tulipmania. The first (exaggerated but entertaining) English account of tulip fever appeared in Charles Mackay’s Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions (3 vols, London, Richard Bentley, 1841), vol. 1, pp. 139–53. Other works consulted include Peter Mundy, The Travels of Peter Mundy, vol. 4, ed. Lieut. Col. Sir Richard Carnac Temple (London, Hakluyt Society, 1925), 2nd series, no. 55, pp. 60–81; Roland Barthes, ‘The world as object’, in Norman Bryson (ed.), Calligram: Essays in New Art History from France (Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 106–15; Roemer Visscher, Sinnenpoppen (The Hague, 1949), from an original of 1614; Paul Taylor, Dutch Flower Painting 1600–1720 (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1995); Dr Frans Willemse, The Mystery of the Tulip Painter (Lisse, Museum de Zwarte Tulp, 2005); and James Sowerby, Flora Luxurians; or, The Florist’s Delight No. 3 (London, 1791).

  In addition to the general works cited, my principal sources on Turkey’s ‘Tulip Era’ were these: I. Mélikoff, ‘Lâle Devri’, Encyclopaedia of Islam, second edn, ed. P. Bearman et al., Brill Online, accessed British Library, 30 September 2011; Salzmann, ‘The age of tulips’; Baytop, ‘The tulip in Istanbul’; Tahsin Öz, ‘Ciraghan’, Encyclopaedia of Islam, second edn, ed. P. Bearman et al., Brill Online, accessed British Library, 30 September 2011; Philip Mansel, Constantinople: City of the World’s Desire 1453–1924 (London, John Murray, 1995), p. 182; and Baker, ‘The cult of the tulip in Turkey’, p. 244.

  Thomas Johnson’s praise of the tulip appears in his revised edition of Gerard’s Herball, pp. 137–46; the biblical reference is from Matthew 6: 28–9. The discussion between the flowers comes from Antheologia, or The Speech of Flowers (London, 1655), pp. 5–13. For the story of florists’ societies, see Ruth Duthie, Florists’ Flowers and Societies (Princes Risborough, Shire, 1988). Also consulted were A. D. Hall, ‘The English or florist’s tulip’, Journal of the Royal Horticultural Society, vol. 27 (1902), Part I, pp. 142–62; J. W. Bentley, The English Tulip and its History, lecture delivered at the Great Tulip Conference of the Royal National Tulip Society, 12 May 1897 (London, Barr & Sons, 1897); James Douglas, Hardy Florists’ Flowers: Their Cultivation and Management (London, 1880), pp. 44–55; Gardeners’ Chronicle (15 May 1897), p. 327; Miller, The Gardeners and Florists Dictionary; George Glenny, The Standard of Perfection for the Properties of Flowers and Plants, second edn (London, Houlston and Stoneman, 1847); The Wakefield and North of England Tulip Society, The English Florists’ Tulip (Bradford, 1997); Robinson, The English Flower Garden; and Sacheverell Sitwell, Old Fashioned Flowers (London, Country Life, 1939), pp. 73–88.

  The tulip poems quoted are: ‘La Tulipe’, in Théophile Gautier, Poésies Complètes (3 vols, Paris, A. G. Nizet, 1970), vol. 3, p. 189; ‘Tulips’, in Sylvia Plath, Ariel (London, Faber and Faber, 1965), pp. 20–3; and James Fenton, Yellow Tulips: Poems 1968–2011 (London, Faber and Faber, 2012), p. 140. My information on the tulip trade today comes from Maarten Benschop et al., ‘The Global Flower Bulb Industry: Production, Utilization, Research’, Wiley Online Library (accessed 28 October 2011), pp. 7–8, and 30–33; and J. C. M. Buschman, ‘Globalisation – flower – flower bulbs – bulb flowers’, Acta Horticulturae, vol. 1, no. 673 (2005), pp. 27–33.

  Orchid

  The chapter’s epigraph comes from Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep (London, Hamish Hamilton, 1939), p. 16. The most comprehensive orchid history is Merle A. Reinikka, A History of the Orchid (Portland, Oregon, Timber Press, 1995). Other sources consulted for the introduction include John Lindley, Sertum Orchidaceum: A Wreath of the Most Beautiful Orchidaceous Flowers (London, James Ridgway & Sons, 1838), plate XXXIII; Shiu-ying Hu, ‘Orchids in the life and culture of the Chinese people’, The Chung Chi Journal, vol. 10, nos 1 & 2 (October 1971), pp. 1–26; and Oakes Ames, ‘The origin of the term orchis’, American Orchid Society Bulletin, vol. 11 (1942–3), pp. 146–7.

  Much of my botanical information about orchids comes from Wilma and Brian Rittershausen, The Amazing World of Orchids (London, Quadrille, 2009). For the newly discovered night-flowering orchid, see Ian Sample, ‘Found in the forest, the only nocturnal orchid’, Guardian, 22 November 2011, and orchid numbers from http://www.kew.org/science-research-data/directory/teams/monocots-III-orchids/index.htm, accessed 11 April 2013. For more detail on orchid classification, see Mark W. Chase, ‘Classification of Orchidaceae in the Age of DNA data’, Curtis’s Botanical Magazine, vol. 22, no. 1, pp. 2–7 (2005); and see K. W. Dixon et al., ‘The Western Australian fully subterranean orchid Rhizanthella gardneri’, in Orchid Biology, Reviews and Perspectives, V, ed. Joseph Arditti (Portland, Timber Press, 1990), pp. 37–62.

  These sources were helpful on Chinese orchids: Hu, ‘Orchids’, p. 19; Hui-Lin Li, The Garden Flowers of China (Ne
w York, Ronald Press, 1959); Sing-chi Chen and Tsin Tang, ‘A general review of the orchid flora of China’, Orchid Biology, Reviews and Perspectives, II, ed. Joseph Arditti (Ithaca, Comstock Pub. Associates, 1982), pp. 59–67; Catherine Paganini, ‘Perfect men and true friends, the orchid in Chinese culture’, American Orchid Society Bulletin (December 1991), pp. 1176–83; and Helmut Brinker, Zen in the Art of Painting, trans. George Campbell (London, Arkana, 1987), pp. 117–22. The poems of Su Shih and Huang T’ing-chien are quoted in Richard M. Barnhart, Peach Blossom Spring: Gardens and Flowers in Chinese Paintings (New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, c.1983), pp. 55–6. Also illuminating on Chinese art were Ching-I Tu (ed.), Classics and Interpretations: The Hermeneutic Traditions in Chinese Culture (New Brunswick, NJ, Transaction Publishers, 2000), pp. 283–4, consulted online; and The Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting, a facsimile of the 1887–8 Shanghai edn, trans. Mai-mai Sze (Princeton, NJ, Bollingen Foundation/Princeton University Press, 1977).

  My information on Japanese orchids comes principally from Kashioka and Ogisu, Illustrated History, pp. 85–94. I also drew on Alfred Koehn, The Art of Japanese Flower Arrangement (Japan, J. L. Thomson & Co., 1933); and Conder, The Flowers of Japan, pp. 133–4.

  For western views of the orchid, see Theophrastus, Enquiry into Plants, vol. 2, pp. 309–11 (from Book 9, Chapter 18); Jerry Stannard, ‘The herbal as medical document’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, vol. 43, no. 3 (1969), pp. 212–20; and Chalmers L. Gemmill, MD, ‘The missing passage in Hort’s translation of Theophrastus’, Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine, vol. 49, no. 2 (February 1973), pp. 127–9. John Goodyer’s translation appears in Gunther (ed.), The Greek Herbal of Dioscorides, p. 373. Other sources on the orchid’s medical uses include: Langham, The Garden of Health, pp. 450–1; and Gerard, The Herball, pp. 156–76; Luigi Berliocchi, The Orchid in Lore and Legend, trans. Leonore Rosen and Anita Weston, ed. Mark Griffiths (Portland, Timber Press, 2004); Dioscorides, De Materia Medica, pp. 522–4; Li, The Garden Flowers of China, pp. 14–15; Chen and Tang, ‘Orchid flora of China’, p. 43; and Hu, ‘Orchids’, p. 15.