Pollen Nation

Calla – The Daily Flower for 28 February

Magnificent beauty? Any plant flaunting such a floriographic connotation so brazenly is bound to be one with ideas above its station. And indeed that’s the case of the callas, the (granted) not-half-bad-looking flowers in the Zantedeschia genus.

A calla lily arrangement at Serenata Flowers

These sneaky members of the family Araceae have wangled themselves into such gentrified locations as suburban homes and florists’ shops simply by pretending to be something they’re not: lilies. Zantedeschias are not true lilies, nor Arums, nor Callas, although they go by the common name of arum lilies, calla lilies and callas.

Perhaps we’re being a bit tough on these African queens. They do have rather splendid spathes that curl in gorgeous yellows, purples and reds around the true flower. And although their species name is eponymously derived from a botanist, the common name calla could possibly come from the Greek word ‘kallos’, meaning beauty.

Good for giving to: Impressive imposters.

Great callas in literature:

The calla lilies are in bloom again. Such a strange flower, suitable to any occasion. I carried them on my wedding day, and now I place them here in memory of something that has died.
Katherine Hepburn as Terry Randall in the film Stage Door'(1937)

Tags: flowers, Zantedeschia, calla, calla lily, arum lily, floriography

Bachelor’s Buttons – The Daily Flower for 27 February

Marriage must have been quite a desirable state for the Victorians. Or else those floriographers were in cahoots with some pretty hardcore social engineering enthusiasts. How else does a flower commonly known as bachelor’s buttons come to connote ‘single wretchedness’ in the language of flowers?  So much for the debonair flaneur and the happy stag.

Centaurea cyanus (cornflowers/bachelor's buttons) by Donarreiskoffer

The tale of how this European annual acquired its meaning may be a little dodgy, but the way it got its name is more above than below the belt: the bright blue (or red, or pink, or white) flowers atop the silvery, fuzzy stems were once a popular choice for boutonnières.

Good for giving to: The terminally single.

Great bachelor's buttons in literature: Should one construe that she’s a spinster, and ‘wretched’ at that?

From the trim little hat, with its white band and jaunty bunch of cornflowers, to the well-shaped patent shoes, she was neatly and daintily dressed.
From  A Millionaire of Yesterdayby E. Phillips Oppenheim

Tags: flowers, Centaurea cyanus, bachelor’s buttons, cornflower, floriography

Tansy – The Daily Flower for 23 February

It’s got a stem that’s described as stout. It has the hypocorism ‘buttons’. It was a favourite additive to Jack’s bourbon concoctions. It contains the same convulsion-causing substance that’s found in absinthe. Plus, it has a name derived from the Greek word Athanaton meaning immortal. All of which makes it pretty clear what kind of ‘courage’ the tansy connotes in the language of flowers: Dutch.

Who would have thought that Tanacetum vulgare, the little aster family member with its clusters of bright yellow flat-topped flowers and sweet camphory scent, would have such a dark side?

Tanacetum vulgare

Good for giving to: The terminally unbrave.

Great tansies in literature: What dreams of immortality, what visions, lo…

She wished to seat herself on a poor man's grave, where the bitter tansy grew; but for her there was neither peace nor rest; and when she danced towards the open church door, she saw an angel standing there.
From ‘The Red Shoes’ in Andersen's Fairy Tales by Hans Christian Andersens

Tags: flowers, tansy, buttons, Tanacetum vulgare, floriography

Amaryllis – The Daily Flower for 22 February

Sound the bright red trumpets and wave the victory pennant to herald the arrival of… err, actually, hold on, perhaps we should be quietly piping a little red flute – see, we’re not exactly too sure who is arriving. It could be Amaryllis, the flower named after the shepherd girl, or it could be that ‘knight star’, Hippeastrum, who, confusingly, also goes by the name Amaryllis.

An Amaryllis arrangement at Serenata Flowers

One good thing about this classification conundrum is that it serves as an explanation for the vastly different floriographic connotations attributed to Amaryllis: pride (gallant and knightly), timidity (et in arcadia ego) and splendid beauty (could be said of a pastoral or a plucky person).

Both Amaryllis and Hippeastrum are in the Amaryllidaceae family. And, to add to the confusion, Amaryllis is usually called the Belladonna lily or Naked lady (not to be muddled with Belladonna or Autumn crocus), while if you asked almost anyone for an Amaryllis, they’d hand over the bright red (or perhaps white, or even pink) showy blooms of the gorgeous South American native, Hippeastrum.

Good for giving to: A rightfully arrogant fairytale hero/ine.

Great Amaryllises in literature:

You are ice and fire,
The touch of you burns my hands like snow.
You are cold and flame.
You are the crimson of amaryllis,
The silver of moon-touched magnolias.
When I am with you,
My heart is a frozen pond
Gleaming with agitated torches
‘Opal’ by Amy Lowell

Tags: flowers, Amaryllis, Hippeastrum, floriography

Veronica – The Daily Flower for 21 February

Is it all in that pretty little head of yours?
What goes on in that place in the dark?
Well I used to know a girl and I would have
sworn that her name was Veronica
Well she used to have a carefree mind of her
own and a delicate look in her eye
These days I'm afraid she's not even sure if her
name is Veronica

It’s unlikely that dear Mr Costello was warbling about the Christian saint purported to have mopped Christ’s brow and thereby imprinted an image of his face on her towel. But it’s apparently not so unlikely that the lady in question gave her name to the genus of over 500 species flowering herbs.

Veronica chamaedrys by Anthere

Rumour has it that the purplish blossoms of several Veronica species sport face-like markings, although nobody seems to specify exactly which species these are.

If this fact can be ratified, then props to the Victorian floriographers. For it would make it rather clever of them to have ascribed the meaning of fidelity to Veronica… not because the saint in question was suitably saintly, but because that lesser-used meaning of fidelity (a reproduction of remarkable exactness) matches most neatly with both the legend of the imprinted cloth and the etymology of the word Veronica: a combination of vera (true) and icon (image).

Good for giving to: Travellers (the plant is also called ‘speedwell’ and ‘gypsyweed’) who need to stick to their course.

Great Veronicas in literature: While sunlight would cause others to fade…

Yet, though remorse, youth's white-faced seneschal,
Tread on my heels with all his retinue,
I am most glad I loved thee - think of all
The suns that go to make one speedwell blue!
From ‘Quia Multum Amavi’ by Oscar Wilde

Tags: flowers, Veronica, speedwell, gypsyweed, floriography

Yew – The Daily Flower for 20 February

If Taxus bacatta were indeed what it sounded like (a paladin of the Inland Revenue who’s turned to drunken revellery), it would be easy to see how it connoted sadness. But, of course, it has nothing to do with government levies or Bacchanalian activities.

Taxus baccata

Taxus is the genus name of those evergreen conifers that have a penchant for mooching around graveyards: yew trees. Bacatta, the species epithet for the common or English yew, is derived from the Latin for berry-bearing, which indeed it is. Except that those in the know refer to the trees’ bright red fleshy bits as arils, not berries. And good it would be to remember that, because those are the only non-toxic part of the plant.

Good for giving to: Antediluvian gloommongers (the yew is said to be at least 2,000 years old, and considered by some the oldest plant in Europe).

Great yews in literature: The jongleur trolls out his ballad, not sadly, but perhaps expressing a saddish sentiment?

What of the bow?
The bow was made in England:
Of true wood, of yew wood,
The wood of English bows;
So men who are free
Love the old yew tree
And the land where the yew tree grows.
From The White Company by Arthur Conan Doyle

Tags: flowers, yew, Conium maculatum, floriography

Moss – The Daily Flower for 16 February

A rolling stone gathers no maternal love – that hasn’t got quite the same ring to it, has it? But perhaps that’s what’s really meant by the proverb; after all, maternal love is the floriographic connotation of the more than 10,000 species in the division Bryophyta.

Sphagnum rubellum by b.gliwa

Surprising, then, that the Victorians didn’t save moss to be the flower of the day for somewhere a little closer to the fourth Sunday after Lent (although it’s not long to go until Mother’s Day).

Admittedly, unless your mum is very rock ‘n’ roll, she probably won’t be too impressed with a gift of a nonvascular bit of greenery that doesn’t do flowers but can drink eight times its weight in ‘aqua vitae’. Oh, she is? Well, in that case, go for a Sphagnum moss – these are the plants that are a vital component in peat, and we all know the best use for peat is intrinsically connected with whisky.

If your mum’s a bit tamer than that, but you still like the idea of giving her moss because of its meaning, you could opt for an orchid. How so? Well, florists tend to wrap up their root systems in a sphagnum blanket to keep them moist, but not too soggy (an idea possibly gleaned from folk of yore who used mosses as nappies).

Good for giving to: Maternal units.

Great mosses in literature: Great at homemaking, just like (the popular Western projection of what it is to be a) mum:

Goody Tiptoes was busy pushing moss under the thatch¬—“The nest is so snug, we shall be sound asleep all winter.”
From The Original Peter Rabbit Books by Beatrix Potter

Tags: flowers, moss, Sphagnum, floriography

Hemlock – The Daily Flower for 15 February

If you forgot to give someone red roses yesterday, don’t be surprised if you receive a little sprig of Conium maculatum today. Whatever you do, don’t eat it. And if you’re foolish enough not to heed that warning (a high possibility if you were foolish enough to forget 14 February), don’t think that the dizzy feeling that ensues is simply a case of lovesickness. It ain’t; it’s a prelude to death.

Conium maculatum from Koehler's Medicinal-Plants 1887

Quite unassuming in its appearance, hemlock is, on the contrary, an extremely toxic herb. You can tell it apart from its benign white-flowered umbellate relatives the carrot, the fennel and the parsley by looking closely at the stem, which is as smooth as a just-shaven leg and donning the plant-world equivalent of racy fish-net tights: streaky red markings. Danger! Danger! All the signs are there…

Good for giving to: Socratic lovers who questioned one thing too many when they wondered the point of sending Valentine's flowers.

Great hemlocks in literature: If you did do wrong, some would seem to suggest that it's best if you do eat it, after all:

Man has no power whatever unless he has unlimited freedom of action. Suppose that he has been guilty of some irreparable error, from the shameful consequences of which there is no escape; a sordid nature swallows down the disgrace and survives it, the wise man drinks the hemlock and dies.
From The Country Doctor by Honore de Balzac

Tags: flowers, hemlock, Conium maculatum, floriography

Japanese Quince – The Daily Flower for 14 February

If it’s the thrill of the new and instant passions that give you your kicks on St Valentine’s Day, the Japanese quince is the thing for you. Jennifer, Alison, Phillipa, Sue, Deborah, Annabel, too… there are so many names for this flowering shrub with its seductive pink, red or blanched blossoms, it’s the horticultural equivalent of dating someone new every day.

Japanese quince by tanakawho

Let’s start with the family name: take your pick from the cutesy Cydonia (meaning quince, and derived from the name of a Cretan town), the provocative Pyrus (meaning pear, after the shape of the plant’s leaves) or the charming Chaenomeles (from the Greek for ‘split apple’). After that, you get to pick a species epithet that takes your fancy – will it be japonica or maulei today, Captain Casanova? Quite frankly, my dear, I don’t imagine you’ll give a damn, for if the Japanese quince lives up to its floriographic connotation, you’ll have already fallen in love at first sight.

Good for giving to: Your gorgeous Valentine(s).

Great Japanese quinces in literature: Not instantly infatuating enough to detract the speaker from her human object of affection:

You tell me that the peonies need spraying,
That the columbines have overrun all bounds,
That the pyrus japonica should be cut back and rounded.
You tell me these things.
But I look at you, heart of silver,
White heart-flame of polished silver,
Burning beneath the blue steeples of the larkspur,
And I long to kneel instantly at your feet,
While all about us peal the loud,
sweet Te Deums of the Canterbury bells
From ‘Madonna of the Evening Flowers’ by Amy Lowell

Tags: flowers, Japanese quince, Chaenomeles, Pyrus, Cydonia, maulei, floriography

Sundew – The Daily Flower for 12 February

Feed me! Feed me! Feed me!
Feed me, Seymour
Feed me all night long
That’s right, boy
You can do it
Feed me, Seymour
Feed me all night long
’Cause if you feed me, Seymour
I can grow up big and strong.

This Little Shop of Horrors song is hardly a piece of gentle classical music in several parts, but it’s definitely a lyric sung for someone, so it might just qualify as a serenade after all. And seeing as ‘serenade’ is what’s connoted by the Audrey II-like sundew, it seems a most apt beginning to today’s post.

Yep, Drosera rotundifolia likes a drop of blood to keep her going. Not human blood, mind you, just the blood of bugs. It’s their own fault, though, for being eaten; they should know better than to be lured by this dewy, round-leafed seductress flaunting five bright-crimson petals atop each slender, glabrous stem, and offering the promise of sugary delights.

Maybe that’s how this dew plant also came to be known as lustwort.

Drosera rotundifolia chromolithograph print from the 1894 edition of "Wild Flowers of America" prepared by Botanical Fine Art Weekly (Published by G.H. Buek & Co., NY.)

Good for giving to: Carnivorous crooners.

Great sundews in literature: Swinburne remarks on the flower’s more tender properties:

A little marsh-plant, yellow green,
And pricked at lip with tender red.
Tread close, and either way you tread
Some faint black water jets between
Lest you should bruise the curious head.
From ‘The Sundew’ by Algernon Charles Swinburne

Tags: flowers, sundew, dewplant, lustwort, Drosera rotundifolia, floriography

Hen and Chicks – The Daily Flower for 9 February

Oh, sure, Sempervivum tectorum looks just like Madame Fowl and her brood – if you’re viewing them through a prehistoric lens.

There’s certainly something Jurassic about the rosettes of this Crassulaceae-family succulent, not to mention its almost antediluvian-sounding trinomial which translates (very roughly) as thick-leaved, ever-living plant that grows on thatched roofs.

Hen and Chicks by dogfaceboy

This ‘ever living’ may explain why the flower has come to connote liveliness in floriography, but its penchant for hayed gables has nothing to do with its common name ‘hen and chicks’. That comes from the fact that, every year, stems extend from below the larger rosettes (the hens) to produce a dozen or so new little plants (the chicks).

Sempervivum tectorum flowers by Sabine Reute

Good for giving to: Fans of poultry in motion.

Great hen and chicks in literature: A hen and chicks by any other name still winks as coyly...

Now,---the single little turret that remains
On the plains,
By the caper overrooted, by the gourd
Overscored,
While the patching houseleek's head of blossom winks
Through the chinks---
Marks the basement whence a tower in ancient time
Sprang sublime,
From ‘Love Among the Ruins’ by Robert Browning

Tags: flowers, Hen and chicks, houseleek, Sempervivum tectorum, floriography

Pineapple – The Daily Flower for 8 February

Ananas comosus sounds like the name of a cartoon heroine who takes the form of an intrepid Russian space cadet by day and a Josephine Bakeresque dancer by night. Well, perhaps not to everyone. It’s certainly a name that smacks of the exotic, though. And so it should – at least if you don’t live in South America, from where this edible bromeliad is assumed to originate.

Pineapple flowers by seveno2003

Wherever in the world you’re from, you’re probably more familiar with the fruit of the pineapple plant than the flower. Although the spiralled segments of the former epitomise the notion of perfection not only in flavour but by their Fibonacci-ness, the small bright purple, reddish or silver flowers embody the pineapple’s floriographic connotation equally well.

Good for giving to: Utopian mathematicians.

Great pineapples in literature: A fictitious genealogy of the transition from a fruit to a grenade...

He hurled a pineapple at the ancient enemy of his people.
From Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs

Tags: flowers, pineapple, Ananas comosus, floriography

Pansy – The Daily Flower for 5 February

Don’t be too soon flattered when someone whispers ‘I think of you’. It sounds like a nice idea on the surface of it, but there’s some significant evidence to the contrary in the language of flowers. After all, ‘I think of you’ is what pansies connote… and one look at their faces suggests that those thoughts might not be all that sweet.

Angry pansies by idreamofdaylight

True, not every Viola tricolor hortensis turns its nose up in its sallow skin this way. The five-petalled flowers (which are found equally often in rich blues as pale golds) can be quite expressionless at times, either single-coloured or with a few radial markings, resulting in a rather genteel demeanour – a two-sidedness of appearance that’s reflected in the usage of the word pansy in popular culture, referring, on the lighter side, to a Milquetoast, and, somewhat more harshly, to a pimp.

Good for giving to: D.H. Lawrence fans.

Great pansies in literature:

Ah, Cruel Love! must I endure
Thy many scorns, and find no cure?
Say, are thy medicines made to be
Helps to all others but to me?
I'll leave thee, and to Pansies come:
Comforts you'll afford me some:
You can ease my heart, and do
What Love could ne'er be brought unto.
From ‘To Pansies’ by Robert Herrick

Does this poem inspire that loving feeling? It might inspire quite a bit more if you send it to someone with some Valentine flowers.

Tags: flowers, pansy, Viola tricolor hortensis, floriography

Yellow Rose – The Daily Flower for 2 February

Down in the Lone Star State, there’s a song about a girl with eyes as bright as diamonds that sparkle like the dew. Well, that yellow rose of Texas sure don’t sound like she’s a fickle, green-eyed monster who’s loved any less than she was yesterday, so I’m all for heading off those alleged floriographic connotations of infidelity, jealousy and decrease of love at the gulch, and embracing the ones of friendship, gladness and true love.

Tell your true love how glad their friendship makes you by sending a Magnum Opus Valentine bouquet from Serenata Flowers.

Good for giving to: Valentine flower lovers.

Great yellow roses in literature:

I offer you that kernel of myself that I have saved,
somehow --the central heart that deals not
in words, traffics not with dreams, and is
untouched by time, by joy, by adversities.
I offer you the memory of a yellow rose seen at
sunset, years before you were born.
I offer you explanations of yourself, theories about
yourself, authentic and surprising news of yourself.
I can give you my loneliness, my darkness, the
hunger of my heart; I am trying to bribe you 
with uncertainty, with danger, with defeat.
Jorge Luis Borges (1934)

Tags: flowers, yellow rose, floriography

Wood Sorrel – The Daily Flower for 1 February

Sour it may taste, but bad-tempered it is not. Au contraire, the little wood sorrel connotes joy in floriography.

A somewhat fitting association, considering that Oxalis acetosella, as it’s binomially known, wears a triad of heart-shaped leaflets below its white blossoms. Add it to salads for pep, but just not too liberally: too much oxalic acid can mess with one’s calcium levels and cause some undesirable effects that won’t leave you feeling very happy.

Wood sorrel by mwri, who remarks that the Finnish name for the flower, Ketunleipä, means fox's bread.

Good for giving to: Anyone Irish on 17 March.

Great wood sorrel in literature:

Almost everything I've seen pushes- the violent
seed-propelling shot of the witch hazel pod,
the philosophy implicit in the inside out
seed-thrust of the wood-sorrel. All hairy
saltcedar seeds are single-minded
in their grasping of wind and spinning.
From ‘Opus From Space’ by Pattiann Rogers

Tags: flowers, wood sorrel, Oxalis acetosella, floriography