In my post, Connect in Place, I talked about how plants communicate with each other. Today, I want to talk about how they communicate with us.
Plants have physical ways to communicate their needs to caretakers. If they need water or have too much water, they droop. If they need nutrients or are under attack by bugs or disease, they yellow or drop leaves. That’s one language of flowers.
Humans, in their desire to assign meaning to their world, have devised a symbolic language of flowers.
Some of it has been handed down through oral history and art. The stories of our religions are rich with plant-word associations. Shakespeare used flowers to represent emotions and the Victorian era resurgence of floriography produced popular dictionaries of plants and flowers. The trendy Victorians created a pastime of sending posies or bouquets and the recipient had to use floral cryptology to decipher its message.
This seems a difficult and unreliable means of communication since multiple definitions could apply to one plant. If you didn’t have the right dictionary you might be in trouble when trying to ferret out the meaning of a bouquet sent to you. Was the sender of the hydrangea saying “thank you for your kindness” or suggesting you are heartless?
Modern literature also employs plants and flowers to convey rich meaning. J.K. Rowling used plants repeatedly in the Harry Potter books to paint deep meanings. This symbolic language of flowers has added great depth to stories throughout literary history.
But the language of flowers that speaks to me doesn’t have defined words.
My plants and flowers communicate their stories as I walk the paths of my gardens.
They tell tales of history and joy, sorrow, and loss. They tell stories of families and individuals, some whom I’ve met and others who I’m connected to only through the plant. They remember loved ones and loved pets. Some of the stories my plants tell me are snippets and some are novels, but they go like this:
That rose is from one of our Texas Hill Country trips.
I bought April Moon because it reliably blooms on our April wedding anniversary.
My good friend gave me that plant when my mother passed away.
And that Japanese Maple is a tornado survivor. My favorite nursery was wiped out in a fall tornado but sold the few surviving plants. Thankfully, they were able to rebuild.
That byzantine gladiolus is from my grandmother’s yard. I’ve never seen it anywhere else.
The tiger lily is from The Fixer’s grandmother who had carried a start of it from her mother’s home, up in the Arkansas mountains down to the valley where she lived. I never met her mother, but I feel her spirit when the freckled, orange flower blooms.
There’s a novel waiting to be written about The Fixer’s paternal grandmother who rode her horse to town to sell the fresh strawberries and green beans she was famous for growing!
Those amaryllises always make me laugh. My mom was not an avid gardener, but she had a few plants and an ongoing battle with voles. She read that these lilies would keep the voles away, so she ordered a dozen bulbs and was disappointed when it didn’t work. I always pictured her building a moat of lilies around her yard as her vole defense.
Those pink dahlias make me think of when my daughter was two in her great-grandmother’s yard, happily picking the abundant, plate-sized flowers and pulling the petals apart. Grandma never got mad about it, she just laughed!
There’s the old-fashioned pink and yellow lantana that the sweet old neighbor shared with me when we bought our first house. I don’t remember her name, but I remember her soul.
And there are also treasured pet memories! Bella, our cat, used to love hiding in the sweet autumn clematis; and how Dottie, our second boxer used to love tomatoes and would pick the ripest ones off the vines! (I wasn’t amused at the time.)
Flowers speak not only in their form but also their smell. Walking through the neighborhood I can smell the scent of mimosa trees blooming and I’m instantly back at my grandmother’s house, climbing trees.
Walking through the cold winter woods, when I get that first grape Kool-Aid scent of the sandplums, I know that it’s spring.
And the scent of daffodils always takes me to the markets in England where I first became aware of their cheery spring beauty.
Another way the flowers speak to me is through the labors of creation.
I always seem to find myself dealing with the stress of challenging circumstances, through physical work. It’s not until the situation has passed that I realize that I created something beautiful through my sorrow. Not only is it a remembrance of the difficulties experienced but also a joyful reminder that we always overcome trying times.
My plants and flowers have a rich language that they only speak to me. I interpret their stories to others as they visit my gardens and share their connections with my kids and grandkids.
For me, the language of flowers is not a preset, dictionary defined language. It is a wordless language of the expression of memories planted into the DNA of each plant. They weave their story throughout the tapestry of my yard and embrace me with connections to my loved ones.
Arthritis pain threatened to steal gardening from my life, but it can never take away my plants’ stories. The garden is my elixir and a great antidote to pain.
What stories do your flowers tell you?
Go plant some memories.
Let your garden tell the stories of your life.
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