odds and ends / 5.21.2026 (may flowers)

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Albert Marquet (1875-1947), "Flowering Tree," undated, via le jardin robo.

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"Gertrude always loved her flowers 1937," from the Peter J. Cohen collection.

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Poem by “Michael Field,” the pen name of Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper, published in 1893.

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Sawkille Minnewaska sconce.

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"Medaljonger" tapestry designed by Märta Måås-Fjetterström in 1926.

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One pressed dried rose which had been worn by the English poet George Gordon Byron on his lapel when he toured the frigate U.S.S. Constitution, anchored off Leghorn (Livorno), Italy, on May 21, 1822. The rose was given as a memento to Catharine Potter Stith, who was on board the ship with her husband Townshend Stith; the following day Byron sent her a volume of Goethe's Faust accompanied by an autograph note. The faded red rose consists of the blossom only, minus stem and leaves.

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Estrid Ericson at her summer house, Tolvekarna, in 1942, photographed by Bo Törngren, via Svenkst Tenn. (More photos here, including a truly enviable picnic set-up.)

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At Tolvekarna, Estrid Ericson aimed to create a kind of choreography of vegetation ...  In front of the house’s south-facing terrace, different varieties of honeysuckle, forsythia, lilac and currant were planted. By the outdoor seating area in the east, a rose garden was laid out to be enjoyed at breakfast. The roses were arranged in squares, each bordered by lavender, carnations and thyme.

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Whether I pick you or leave you, flowers,
Your destiny remains the same.

You, path that I follow, are heading
For other destinations, not just mine.

We are nothing that is of any worth
And are therefore doubly worthless.

Fernando Pessoa, 115 [c. 2 September 1923], from The Complete Works of Ricardo Reis.

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"I don't think flowers are at all unnecessary. I see it more as a kind of generosity."

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"Her mouth breathes flowers ..."

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To compare women to flowers is another habit of eternity or of triviality. Here are some examples. “I am the rose of Sharon, and the lily of the valleys,” says the Shulamite in the Song of Solomon. In the story of Math, which makes up the Fourth Branch of the medieval Welsh tale known as the Mabinogion, a lord is asked to form a woman who is not of this world, and by “magic and enchantment” conjures one out of “the flowers of the oak, and the flowers of the broom, and the flowers of the meadowsweet….” In the Fifth Adventure of the Nibelungenlied, Siegfried at last beholds Kriemhild, and the first thing we are told is that her skin shines with the glow of roses. Ariosto, imitating Catullus, compares a maiden to a hidden flower (Orlando, I, 42); in Armida’s garden, in Tasso, a purplebeaked bird exhorts the lovers not to let this flower wither (Gerusalemme, XVI, 13-15). At the end of the sixteenth century, Malherbe tries to console a friend on the death of his daughter and in his condolence are these words: “Et, rose, elle a vécu ce que vivent les roses” (“And, a rose, she lived the lifetime of a rose”). Shakespeare, in a garden, admires the deep vermilion of the roses and the whiteness of the lilies, but these delights for him are but shadows of his absent love (Sonnets, XCVIII). “God, making roses, made my face,” says the Queen of Samothrace on a page of Swinburne. This list might go on without end; The same metaphor is suggested with delicacy in Milton’s famous lines (Paradise Lost, IV, 268-71) on the abduction of Proserpine, and in these lines from Darío: let it suffice to recall that scene in Stevenson’s last book, Weir of Hermiston, in which the hero wants to find out whether Christina had a soul in her or “if she were only an animal the colour of flowers….”

Jorge Luis Borges, "Up from Ultraism." The New York Review, 8/13/1970.

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If a man could pass through Paradise in a Dream, & have a Flower presented to him as a pledge that his Soul had really been there, & found that Flower in his hand when he awoke—Aye! and what then?

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, from the Notebooks. 

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