BLOOMING FLOWERS: A SEASONAL HISTORY OF PLANTS AND PEOPLE
A book to dip into little and often, which serves up a year’s worth of intellectual stimulation, sensual pleasure and high-brow, pub-quiz trivia.
Reviewer Jodie Jones is a garden writer.
This engaging book, subtitled
A Seasonal History of Plants and People, is hard to classify but easy to read. Author Kasia Boddy is a Cambridge University academic who has devoted herself to the study of literature, so you would expect her exploration of the role of plants in cultural history to be beautifully written, but the breadth of her references is quite simply breathtaking.
From ancient history to modern pop culture, through the outer reaches of art, politics and religion, she wrangles her references into 16 carefully curated chapters, subdivided into seasonal sections which consider four flowers a piece.
Take the chapter on Daffodils, in which Boddy tells the story of how William Wordsworth came to write the one poem that everyone has heard of. This is unexpectedly interwoven with an exploration of the Caribbean literary canon that perceives a ‘daffodilish presence’ hanging over everything, imposing colonialist assumptions on readers (and writers) who most probably had never seen even a single golden trumpet bloom. Then she explains how Wordsworth’s poem was largely derided during his lifetime and only became really popular some decades after his death, when the Lake District tourism industry spotted its marketing potential. Threaded through it all are classical and Persian references, a botanical comparison of Narcissus tazetta with N. pseudonarcissus, and a historical consideration of the geographical origins of the Tenby Daffodil. No wonder this book’s final credits for literary sources runs to nearly 20 pages of closely spaced entries.
If you have ever wondered how Calla lilies became a symbol of the Republican movement in Ireland, or why the historic association of roses with prostitution was revived to circumvent civic decency laws on dating websites, or how exactly you extract opium from poppies, then you will love Blooming Flowers.