Love among the flowers
EMILE Delavenay’s stupendous study of DH Lawrence’s Formative Years affirms Lawrence having “always loved plants, their sudden growth in spring, the mystery of their flowering”. Lawrence’s sister Ada records in Young Lorenzo the Easter ramble to Wingfield Manor when “nothing escaped my brother’s attention... the first primrose, or the fascinating male and female flowers of the larch”.
Ursula Brangwen, in The Rainbow, decides she “would take honours in botany. This was the one study that lived for her. She had entered into the lives of plants”. Attending Nottingham University College, 1906-08, Lawrence’s botany course had such importance he achieved distinction in that subject, rather than in English. His philosophical botany lecturer, nicknamed “Botany” Smith, became his favourite tutor, along with “elegant” Professor of Modern Languages Ernest Weekley.
Lawrence met his future fiancée Louie Burrows there – she read botany too!
This fervent love of plants offered imaginative escape. Lawrence’s passion took botany to a new plane, as instanced in his Australian novel, Kangaroo.
The disillusioned death of Benjamin Cooley brings lashing rains and roaring winds. A four-day “black storm”. Then awakens Wattle-day in Sydney (August 1, 1922). A “city filled with yellow bloom of mimosa”, Australia’s national flower. Richard and Harriett Somers trot under gum trees in a pony and trap, a “sulky”, to where the bush is in bloom. Along the stream are “great gold bushes full of spring fire”, “ethereal”, “feathery yellow plumes”, issuing the scent of spring. It was “as if angels had flown right down out of the softest gold regions of heaven”. Only “strange bright birds” and flocking parrots broke the stillness of a “bush flowering at the gates of heaven”.
They “plunge” into this “gold plumage” for armfuls of “fluffy gold wattle-bloom”. Their sulky “looked like a corner of paradise”. That evening “angel presences” illumined their room, “something out of heaven”.
Next day “even the sea had gone flowery”. On departure, Harriett felt something of her stayed forever; Richard, “that one of his souls” remained on the rocky promontory, “advanced into the sea”.
100 years ago, on July 31, 1922, Lawrence sends a postcard picturing “lovely” profuse treeferns to Baroness Anna, his mother-in-law. It’s the “beginning of spring”. They “found four kinds of mimosas”. They’re getting “trunks ready again”.
On August 2, Lawrence tells poet William Siebenhaar that the “big storm nearly blew the sea out of its hollow”.