BLOOMING FLOWERS
A SEASONAL HISTORY OF PLANTS AND PEOPLE
KASIA BODDY
Yale, 256pp, £14.99, ebook £6.99
Kasia Boddy’s book about flowers is less a manual for gardening than a miscellany of stories, culture and symbolism. Reviewing Blooming Flowers in the Sunday Times, Richard Eyre reflected on his own horticultural meditations: ‘I’ve had the RHS A-Z Encyclopedia of Garden Plants on my breakfast table as my household bible and studied a page or two a day like a monk in a refectory, so a book with the title Blooming Flowers ought to be my perfect companion. And in some ways it almost is.’
Publishers Weekly in the States also enjoyed the book’s ruminations. ‘The flowers, divided among the four seasons they represent, include old standbys (such as roses and lilies) as well as unusual varieties (such as almond and cotton flowers). In a meandering, essayistic fashion and with a flair for aphorisms (“Autumn is spring’s alter ego”), Boddy touches on origins, popular associations, and ceremonial and medicinal applications in countries around the world (including China, Japan, Mexico, India, and Iran).’
What Eyre missed in the book was ‘a sense of wonder’: ‘Look into the face of a bearded iris and I defy you not to marvel at its preposterous beauty and the miraculous complexity of its invention.’ In the Spectator, however, Peter Parker enjoyed Boddy’s connections: ‘In discussing roses, she refreshingly highlights the flower’s sexual, rather than traditionally romantic, associations, from “the virginal promise of the closed rosebud” in 16th-century poetry to gonorrhoea being dubbed “Saigon Rose… the prickliest rose of all” during the Vietnam war.’ Parker thought it ‘a garland of delights’.