I am not a flower girl - or wasn't. I'd always rejected things that screamed 'girl' - flowers, pink, frilly socks. I was horseriding bareback along the beach and surfing and skateboarding, and though I liked gardening from an early age, it was a practical kind of gardening - I'd plant thyme in pots and lug them from house to house.
But my Mum loved blue irises. Sometimes that's enough to make you love something to - that someone you love felt so strongly about something. It was enough to make me choose blue irises for my wedding bouquet - because I sure as hell wasn't having an ordinary bouquet.
Van Gogh's Irises courtesty of WikipediaMum always loved Van Gogh. I guess it was one of the painters you were taught about at school. In my tradition of rejecting cliches, I also rejected his sunflowers, midnight skies and irises - they were too popular for me to even glance at.
But this week's Hive Garden challenge, that asks us to look at gardens in art, has me lazily turning to the irises, because I don't have time to peruse other art right now, and because I just transplanted some irises to fill a garden space after chopping down a native banksia that the rabbits were hiding under. It's Spring here, and I'm eagerly waiting for them to flower, because I'm convinced no one could not put an offer on the house once they see them in full bloom.
Van Gogh's Irises are almost as dynamic as the real thing - or perhaps more so. They fill the frame - one cannot escape them. There's an intensity to them - thickly painted and almost tactile, they swirl across the canvas. They are so intense and alive - flowers caught in time. I wonder about those flowers, and the bulbs from them - he painted them in 1889, and are those bulbs still planted in gardens today?
I'll certainly be taking them to my new place, at least a few of them. They are such a delight come Spring. When Dad died, I focussed on the irises as a symbol of life persisting. He died in September, so this month is the mark of him gone a year, and when the irises come out, I think I'll either sob or smile - or maybe both. Vincent long dead, Dad long dead, and the irises still a-bloomin'.
My favourite irises are not deep blues, but deep maroon or bright yellows - like in the painting, the irises in my garden have an individual presence, full of energy and vitality. For the first time I imagine Van Gogh as like me - looking at the natural world with admiration and wonder, and being lost within it. There's also the single white iris, apart from the cluster of purple ones - Van Gogh himself, perhaps, isolated and different, like how I feel in my day to day life. I admire that = the defiance, the non conformity. Later queer readings suggest that there is an intense expression of difference here, and the painting is a defiance of social norms - perhaps because they are so vivid and unruly on the canvas, they become a celebration of non conformity. The more you look, the more you see.
Perhaps if I had his artistry, I would paint my iris colours in thick sweeps of paint.
Image created at my prompting by Chat GPT
I realise that these days I am a flower girl. They're metaphors, symbols, reminders, lessons. They are beautifully impractical (though the herbalist in me knows that there is medicinal value in almost every plant, if not all) and paralysing, at times, in their beauty. They are all the more special because they're impermanent , brief in their splendour. Nothing lasts, after all, but we can appreciate things whilst they are around.
With Love,
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Hmm, is this a test to see who reads all the way to the final sentence?
Finished 😁
Grand. I feel much better now!
Stop solving the riddles for everyone! Let other people shine, too! 😜
Riddles? If it takes a man a week to walk a fortnight, how many apples in a barrel of grapes?
That's math. That's easy. To take a week to walk a fortnight means he's walking double speed, so a 2x. The regular apple is 5x larger in diameter than a grape, but that's in 1D - in 3D, it would be 5³, so 125 times bigger. Meaning, there are 1/125x apples in a barrel of grapes.
Now, barrels of grapes are barrels of wine. If we take the bordeau standard of 225l, and say each grape has a volume of 2,8cm³ and hence an apple has 350cm³, we get to a result of 642 apples per barrel, not calculating the space between the apples. The fact that "42" is inside this number is already a hint to that I'm on the right path. Now, we 2x from the speed-walker that and get to 1284, the year that Edward II. was born, an event that lead to the invasion of Ireland in 1315 - and that is obviously the whole idea of the riddle, to educate about the history of Ireland.
Impressive! It's almost as if you can read my mind:)
Lol. Oops.
I can't believe it's been a year for your dad already!!
A side note: I have a T shirt with a blue iris on it. I wore it over black pants to my friend's memorial in August. His daughter commented on the shirt, saying iris was his favorite flower. I said I'd wore it as life carries forward, the pants as sadness and grief. I hadn't known it was his favorite.
I, on the other hand, started out with flowers, having no mom or grandmother to learn from. My paternal grandmother used to put in a few annuals each year, but it wasn't really a garden. And now my biggest gardens are vegetables and herbs. But there's always some flowers for the pollinators.
But currently the very favorite of the pollinators is the Yellow Dotted Mint.
That's amazing you wore a shirt with his favourite flower! Love those coincidences.
I'm not familiar with the yellow dotted mint .. will have to look it up.
I do love the herb flowers though, from pretty coriander to calendula. I always made exceptions for those.
I know, nearly a year. I walked past a fundraiser for the Melbourne cancer center he was at today. I had to quickly say I couldn't stop to chat because I'd cry. They were very kind about it.
Irises is beautiful, I haven't really seen one in person but with the photo, it screams beauty. Between the two irises you have I love the darker one, the yellow is pretty and can brighten one place but the dark one hits different. Its like in gradient.
And Ahhh, sorry about your dad, so it is this month.
Thanks lovely. Yes I love the darker ones as well x Just really unusual!
This is beautiful.
Who knew flowers could carry so much rebellion and memory all at once? You’ve definitely made me look at irises differently.
Did I tell you I saw Vincent van Gogh at the wool show last weekend...
Oh he's Vincent Van Goat.
But seriously I know your tomboy antics so to speak with the surfing beach riding etc, Mrs T was not girly either and appreciates flowers. In our 26 years of marriage I only bought her flowers twice, she then pointed out she likes flowers on plants, so then those flower bunches became plants. Irises really are gorgeous but then again I am a blueaholic. A big hug River and I feel for you with the first year of Dad's passing coming up.
I have blue and white irises in my garden and I really have to start writing about it. I'm very proud of my garden, it was almost barren dirt, nothing else, and now it's a little paradise that I get a lot of credit for from people visiting the restaurant.
I got the irises from a friend of mine, she was weeding out hers and gave me around 20 bulbs. That was 5 years ago, since then, I've lightened the rows of mine around 3 times, and gave away more or less 10kg of iris bulbs. The biggest part went to Lily's school, as those plants are resilient little buggers and can sustain the handling of children quite well.
The colors are beautiful and the way you see Van Gogh makes me also think deeper about the painting. Flowers really carry so much story with them. Thanks for sharing this. Have a wonderful day...
Iris are my favorite flower.