FlowPow
On entering the ghost garden phase of grief
I didn’t have a yard for about 30 years. I wasn’t aware of that lil life fact until I moved back here and experienced my mom’s landscapey garden without her.
For months and months I would wake up in a grieffog, go outside, walk around until a bloom caught my eye, and then I’d get my scissors out. “Don’t worry, I’m taking you to your next life where you’ll live forever!” I’d say to the flower before I snipped it from its stem/lifesource (usually right above the next first set of healthy leaves as recommended by the Better Homes & Gardens book I found at a library sale), took it inside, and smushed it under the weight of my dark soul. Ok, more like the weight of fifteen heavy books1 .
This wasn’t something I’d planned to do. It was an inner compulsion. For what and why I can only speculate. Maybe I was worried that the flowers would never bloom again because we’d never be able to keep up with the gardening work. We didn’t even really know work, work was involved. We thought mom just threw some seeds around and beautiful carefree things magically sprung up bright, clear, in line and in a new variety each season2. Maybe that’s what I was doing; documenting all of her work and her horticultural genius. Or maybe it’s just that if you have enough time, if you’ve been leveled by grief or change or anything, if you can look, really look at a flower you kind of can’t believe what you’re seeing and that you’ve never seen it before. And you understand why, aside from their fruit cousins, flowers have been a top choice nonreligious subject for artists across centuries.
I am aware that flowers, nature, gardening, etc are all ripe for a human life cycle metaphor. So I’ll let you decide what it means now that I have a years-plus surplus of flattened flowers, flower petals, and interesting leaves, I’ve taken to finding ways to animate them.
I’ve made a few flat arrangements. I admire what some artists do with pressed flowers and I adore Emily Dickinson’s Herbarium and herbariums in general. Who doesn’t? But lately, whenever I start to arrange a petal on a flat page, my brain screams “make it dance!” Who am I to ignore the flower?
Flowers stir a compulsion in us to capture and recreate what we see. Is there a floral receptor in our brains? And why does it seem to be connected to loss? Or a general soul ache? Or are those silly questions? Something beautiful is here. Then it is not. We spend our lives trying to get a grip on this very notion.
Pysche sent out a newsletter recently with a link to ‘Nothing renders their beauty’ – can art ever capture the splendour of a flower? It includes this (see below) enchanting short film, Algorithmns of Beauty. The director, Miléna Trivier, got her inspiration from Mary Delany’s work.
Delany, an 18th century English artist, started creating incredible replicas of flowers using paper and scissors at the age of 743. That’s right, seventy-four. I love a late bloomer story! I also want to note that people aren’t just annuals or perennials. We could use more cyclical bloomer stories. Probably why I started Hot Hot Boredom.
Back to Delany. Trivier mentions that Delany started making her unique paper mosaic flowers for the people she’d lost. Her second husband had recently passed and I imagine that by the age of 74, she’d experienced a number of loses and a whole lot of life. It’s interesting that you can tell this just by looking at her work. There’s something ethereal and even a bit upsetting or ghostly about static, flat flowers. It’s possibly the most Lynchian of the nature arts.
Much like our relationship with flowers and nature, the film is haunting, beautiful, and fleeting. Give a watch when you have a spare 20 minutes and time/space to read subtitles. Then go outside and commune with the flowers.
Thank you so much for reading! I mean it. You are awesome and have incredible taste and curiosity and you will go far in life.
I’ll be sending out an update in the next few days about a new craft section and project for HHB, so you’ll get to hear from me a couple times this week4. In the meantime, I would love to hear your thoughts about flowers and life and art and how maybe we should only speak French when discussing those things.
My brother has since made me a flower press with some wood boards and really tall bolt-screw thingies.
Ok, we knew it was a lot of work but we didn’t KNOW, know.
Trivier says 74, but some sources say 72.
I don’t typically send out multiple updates/emails, but if you find emails annoying you can opt out in your Substack settings.