'Flowers hold powerful histories, from African slavery to Indian freedom and anti-Vietnam War protests in the US'

Kasia Boddy is Professor of English at the University of Cambridge. She tells Times Evoke about why flowers matter so deeply to people worldwide — and how these repositories of meaning could soon change:


Kasia Boddy writes about the floral world but far from being flowery in talk, she speaks in a concise, even dry way, about the efflorescence of blossoms. Discussing her work, Boddy explains, ‘My research is about the ways in which the things we do and interact with in our everyday life feed into aspects of culture .

I’ve written about boxing and sport earlier — this is one of the things people take for granted but it has very important impacts.’ She allows herself a fleeting smile as she comments, ‘While I’ve never been a boxer myself though, I have always been a keen gardener — my research on plants began some years ago when I contributed to a book about urban life. Back then, I didn’t have a garden but grew a window box. So, I began thinking about the ways people construct urban gardens — that led me to write a book about geraniums and the history of how those plants from South Africa travelled the world and came to mean different things in diverse contexts.’ She then wrote ‘Blooming Flowers’, a series of essays around the four seasons and the changing meanings of blossoms.

‘What flowers convey to human beings varies across cultures but there are similar patterns,’ Boddy points out. ‘Flowers are tied to rituals of love and weddings, to religious beliefs and offerings, to rites of renewal and the cycles of human life itself. Their fragility symbolises human vulnerability while their beauty and growth reflect rejuvenation. There is almost no sphere of human culture where flowers don’t appear — they are important in agriculture, art, medicine, etc.’

Flowers also have political symbolism . ‘The saffron blossom and poppies hold vital histories. These archives can be localised, even arbitrary, but they make a flower a powerful symbol,’ Boddy says, ‘Poppies grow continuously in the fields of northern France — every time these are ploughed, they come up again. After the first World War, people noticed their preponderance in fields where terrible battles had raged very recently. So, a campaign began to make them a symbol of the soldiers lost to the war,’ Boddy allows herself another measured smile as she comments, ‘Interestingly, while this movement grew out of Canada and the United States, in France itself, the symbol of martyred soldiers was cornflowers as their forces wore blue uniforms.’ Flowers also symbolised revolutions — ‘In my book, I discuss how carnations became the symbol first of the Russian Revolution in 1917 and then, the Portuguese Revolution in 1974 — by that point, carnations had become a massproduced flower, grown through green houses. They were very easily available and often red, a revolutionary colour.’

Some flowers remain consciously nonpolitical and deeply commercial — as Boddy writes, roses have become ubiquitously acceptable symbols. ‘For people living in rural areas, surrounded by flowers, traditional meanings persist’ she explains, ‘For those who live in cities and are more alienated from natural circles, inter actions with flowers depend on what’s available in shops — the mass production of roses that commercial growers have learnt to do and their transportation on a huge scale has driven their prominence. There is hardly an occasion now when roses are not gifted or displayed. Interestingly, in the early 20th century, modernist artists grew eager to break away from all sorts of clichés, including how roses had become stereotypes about love and senti mentality. They decided to think of new meanings for them — the American poet Marianne Moore wrote a poem on roses, saying their thorns were their best part, subverting the ordinary ways people envisioned them.’

Alongside, some flowers become hotly politicised. ‘In Ireland, the Easter lily became a symbol of the IRA and there are still debates in Northern Ireland about these flowers appearing in government buildings.’ Sometimes, it wasn’t so much the flower itself but its colour. ‘One of the main uses of saffron is as a dye — this became banned in Ireland which the English had colonised. Irish nationalists, who got saffron by importing it, dyed their clothes with this flower as a sign of defiance. So, Henry VIII tried to establish a ban on all saffron-coloured clothes, a move which, he found, was quite hard to police,’ Boddy explains with a definite hint of amusement in her voice.

For all their delicate, winsome appearance, flowers also reflect brutal realities. ‘The whole project of colonialism was very much tied into collecting flowering plants for commercial purposes — colonialists, accompanied by botanists, moved crops from one part of the Empire to another, obscuring the origins of plants and their growers. Cotton is a crucial example,’ Boddy explains, ‘It isn’t a garden plant but it has flowers and played a very important role in the history of the modern world, stemming from cotton plantations in America, which increased the demand for slaves from Africa to service them. In India, a major cotton producer, British colonial trade focused greatly on this crop while a key phase of the Indian independence movement came with Mahatma Gandhi boycotting imported cotton, arguing Indians should spin and weave their own.’

Flowers and protests grew intertwined. ‘The struggle in the US against the Vietnam War was associated with a desire to protest peacefully. Flowers grew important — the poet Alan Ginsburg advocated carrying these on marches and giving them to police. In October 1967, young National Guard soldiers were posted at the Pentagon and anti-war protestors approached them with flowers — a photo by the French photographer Marc Riboud captured a young woman holding a chrysanthemum, a seasonal flower, which she gave to a soldier who looked the same age as her. She reported he was shaking while she gave him this blossom — the black-and-white picture showed this whole line of soldiers with their bayonets pointing at her and this young woman holding up just this single little flower.’

Today, climate change could alter this entire floral universe with its rich meanings. Boddy elaborates, ‘In Britain, people are noticing changes in seasons and plants now — there is what scientists are terming ‘season creep’. Autumn and spring are longer now while winter is shorter. The northern hemisphere could move towards two long seasons with shorter transitional ones, more like the southern hemisphere. While certain flowers that used to perish in the winter now survive, we see daffodils and tulips blooming much earlier. Importantly, flowering crops used for food are not being able to cope with extreme weather conditions like drought and heavy flooding. There are real efforts on in the horticultural world to develop new strains of flowering plants which are resilient and can keep feeding the planet.’ Meanwhile, flowers that indicated seasons like spring — and reasons like hope — could change. That could subtly but powerfully alter some of our relationships with our outer — and inner — worlds.