Botanical exactitude

As I spend much of my life in a flower bed, bottom up, I rarely consciously make the connection between the flowers that I grow in my garden and their more elevated associations, in particular their role in Christian art. Only when I visit art galleries or churches am I forcibly reminded that gardens and wild flowers appear again and again in paintings, as well as featuring prominently in the plastic and applied arts.

This is hardly surprising, since flowers were both comprehensible and universal symbols in preliterate times, and have remained enduring signs of Man’s appreciation of the beauty and variety of God’s creation. This was brought home to me the other week in Krakow in southern Poland, when I went to reacquaint myself with the Art Nouveau stained glass and murals of Stanislaw Wyspianski.