Flower power: symbols of romance and revolution

Critics have argued over the meaning of the great golden flower head to which Van Dyck points in his ‘Self-Portrait with a Sunflower’. It probably symbolises the radiant majesty of the painter’s patron, Charles I, but for Van Gogh the sunflower ‘embodied and shouted out yellow, the colour of light, warmth and happiness’.

In the Victorian language of flowers the plant denoted pride or haughtiness, but its tendency to turn its head to the sun led Byron’s abject Julia to use its image on a seal for her final letter to Don Juan with the accompanying motto Elle vous suit partout. The sunflower has been adopted as an emblem by such diverse groups as the American women’s suffrage movement in 1896, the devoted followers of Chairman Mao in 1960s China and the Green Party in Germany in the 1980s. It is also the national flower of Ukraine, which not only grows some 15 million tonnes of sunflowers a year from which to extract a cooking oil low in saturated fat, but planted further ranks of them around the damaged Chernobyl nuclear reactor because they are highly effective in soaking up and eradicating radioactive contaminants. The cultural, symbolic and scientific properties of this single plant, one of 16 discussed, gives an indication of the imaginative reach of Kasia Boddy’s Blooming Flowers.

Subtitled ‘A Seasonal History of Plants and People’, it is arranged in four sections — from spring to winter — each containing a general introduction and chapters on four individual species. Alongside essays on the lily, rose and poppy are investigations of less obvious plants, such as lotus, cotton and almond. Even among familiar flowers Boddy finds unexpected stories and 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.