A flower is beautiful, and that above all is why we love them. But often, and in many places, a flower is also much more — it’s a food, a lucrative export, a symbol. There’s a reason why, throughout history, different people in different places have lost their minds over one flower or another (the tulip most famously, but not only); a flower is both a seductive object and a metaphor, a receptacle for whatever kind of meaning we bestow upon it.
In this issue, we traveled to six places to see what a flower represents — not only as a crucial part of an ecosystem but in a culture’s larger psychology. “Flowers are enduring yet mutable symbols upon which our collective imagination inscribes meaning,” notes writer at large Aatish Taseer in his story about how the lotus flower, long an icon of religious significance in Sri Lanka, became appropriated as a political one, too. “The transition of a natural entity such as the rose, the acanthus or the fleur-de-lis into a totem is essentially an authorless process in which an entire enterprise of sculptors, artisans, bards and poets, each working within tradition, express the cultural yearnings of a society,” he continues. This is certainly true in Sri Lanka, where the lotus — the manifestation of the idea of purity, of something beautiful rising from the muck — is ubiquitous yet, depending on who you ask, signifies something different.
One of the reasons the language of plants has always fascinated me is because I grew up in Hawaii, where everyone understood the semiotics of flowers. The papery little ilima, a member of the hibiscus family, was worn by royalty and strung into leis for only the most special occasions; the intoxicatingly scented tuberose, a native of Mexico, was an expression of love. Growing flowers, picking them, stringing them and, most important, giving them, was often a substitute for speech. You didn’t need to say you were happy for someone, or that you missed them — the flowers did it for you. Sometimes, words will do; other times, flowers will do better.
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