![\"Book](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/\/7cccae33-896c-4ef1-a609-6cc5f6b8970f.jpg\")
<\/p>\nI have remembered a cartoon that made me giggle. Henry VIII walks into a florist. On the counter is a sign advising customers to Say It with Flowers. So Henry says: \u201cI\u2019ll have a bunch of stalks.\u201d <\/p>\n
Which proves, I suppose, that saying it with flowers can be good for a laugh. <\/p>\n
But, as Hope B Werness insists in The Secret Language of Plants, an encyclopaedic summer read packed with examples of horticulture\u2019s insistent presence in art, the world of flowers can prompt a cornucopia of reactions and emotions. And humour is rarely the aim. Indeed, by the time you\u2019ve finished reading this windy and heavily pictured tome you\u2019ll be wondering how art might have symbolised anything profound, complex or important had it not had flowers, trees and vegetables at its (green) fingertips. <\/p>\n
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Van Gogh only features lightly in Werness\u2019s bouquet, which surprised me. If I had written the book he would be on the cover. His Sunflowers and Irises convey the thump of ecstatic excitement that horticulture can hit you with more tangibly than any other painter. Except, perhaps, Renoir in one of his good spells. <\/p>\n
But this thrilling directness can be deceptive. Flowers keep popping up in art because they are beautiful and stir the senses, but also because they have sneakier ambitions: the secret language Werness warns of in her title. And here the revelations are not always so sunny.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s a painting by Van Gogh called La Mousm\u00e9, which shows a young girl with a stern expression holding a sprig of oleander. It was inspired, we learn in one of Van Gogh\u2019s letters to his brother, by Pierre Loti\u2019s novel Madame Chrysanth\u00e8me, which is set in Japan. \u201cA mousm\u00e9,\u201d Van Gogh writes, \u201cis a Japanese girl \u2014 Proven\u00e7al in this case \u2014 twelve to fourteen years old.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u2022 Henrietta Abel Smith \u2014 Britain\u2019s new flower power painter<\/b><\/a><\/p>\n So far, so innocent. Until we turn to the flower she is holding. Oleander may be pretty but it is also deadly poisonous. Van Gogh had read about some French soldiers in the Peninsular War who had used skewers of oleander branches to grill their food. Eight out of 12 of them died. So when he puts a sprig of oleander in the hands of a teenage girl \u2014 \u201ctwelve to fourteen years old\u201d \u2014 he\u2019s issuing an uncomfortable warning. Danger ahead. The darkness of Van Gogh is rarely admitted to these days \u2014 the days of cuddly Vincent. But the secret language of plants can also be the secret language of uncomfortable truths.<\/p>\n Werness doesn\u2019t deal with La Mousm\u00e9 but she does deal with another awkward horticultural symbol \u2014 the palm. If you\u2019ve ever stepped into a Christian church you may have noticed how many of the female saints gathered on the altar are holding palm fronds. Why? To symbolise their martyrdom. The brutal killing of young virgins, usually because they refused to marry a pagan, became a favourite theme in Catholic art. <\/p>\n Francisco de Zurbar\u00e1n\u2019s St Apollonia, 1636<\/p>\n ALAMY<\/p>\n The great Spanish baroque painter Francisco de Zurbar\u00e1n produced a lengthy suite of depictions of these female martyrs, beautifully attired, stepping elegantly to their deaths, holding a palm. For the Romans the palm had been a symbol of victory. So when the female martyrs display one they are signalling their victory over death. Thus Zurbar\u00e1n\u2019s gorgeous St Apollonia in the Louvre clasps a palm in one hand and a pair of pincers in the other with a tooth in them. To torture her for her Christianity, the Romans, it was said, pulled out all her teeth. She is now the patron saint of dentists.<\/p>\n The bad news associated with plants does not figure vigorously in Werness\u2019s book. It\u2019s a summer tome, filled mostly with happy examples. So she omits an important stratum of plant life that has figured strongly in art: things that grow at the bottom of the forest. What fun painters have had with mushrooms, brambles and thistles. An entire arboretum of botanical art is devoted to the darkness under the trees. <\/p>\n Like tulips, it was a Dutch speciality. Van Gogh produced his own versions of the \u201csous bois\u201d, as it was called, but the heyday of the genre was the 17th century when artists such as Rachel Ruysch and Otto Marseus van Schrieck haunted the woods at twilight looking for vegetation that would remind us of the brevity of life and the nearness of the end.<\/p>\n Otto Marseus van Schrieck\u2019s Still Life with Mushrooms and Butterflies<\/p>\n BRIDGEMAN IMAGES<\/p>\n In a typical Ruysch or Van Schrieck, a writhing bramble or broken mushroom will be surrounded by lizards, snails and snakes. In God\u2019s glorious kingdom, everything had its place, and the stuff at the bottom of the woods was the stuff that was most regrettable. The denizens of the dark represented the sinfulness that lurks at the base of humanity. Occasionally, an innocent butterfly would flutter down to compare its briefly joyous life with the eternal gloom of human guilt. Among the mushrooms, however, its days were numbered.<\/p>\n![\"Painting](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/\/1ae891cf-a9ca-4c4a-bd2b-533003e52952.jpg\")
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![\"Painting](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/\/323e8fd7-1eb1-45c5-ade5-1afcd3fa6e3a.jpg\")
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