“Asia forms the heartland of the wild chrysanthemum, with China the centre of diversity…. In addition to being prized for its beauty, the chrysanthemum was incorporated into the very heart of Chinese culture, in literature, religion and the very rhythm of the seasons, with festivals and traditions linked to their flowering….
“Unlike the relatively simple and largely romanticized ‘language of flowers’ of the West, in China the meaning of individual plants is overlaid not only with historical and cultural association and religious symbolism, but with philosophical attributes associated with flower shape, colour, flowering time and growth habit. In Chinese culture plants may also be combined to make favourable or auspicious groupings; for example the pine, bamboo and plum combine to make the ‘Three Friends of Winter’, or suihan sanyou, and represent longevity and perseverance, which in turn are virtues attached to the ‘gentleman scholar’….
“When the chrysanthemum, bamboo, plum blossom and orchid are combined they are collectively referred to as the ‘Four Gentlemen’ or ‘Four Noblemen’. In this guise they represent the four seasons and the unfolding nature of the year from autumn to winter through spring and summer. This in turn represents the passage through life and its cyclical return.”
Big Weather is threatening us with another snowstorm, “storm” being a bit relative here since a southeastern snowstorm is any amount of snow over a dusting from flurries. I think this one’s less likely than the last one (which I also thought was unlikely — surprise!), and I’m right at the predicted dividing line between snow and not-snow, so I may or may not see any. Even so, it’s much colder than a typical late January — with temps barely creeping up to freezing — so I’m glad to have some warm and fiery red flowers to work on and share.
“From philosophy to art, ceramics to silks, medicine to death: the chrysanthemum winds its way through ancient Chinese culture to the imperial courts of Japan and onto the canvases and pages of Western civilization. Often dismissed as the ‘showman’s flower’ it draws its allure from the gold of the Sun and the rule of emperors, with sunset shades beloved by East and West. The delicacy of its petals, combined with a long flowering period, gained it the affection of the ancient Chinese, who named it Chu, from which comes the name of the ancient city Ta-chu Hsien….
“Coming to Europe with the opening up of Chinese trade in the eighteenth century, the flower was given a new baptism and chu or kiku became chrysanthemum, named from the Greek for gold (chrysos) and for flower (anthos). Ironically, it was not until the importation of ‘Old Purple’, a plum-red variety, that the possibilities of the chrysanthemum were truly appreciated in the West as the cheering yellow colours of the original wild chrysanthemum multiplied into an array of autumnal hues….
“Filling the autumn months, they give rise to associations varying from remembrance of ancestors to the start of the American football season — the latter an occasion to which it was long a tradition to wear a chrysanthemum buttonhole. In America the tradition of Thanksgiving was soon regarded as incomplete without a bunch of chrysanthemums, despite the fact that they only arrived on the continent in the late eighteenth century.”
Dusky red chrysanthemums out of Japan, With silver-backed petals like armor, Tell me what you think sometimes? You have fiery pink in you too… You all mean loveliness: You say a word Of joy. You come from gardens unknown Where the sun rises… You bow your heads to merry little breezes That run by like fairies of happiness; You love the wind and woody vines That outline the forest… You love brooks and clouds… Your thoughts are better than my thoughts When the moon is getting high!
Hello!
Here we have the first of four posts featuring photographs of mums and daisies from Oakland Cemetery’s gardens, that I took in late November and early December. My previous posts with pink and magenta mums and daisies from the same trips are:
As I often do, I’ve organized the photographs by color: this set of four posts features blooms where the color red dominates — and these flowers seem to have produced just about every shade of red you could imagine. Some yellow, orange, and white collections are currently queued in my backlog, just waiting to be set free later this month and beyond.
According to PlantNet (and depending on which photograph you’re viewing), the plants will likely be Hardy Garden Mums (Chrysanthemum × morifolium), Persian Daisies (Tanacetum coccineum), or Indian Chrysanthemums (Chrysanthemum indicum) — so you have a one-third chance of getting the name right, as PlantNet attributes about the same probability to each of these three plant names upon examining my photographs. You could also just call them Asters — from their family name Asteraceae — and of course get it exactly right in all cases.
I was glad to come across the book I quoted briefly at the top of this post because I like discovering new books devoted to just one plant genus, especially if the books dive into the botanical and cultural history of the plants. Chrysanthemum (Botanical) by Twigs Way is part of a series of twenty-seven books, each taking a similar approach to botanical history. In my imagination, I like to think I’ll eventually own the whole series; but realistically, I’ll take a look at certain ones as the blooming period for those flowers approaches. We’re not just about photographs here (not that there’s anything wrong with that), so finding books about the dynasties of lilies, snowdrops (a book just about snowdrops!), tulips, rhododendrons, sunflowers, cherries, roses, and daffodils (forthcoming) — all plants that pose for my photoshoots — turns each nature trip into an exploration of not only photography but of plants and their relation to human histories. We are going to learn so many new things!
Here we are on the last day of November (how did THAT happen?), right on the cusp of starting the month of curiosities and baubles, clouds of glitter, and the lights and candles we use to ward off winter darkness. For my part, I’ve engaged the services of my decorating assistant — The Small Dog — who supervised the work yesterday as I untangled the first of two strings of 900 (three sets of 300 each) lights and began shoving them into the Christmas tree. You can just barely see his head peaking around the wall in the first image, but the more I swore at the lights to encourage them to straighten out, the more interested he got!
From “Sensory” by Marian Harmon in The Best Poems of the 90s, edited by Caroline Sullivan and Cynthia Stevens:
Eyes to photo flights of hummingbirds As television lions mate, Vesuvius explodes. Eyes to read the shape of breasts that swell And turn to milk for one as yet unborn.
Tongues to taste new kernel corn The bite of dill, The sweet bright mouth of love.
Ears to hear the measured paragraphs of Bach The stamping of the tiny hooves of deer. Unfinished words that slither into nibbled cries.
Nose that knows delight in spring verbena, Summer phlox and autumn mums, The perfumed sweat that rises with my touch.
Yet all those wonders fade, become as garden weeds, Or dust on lamps When you no longer share The scents, the sounds, the tastes, The beating of my wings.
Hello!
This is the second of three posts with photographs of Persian (or Painted) Daisies (Tanacetum coccineum) and mums (Chrysanthemum zawadzkii) — all in shades of pink, starting with saturated blends of pink, purple, and magenta followed by those that are more purely pink. The first post — where I also wrote about the significance of mums and daisies at Victorian garden cemeteries — is Pink Daisies, Pink Mums (1 of 3).
“The pleasure garden would seem to have come through the fourteenth, fifteenth, and most of the sixteenth centuries, without many changes or additions to its stock of flowers. They had a few, a very few, Roses, and the simple stock-in-trade of Carnation and Pink. Daisies, Violets, Periwinkles, Poppies, Primroses, such were their flowers. They had but little, and of that little, less still is lost to us….
“And so it continued, until the period of great voyages began. During the reign of Queen Elizabeth many new flowers were introduced into our gardens. By 1580 or 1590 at latest, the Tulip had arrived from Turkey, with intermediate stopping places in Germany and the Netherlands upon the way. At about the same time the Auricula came from Flanders. And, by 1600, we may say that the florist’s cult had been established. The possibilities of these garden flowers were at once apparent. It was only a matter of a few years before regular nurseries were in being. So many qualities in the florist’s flowers made their appeal to the curious, if even precious, minds of the English Renaissance. For the reign of James I, even more than that of Queen Elizabeth, represents the flowering of the Elizabethan Age….
“This age, with its humanistic learning, was apt to look upon flowers as not less a part of the dominion of man than the beasts of the field, or the bricks and mortar of a human dwelling. All such things were given to mankind for his use or pleasure. They responded to his care and rewarded him with their plenty.”
White-cloud ribbon crocheted through the sky’s baby blanket. Cradles with pure fall day.
Pink mums, banked row upon row, a child’s picnic treat — scoop upon scoop of ice cream — strawberry sweet.
The gingko’s leaves, fan-shaped and falling. buttering the stones, the grass, earth’s dirty face.
A single rose, dark crimson, droops like a floppy hat. Not here a week ago. She’s come back for the last dance.
Light breezes ripple water, sashay against her petals, spin twirl after twirl fire-gold. Dizzy, giddy,
the sun totters. Stipples a shadow from the tallest pine. Descends through leafless trees in a curvy,
winding line. Vanishes. Like a flat-edged cloth, pale gray felts down.
Sudden gusts, leaf somersaults, the chase — October escapes.
Hello!
Since it will be a busy week of glitterizing the house for Christmas each day around Thanksgiving, we have prepared three posts featuring 54 photos I took in late October that our Post-Processing Department (me!) finished up just in time, as in today. The flowers in these photos are a mix of Persian (or Painted) Daisies (Tanacetum coccineum) and mums (Chrysanthemum zawadzkii). Those with smaller, more compact bunches of flowers are mums; the embiggened ones are Persian Daisies. Wherever you can’t tell the difference, you may call them by either name.
As is so often the case, I went a-hunting for some interesting historical tidbits about the flowers whose photographs I was planning to post, and searched Books to Borrow at the Internet Archive for the phrase “pink daisies.” It wasn’t until I was copying and pasting the up-top quotation from Old Fashioned Flowers by Sacheverell Sitwell that I realized “Pink” was the last word in the second sentence and “Daisies” was the first word in the third sentence. In other words, the excerpt wasn’t about “pink daisies” at all, but about a flower Sitwell was calling “Pink” — even though, if you drop the period between “Pink” and “Daisies,” the sentences seem to work as one anyway.
I had no idea what “Pink” meant as the name of a flower. So, as one does, I turned to my imaginary research assistant ClaudeAI and learned that “Pink” was often used as a common name for flowers in the Dianthus genus, many of which (no surprise here) were actually pink in color. Dianthus plumarius is a typical example, where you can see a fine pink flower with serrated or scalloped edges if you click the link. So even though my excerpt from Old Fashioned Flowers wasn’t about “pink daisies,” I kept it anyway because I liked how it provided a brief tour through the very early history of plant exploration and the British empire — one of my favorite subjects to dig into when I’m researching flower ancestries.
I have to say I sometimes get carried away with my ClaudeAI conversations, and I ended out asking twenty questions about the Old Fashioned Flowers excerpt, the history of imperial Britain, and how that intersected with the movement of plants and flowers around the world. Eventually the conversation swirled into a discussion of the use of daisies and mums, specifically, at cemeteries like Oakland Cemetery that were originally designed as Victorian garden cemeteries. (For more on this, see In the Garden Cemetery: The Revival of America’s First Urban Parks, which describes how early garden cemeteries came about, and includes Oakland among those discussed.) While I knew quite a bit about the design of public spaces like this, I didn’t realize that these flowering plants — daisies and mums — and their placement among the cemetery’s architectural elements was intentional. Here’s what I learned when I told ClaudeAI that I had photographs of these flowers situated among some of their surrounding stone structures and monuments:
Victorian-era garden cemeteries like Oakland Cemetery were revolutionary spaces that blended mourning, horticulture, and landscape design. These were not just burial grounds, but carefully designed landscapes that reflected complex cultural attitudes toward death, nature, and memorial.
Daisies and chrysanthemums were particularly meaningful in this context. Victorian flower language (floriography) assigned specific symbolic meanings to plants. Daisies traditionally symbolized innocence and purity, making them poignant choices for memorial plantings. The pink varieties you’ve photographed would have been especially significant — pink often represented gentle remembrance and tender emotions.
Chrysanthemums in Victorian culture had layered symbolism. In European traditions, they were associated with death and mourning, while in Japanese culture (from which many varieties were imported), they symbolized longevity and nobility. In American garden cemeteries, they represented both memorial and hope.
Oakland Cemetery is an exceptional example of this Victorian garden cemetery aesthetic. Established in 1850, it reflects the era’s approach to commemorating the dead through carefully designed botanical landscapes. The use of ornamental flowers like the pink daisies and mums you’ve photographed would have been intentional — creating spaces of beauty and reflection that transformed mourning into an almost aesthetic experience.
At places like Oakland Cemetery, each planting was essentially a form of three-dimensional storytelling. The positioning of flowers in relation to monuments, paths, and stone structures wasn’t random but carefully calculated. Pink daisies and chrysanthemums would be placed to soften hard stone surfaces, create visual rhythms, and provide emotional nuance to what could otherwise feel like a stark memorial environment.
In these spaces, plants were chosen not just for aesthetic reasons, but as living symbols of human experiences. Pink daisies and chrysanthemums represented nuanced emotional states. Their delicate, somewhat ephemeral nature mirrored Victorian contemplations about life’s transience. The pink color specifically — neither bold red nor stark white — suggested a liminal emotional space of remembrance tinged with hope.
Botanical placement was deliberate. These flowers weren’t randomly scattered but carefully positioned to create narrative landscapes. A cluster of pink daisies might symbolize a child’s innocence, while chrysanthemums could represent a mature life’s complexity. The layered meanings allowed mourners to ‘read’ the landscape as a form of emotional expression.
“Botanical placement was deliberate.” This insight fascinated me, especially since I photographed some of these daisies and mums at wider angles rather than as close-ups, to show their positioning against nearby stone. Some of the photos in this series, for example, show the flowers as they’re tumbling over walls and across memorial structures — something I just thought was aesthetically pleasing (the contrast between delicate flower petals and hard, grainy stone) — but now I know reflects intentional landscape design blended with the property’s monuments and other stone structures. I’ll likely bring a completely different perspective to my next photoshoot at the gardens….
