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….
“It is about the third week in September that the Asters in the pergola garden are at their best, and if the Vines on the vine pergola are doing their duty that season and have coloured well, the contrasts of colour are beautiful on a sunny day. A row of the lovely rosy-pink Aster… crosses the front of one of the square beds, hiding up the plots of bare ground where the Daffodils reigned in the Spring. Though the colour of this delightful variety is charming at all times, it glows out with an extra charm just at sunset, and increases in beauty every minute until the light has faded almost away….”
“From the early days of its cultivation it was known that this plant was a principal ingredient in the manufacture of Persian insect-powder; and its near relation, P. cinerarifolia, was used for the same purpose in Dalmatia. The powder is produced from the flower-heads, which are cut just as they are about to open, carefully dried, and pulverized; and Pyrethrum-powder as an insecticide has become of increasing importance in the present century. Pyrethrums are grown for this purpose in Kenya, and were considered a crop of the first priority during the last war, for their value in the control of insect pests and the prevention of typhus and other insect-spread diseases.
“The pyrethrums are closely related to the chrysanthemums…. The Greek name comes from pyr, meaning fire, and was originally given to a plant with a hot, biting root…. The root of this plant was formerly used as a cure for toothache….”
When I took this batch of photos, the sun had slipped behind some thin clouds, keeping shadows intact yet darkening the scene just a bit. The added saturation made many of these flowers even pinker than the previous pink ones. And — check it out! — the last one is waving “Goodbye” to you!
“The first reference in the Oxford English Dictionary of the word being used to describe pale reds is the late seventeenth century. Before then pink usually referred to a kind of pigment….
“Pink pigments were made by binding an organic colorant, such as buckthorn berries or an extract of the broom shrub, to an inorganic substance like chalk, which gave it body. They came in several colors — you could have green pinks, rose pinks, or brown pinks — but were, more often than not, yellow. It is an odd quirk that while light reds acquired a name of their own, pale greens and yellows did not for the most part (although several languages, including Russian, do have different words for pale and deep blues). Most romance languages made do with a variation of the word rose, from the flower….
“Although it is not certain, it is likely that the English derived their word for the color from another flower, the Dianthus plumarius, also known as the Pink.”
“I have in mind a long narrow border of which the only views are from end to end because, although there is a grass walk to stand on while appreciating it, there is also a hedge completely sealing off all frontal views. Passing behind the hedge, therefore, one uses the grass walk as a means of viewing the border from end to end. Along the front is an edging of Catmint (Nepeta X faassenii), which if clipped over in July will remain in respectable bloom until the autumn, contributing its greyish leaves and soft lavender flowers to almost any colour grouping. Behind it are pyrethrums, irises and lupins, all for June display. Pyrethrums (Tanacetum coccineum) have good parsley-like foliage until autumn….”
Hello!
It can be a challenge to determine the names of some of the Asters I’ve been photographing, but I think I’ve correctly identified these very, very pink ones as the somewhat unpronounceable Tanacetum coccineum — commonly described by the easier-to-say names Pyrethrum, or Painted Daisies, or Persian Daisies. Even if I’ve gotten it wrong, they’re definitely pink! And the first one is waving “Hello!” to you!
