GARDENS AND LIBRARIES

A BOOK I am currently reading, Jennifer Potter's Seven Flowers and How they Shaped our World, is about the stories and histories flowers have to say! How about flowers in stories? Here's some ideas!

Ophelia's wild river flowers are deadly in Shakespeare's Hamlet, but Romeo is so beautiful Juliette can only compare him to a rose!

Flowers as a token of love, passion and affection exist everywhere in books, from Charles Dickens's Bleak House to E.L. James's Fifty Shades of Grey. In Tara Sue Me's The Submissive, a bouquet of white roses with pink tips is fraught with meaning!

A tragic story behind flowers is found in Elizabeth Gaskell's Ruth; hero-villain Henry Billingham places flowers on Ruth's beautiful hair, only to remember them later while he is ill and Ruth is nursing him, the love they once shared shattered beyond repair.

If you are interested in the history of flowers and their cultural meanings, I would recommend Edward Lucie-Smith's Flora: Gardens and Plants in Art and Literature, Brent Elliott's Flora: An Illustrated History of the Garden Flower, and Peter Harkness's The Rose: A Colourful Inheritance. All beloved books in my garden -- er, I mean library!