The flowers look lovely in the big picture window with the sun streaming through them. An unexpected gift of lilies and roses which I’ve jammed into the first vase I’ve managed to find; glad to have found any vase in this new flat full of unpacked boxes and unresolved spaces in cupboards and shelves. The flowers feel like a small space of order and calm in the chaos. I stand back to admire them better. Yes they make a charming picture in the frame of the window there’s no denying, but I know that as soon as those lilies start to fan open I’ll throw the whole lot out. They are beautiful, but like everything else; up to point. While they’re still tightly furled the lilies have an elegant poise about them but once they splay open into those big blousy blooms; it’s as if they lose all sense of decorum; like pretty girls at the bar who after too many drinks turn into loud, drunken trollops coming on to every man in sight. Once their petals flare open revealing those thrusting dark stamens, the lilies look indecent, desperate for attention. But it’s not so much the sight of the gaping flowers that trouble me, as the cloying scent they give off when they open up. It’s the smell of funeral homes with the hushed strains of consoling organ music as relatives quietly weep; the overpowering stench of loss and grief. So yes, lovely - up to a point, but once they get ‘overblown’ the lilies will quickly become repugnant and I’ll have to bin them along with the roses which their gaudy petals have forced into hiding; the innocent roses tainted by association.
The Italians take a different view. For them the lily is all about purity, beauty and even chastity. You’ve only to see the way the Angel Gabriel wafts his lily about when he gives the big news to the Virgin Mary in the Renaissance paintings. Then again, maybe Gabriel’s lily not only symbolises Mary’s present state but foretells her future suffering as a mother losing her only son. So even in the Annunciation there’s a whiff of tragedy. The lily (il giglio) is the symbol of the city of Florence, you see it emblazoned everywhere, though on closer inspection the Florentine giglio is what we would call an iris. And you can’t take exception to an iris, can you? Irises keep their integrity; they don’t blow out like lilies. There’s something uncompromisingly stylish about an iris. I like to think of them as a unisex flower. You’re safe to give irises to a man as a gift without it seeming too feminine or frothy a gesture.
“Consider the lilies of the field……even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these” says The Bible in homage to the lily’s natural magnificence. And yes they are highly decorative but the trouble is they go too far. They are like exhibitionist of the worst order. They are too ‘in your face’. Lilies have their moment, but for me, the moment passes all too soon. I believe Shakespeare was closer to the mark, (as he so often was), when he said “Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds”.
The New Testament; Luke 12:27
Shakespeare: Sonnet 92
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