The headquarters of Birthday Blossoms in New York City recently received the gift of over a foot of snow outside our door, courtesy of Old Man Winter. Accompanying the snow is a pocket of extreme cold which, according to forecasters, intends to hang around. Put those two sentences together and you get the perfect situation for a book recommendation. And what better than a book about flowers?
Science tells us looking at flowers can make one feel happier. Which, naturally, begs the question, might a book about flowers make one feel warmer? As with many things, there is only one way to find out. Birthday Blossoms staff members did the work for you and we are delighted to report that the experiment was a success. The book we chose for our test was The Flowers Personified, a nineteenth-century book by the artist J.J. Grandville. This genre-defying work contains a collection of floral writings, such as short stories, satirical essays, and humorous asides, all accompanied by exquisite illustrations.
The titular storyline imagines common flowers coming to life as splendidly adorned women who possess the flowers’ characteristics. The flowers live in the domain of the Flower Fairy, a secret oasis where plants from every zone and climate exist in harmony. One day, the flowers join together and ask if they may assume human form so they can experience human life and see whether human judgement of the characters of each flower are correct. The Flower Fairy agrees, albeit sadly, and sends them off with the prediction that they will soon be back. (To speed up their return, she decides to teach men to love tobacco, under the theory that the flower women won’t like this and it will drive them home. Her plan is foiled when the women take up smoking too, and she must wait for them to come back in their own time.)
The stories of each of the flowers lives as humans are accompanied by lavish illustrations of what each would look like if she were personified. Interspersed amongst these stories are miscellaneous other writings. In one essay, the Flower Fairy provides a treatise on the origin of the violet to correct what has been written about it. There is a petition from ballroom flowers protesting their treatment – they want to stay in their vases, not go to balls as hair ornaments for young ladies (they helpfully suggest diamonds as a substitute), and they resent that the day after the ball they are thrown out with the garbage. Another example is a digression on the fashions of flowers, a sort of history of which flowers have been valued by French society and what that tells us, starting from the Middle Ages through the nineteenth century.
We eventually find ourselves back with the personified flowers in a floral version of The Decameron. If you aren’t familiar with fourteenth-century Italian literature, The Decameron contains one hundred stories told by a group of friends who have fled a plague and are sheltered at a Tuscan villa. In the floral version, some of the women who became flowers meet up on their way back to the home of the Flower Fairy. They have lost their way and decide to sit and tell each other what they have been doing during their sojourn on earth while they try to figure out how to find their destination. They only make it through seven stories before they espy a friendly bluebird who leads them to their home.
The book is equal parts whimsy, social commentary, botanical information, and fantastical entertainment. Taken together, you get a lovely escape from the adamantine chill of a winter day. Throw in a cozy blanket and a cup of hot tea and you might even forget the cold.