Blooming Flowers

“Daffodils made D.H. Lawrence think of ‘ruffled birds on their perches'; yellow cabs reminded Frederick Seidel of daffodils. John Ruskin brought a fine-tuned sensibility to bear when declaring a bunch of anemones ‘marvellous in their exquisitely nervous trembling and veining of colour – violin playing in scarlet on a white ground'. James Schuyler, a curator at New York's Museum of Modern Art as well as a poet, couldn't ‘get over' the beauty that met him at five o'clock ‘on the day before March first', 1954, when he saw the green leaves and pink flowers of the tulips on his desk against the backdrop of a setting Manhattan sun.”

And if this paragraph makes sense to you, you get a reading medal.

This was supposed to be a beautiful book about the beauty of flowers, the legends, the stories, the poems, the paintings. And it tried to be. Hard. Presenting sixteen plants, divided by seasons, its only redeeming quality the vivid illustrations and the reference to Jean Genet's Un Chant d'Amour, his only film.

And that's about it.

Let me count my issues with it.

Oh, right. They're too many...

Unnecessary political remarks. Why does everything get politicised these days? It's tiresome.

Excuse me, but when a writer starts making references to Sex and the City and similar TV series made for stupid people, I begin to seriously doubt her integrity. Even if her comments are dismissive (as they ought to be). TV references about a bunch of sex-crazed bimbos side-by-side to Romantic poets and remarks about the Troubles?

Are you serious?

The writing is all over the place. Too many extracts “woven” into the paragraphs, too many clarifications, too many parentheses. Footnotes would have been a better choice, in my opinion. I mean, do we really need to be told what “photosynthesis “ is? It seemed to me a poor effort on the part of the writer to show off.

A little more respect towards Oscar Wilde wouldn't hurt. Her attitude is particularly high-and-mighty towards certain issues. And her obsession with D. H. Laurence acquired exhausting proportions. In addition, she needs to check her fact on Ancient Greek culture and mythology. Her inaccuracies were shockingly ignorant. In addition, she completely ignores the well-known Native American legend of the princess and the Sun God which is linked to the sunflower. But yes, let's write about Mao Zedong instead...

In addition, writing about saffron and not mentioning the Greek variety of the beautiful plant, referring instead to...Essex, Pennsylvania and the supposedly “nationalist” connotations of its use in Asia (yeah, I don't know where that came from) was the final stroke.

We get it, greenhouses bad!!!

Numerous syntactic and grammatical errors.

Also, “middle-age reflection”? Seriously?

Some may like this one. But I wouldn't let it anywhere near my bookcase. To me, it is one more example of a “writer” that desires to show off her limited knowledge by stacking quote upon quote in every single paragraph, serving dubious political agendas. How was that even possible in a book about flowers? The explanation hasn't bloomed in my mind yet, and I won't bother...

Many thanks to Yale University Press and NetGalley for the ARC...