A Victorian Flower Dictionary - Mandy Kirkby [4]
This sweet and aromatic plant was first grown in Britain in the sixteenth century, when it became a favourite kitchen and strewing herb. The Victorians considered it too strongly flavoured for their tastes, and grew it in the hothouse, where it was valued for its creamy flowers and deep and musky scent. Those who were wealthy enough to make the Grand Tour would have been familiar with this plant, and perhaps would have brought a few seeds back home with them.
One of the most startling of Victorian paintings is William Holman Hunt’s Isabella and the Pot of Basil, painted in 1868 and inspired by John Keats’s poem of the same name. The story of Isabella is a gruesome one: her lover, Lorenzo, is murdered by her brothers and buried in the forest. On finding his body, Isabella removes the head, places it in a large pot, covers it with earth, plants it with basil and waters it with her tears. The painting shows a mournful Isabella draped over a large majolica pot, in which grows a profusion of basil. The pot sits on a table covered with a cloth embroidered with roses and passionflowers, the emblems for love and faith.
from ISABELLA; OR THE POT OF BASIL
Then in a silken scarf, – sweet with the dews
Of precious flowers pluck’d in Araby,
And divine liquids come with odorous ooze
Through the cold serpent-pipe refreshfully, –
She wrapp’d it up; and for its tomb did choose
A garden-pot, wherein she laid it by,
And cover’d it with mould, and o’er it set
Sweet Basil, which her tears kept ever wet.
And she forgot the stars, the moon, and sun,
And she forgot the blue above the trees,
And she forgot the dells where waters run,
And she forgot the chilly autumn breeze;
She had no knowledge when the day was done,
And the new morn she saw not: but in peace
Hung over her sweet Basil evermore,
And moisten’d it with tears unto the core.
JOHN KEATS
CAMELLIA
My Destiny Is in Your Hands
Camellia-petal
fell in silent dawn
Spilling
A water jewel.
MATSUO BASHŌ, SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY HAIKU POET
The camellia is an evergreen bush, and is known as the Empress of Winter as it blooms during the long dark months of the year, bringing us lightness and gaiety. In Japan, where it grows in the wild, it is especially revered. It produces glorious flowers, striking and feminine, which appear as double or single blooms, in colours from pure white through to dusky pink and deep red. A flower of singular beauty, the camellia speaks of love, strong and all-embracing, of destinies inextricably linked.
The flower is named after a Jesuit missionary and botanist called Georg Kamel who brought the camellia to Europe from east Asia in the early eighteenth century. It was grown in the hothouse and became an exotic luxury, and by the mid-nineteenth century it was one of the most sought-after flowers. The Victorians were especially captivated by the white camellia, luscious and dramatic against beautiful shiny green leaves. It was the belle of winter flowers, gracing dinner parties, balls and concert rooms; gleaming out in rosy crimson streaks from flaxen hair, or showing off its depth of spotless whiteness among dark braids of brown or black.
At fancy-dress balls, girls would come as camellias, and there was no waltz or cotillion danced where a lady did not clasp a bouquet of them. A posy of a white camellia surrounded by a band of violets and a fringe of scented geranium leaves presented to a lady would be immensely flattering, and a bridal bouquet of the flowers a sensation.
A pink and a red camellia appear in John William Waterhouse’s Camellias, where they adorn the hair of a young woman. Waterhouse painted many portraits of women, as mythological characters or as damsels from Arthurian