On Flowers and What They Hold
A meditation on the symbols of Mother's Day
There is a small church in West Virginia. White clapboard. A Sunday in May, 1908. A woman named Anna Jarvis stands at the door and places a white carnation into each arriving hand. Five hundred flowers, carried from wherever she sourced them in a town called Grafton. One for each mother present. One for each mother gone.
It is a quiet gesture. And yet it is also the beginning of something — a visual language for a feeling that language proper cannot quite reach.
The carnation.
Its Latin name is Dianthus. Flower of the gods. The Greeks said so. Before that, Flemish painters placed it in the hands of the Christ child — those dense, jewel-like still lifes where every object earns its place and means more than it appears. The carnation in those paintings is a token of divine love, chosen carefully, not decorative. It arrives into Mother's Day already carrying all of that.
Jarvis chose white. White spoke of absence. To pin a white carnation to your coat was to tell the room that your mother was no longer in the world. It was a public act of mourning — intimate, but worn on the outside. Pink was for the living mother, warmer, softer. Red for something deeper still: ardour, not mere affection.
The word itself bears looking at. Carnatio: flesh. Or corona: crown. A flower named for the body, or for sovereignty. Given to the woman whose body made us. There is something almost too apt about this, the kind of coincidence that feels less like chance and more like the language knowing something the speaker doesn't.
The rose is different. Where the carnation has a specific, dateable origin, the rose has always been here.
It was sacred to Aphrodite. Then to Venus. Then, as the Church absorbed and transformed what it could not suppress, to the Virgin Mary — the Rosa Mystica, the Mystical Rose. Rose gardens, rose windows, the rosary (a word that means simply: a rose garden). The rose is one of those symbols that pre-exists every tradition that claims it and outlives every attempt to fix its meaning.
By the nineteenth century, the Victorians had codified flower language into something approaching a system. Floriography: the sending of messages through blooms. Pink roses for grace and gratitude. Red for love. Yellow for friendship, for the warmth between equals. These meanings endure, half-remembered, in every florist's shop. We feel them without knowing we know them.
A pink rose given to a mother is, among other things, a faint echo of all those roses arranged before the Madonna. The gesture does not require this awareness. The rose carries the meaning regardless.
Lily of the valley grows close to the ground. Its bells face downward, white and small. In Christian tradition it was called Our Lady's Tears — said to have grown where Mary wept at the foot of the Cross. Its Latin name, Convallaria majalis, contains majalis: of May. Even the taxonomy places it in the season.
In France it is given on the first of May as a charm. In Germany: Maiglöckchen, May bells. The names across Europe are all variations on the same idea. Here is the flower of the returning month. Here is the guarantee that warmth comes back.
Perfumers have long noted that lily of the valley cannot be extracted. Its scent must be reconstructed from other materials, approximated rather than captured. The living flower keeps its secret. There is something right about this, in the context of what it symbolises. Some qualities resist direct translation. They can only be approached, circled, suggested.
On colour.
White first. It holds purity and grief simultaneously — the christening gown and the mourning carnation, the blank page and the white of a winter that is finally over. Anna Jarvis chose it for its capacity to contain both the living and the dead, the love that remains and the love that must be remembered.
Pink is more recent. It entered the palette of the holiday as a softening: warmer, present-tense. It speaks of the living bond, the relationship that is still being made. It is the colour of the skin beneath the frost. Of something continuing.
Gold is older than the holiday by a long way. In Byzantine painting, the gold ground of an altarpiece is not a colour at all — it is divine light, the ground of existence itself, the eternal against which everything else is figured. The gold of a Mother's Day card does not know this about itself, but the tradition does. A golden locket at the throat is, somewhere in its deep history, a reliquary: a portable container for the sacred.
Blue is the colour that does not announce itself on Mother's Day and yet underlies almost everything. It is Mary's colour — ultramarine, made from lapis lazuli quarried in what is now Afghanistan and traded along routes that crossed half the known world. Weight for weight, it was worth more than gold. Painters used it only for the most honoured subject. The blue mantle of the Madonna became the colour of constancy, of faithful presence, of the guiding light that does not move. Every blue ribbon and blue-inked inscription on a card carries some residue of this.
The heart.
Not the anatomical organ, which is not shaped this way. The familiar form comes from medieval representations, and from a courtly tradition in which to give your heart was to give the whole of yourself — not a metaphor but a literal imagined act. The heart as object. The heart as gift.
On Mother's Day, the crayoned heart drawn by a small child is among the most eloquent things in circulation. It does not try to be more than it is. Its wobbling outline is its honesty. The symbol says: I cannot find the words, but I know the shape of the feeling, and it is this.
The Latin root, cor, also gives us courage. To have heart is to be brave. The heart given to a mother acknowledges something the greeting card industry prefers to leave unspoken: that this love is not only tender. It requires something.
The nest.
It must be built. Unlike the hollow or the cave, which simply exist, the nest requires material gathered from the surrounding world and shaped by the body into shelter. The swallow returns each year to the same wall. The robin weaves in a week what will house an entire season.
Medieval illustrators placed nests in the margins of manuscripts — those borders where the formal argument of the text gives way to observation, to humour, to the incidental pleasures of the physical world. The nest appears there as a small emblem of domestic intelligence. Of the instinct that makes order from available material.
In Norse mythology, the world-tree Yggdrasil shelters all life under its branches and suffers for the privilege. The tree is a nest writ large. Both are structures that hold things, at cost, for as long as they are needed.
The nest in Mother's Day imagery — in the ceramic bowls with their smooth river stones, the silver pendants cradling a pearl — translates something ancient into something wearable. The symbol finds a new vessel and continues.
The locket.
Before photography, there were portrait miniatures. Court painters in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries produced images no larger than a palm — painted on vellum, housed in enamelled gold cases, given between lovers and sovereigns and devoted family members. To carry a portrait miniature was to carry a presence. The absent made portable.
The locket is the democratic form of this tradition. In the Victorian period, photography made likenesses available to everyone, and the locket brought them close to the body — hung at the throat, resting against the chest. A golden heart, usually, that opens. Inside: a face.
To wear your children at your heart is not a metaphor. It is the thing itself. The locket literalises what the emotion wants to do: to keep the beloved near, at the level of the pulse.
The pearl.
An oyster, encountering an irritant, responds with nacre. Layer after layer, over years. The irritant is encased, transformed. What was a problem becomes an object of beauty, smooth and luminous, with a depth that changes depending on the light.
The pearl is among the oldest symbols of maternal wisdom. It has been associated with the moon — which governs tides, and time, and the rhythms of the female body — across cultures from ancient China to classical Rome. In the Renaissance it was prized above diamonds. Its value lay not in hardness but in the quality of its making: sustained, quiet, over time.
To give a pearl is to give a symbol of endurance and transformation. Of beauty that takes years and requires difficulty. There are few better ways to describe what the best mothering does.
The sun.
In ancient Egypt, the goddess Nut arched her body over the earth and became the sky. The sun moved through her daily. Isis wore the solar disc between her horns. In Japan, Amaterasu — sun goddess, ancestral deity of the imperial family — is the most important figure in the Shinto tradition. In Aztec cosmology, Coatlicue governs cycles of sun and regeneration.
These are not arbitrary convergences. The sun is the most powerful available image for love that does not choose its recipients, that gives without condition, that is present whether or not it is acknowledged. It is also the most constant thing available to the naked eye. It rises. It sets. It returns.
Mother's Day in the northern hemisphere falls when the days are visibly lengthening. The celebration of the mother coincides with the return of the light. The holiday does not orchestrate this. The calendar simply arranges it, and the arrangement is appropriate.
The tree.
The family tree is a diagram before it is a metaphor. But the metaphor holds: the root that does not show its work, the trunk that bears the weight of every branching, the canopy that filters the light before it reaches whatever grows below.
The oak shelters. The willow bends without breaking. The apple gives: first blossom in spring, then fruit in autumn, then wood in the fire's warmth. In British folklore the apple tree is associated with abundance and with the otherworld — with what is held in trust for the future.
To plant a tree for a mother is among the more considered gifts. The tree will outlive both parties. It will grow in grandeur as the years pass. It asks for very little and gives consistently, and in this it is a fair image of what is being honoured.
Mothering Sunday falls on the fourth Sunday of Lent. In its original form, it was a day to return to the mother church — the cathedral, the source of diocesan authority. People walked from their parish churches to the larger church that held authority over them. A pilgrimage, modest in scale but genuine in intention.
Domestic servants, who made up a significant portion of the working population, were typically given this one day to travel home. To see their actual mothers. The ecclesiastical and the domestic meanings ran alongside each other for centuries before the domestic overtook the other entirely.
The Simnel cake belongs to this tradition. A fruitcake — dense, preserved, made to last — with marzipan layered within and a thicker layer on top. Eleven balls of marzipan placed around the edge: the faithful apostles, Judas excluded, loyalty counted and the disloyal one left out. The balls are uneven, handmade, not uniform. This is part of their point. They are domestic objects placed on a ceremonial one. They look like something made by hand, with care, without industrial precision.
The best Mother's Day gifts look the same way.
Three.
It is the first number that is not reducible to a pair. The simplest structure that cannot be bilateral. In the grandmother-mother-grandchild photograph, three generations face the lens. The image does not merely record. It asserts something about time: that it moves in one direction, that each face was made possible by the face beside it, that the youngest face contains, somewhere, the faces not yet born.
The Triple Goddess — maiden, mother, crone — maps the full arc of female life onto a single symbol. Not three separate figures but one figure, seen from three angles, at three stages. Wholeness understood as movement through time, rather than as a fixed state.
Three is also the structure of the best stories. Beginning, middle, end. The child becomes the parent becomes the elder. The cycle does not close. It simply turns.
On the symbols themselves.
They are not decorative. They are not recent inventions dressed up as tradition. They are old — older than the holiday that now carries them, older than the commercial apparatus that sells them, older than the language we use to describe them.
The white carnation connects to a Sunday in West Virginia in 1908, yes. But it also connects to the Flemish painters and the Greek botanists and the medieval iconographers who placed it in the Madonna's hand. The locket connects to the Victorian photographer but also to the court painter and the reliquary maker and the goldsmith who understood that devotion requires an object.
The symbols have been refined over centuries of use. They have been tested against the full range of what this relationship contains — its tenderness and its difficulty, its dailiness and its extremity. They have survived because they are adequate to what they are asked to express.
When the carnation is placed in the hand, or the locket is clasped at the throat, or the nest sits on the shelf with its small smooth stones, something older than the gesture is present. The symbols know what they mean. They have always known.
We are simply the latest people to use them.
