I wanted to riff this week on a more light-hearted quote than those I have lately considered, so I googled P.G. Wodehouse quotes, thinking that if anyone had uttered something memorably light-hearted, it would have to be the creator of Jeeves.

Oddly, the one that caught my fancy was this: “Flowers are happy things.”

I suppose this is something one of Wodehouse’s characters says, though it doesn’t exactly sound like something Bertie Wooster — or his incomparable valet — would come up with.

It isn’t exactly light-hearted, either, just a simple, four-word declarative sentence that actually makes one feel somewhat wistful. Nor is it exactly true. The faded, drooping roses I snipped off in my garden the other day hardly seemed images of happiness, though the blooms attached to the now-stringy pansies still have a jaunty look.

So actual flowers, in actual circumstances, may not necessarily seem like happy things at all. And yet, if asked to conjure an image of happiness, one of the first things most of us would think of, I suspect, would be … flowers. Small wonder that Novalis chose “the blue flower” — a kind of sky blossom — as the central symbol of the poetic quest.

I first encountered Novalis and “die blaue Blume” when I was studying German literature in college, and it had an immediate and lasting impact on me. Symbol and phrase alike seemed perfectly apt. I knew in my deepest heart exactly what he was driving at. It is, however, something you either get or don’t, and if you don’t, no amount of explication will help.

The first flower that made any impression on me was blue — the flossflower. I can still vividly remember the warm and bright Sunday afternoon — I was only a toddler — when I watched my mother planting some, and their shade of blue always affects me. There was a house near where we later lived that was outlined at Christmas with lights that shade of blue and in the cold winter night it always seemed to me an image of heaven.

Perhaps that is why I feel ill-at-ease with Wodehouse’s designation of flowers as “things.” They are things, of course, living things, as we are, too.

But the very juxtaposition of living and thing seems somehow wrong. When I think of “things,” I think of inanimate objects. Whatever lives is never a mere object. And no one who raises flowers ever thinks of them as things. We are even inclined to talk to them. I imagine we secretly agree with Gérard de Nerval that “every flower is a soul blossoming out to nature.”

“Unless ye see signs and wonders, ye will not believe,” Jesus declared. But signs and wonders abound in every garden. Standing alone in mine — a tiny urban affair — and looking at the flowers always lifts my spirits in a way that can sustain me throughout the day. As Wordsworth said of his daffodils:

In vacant or in pensive mood,

They flash upon that inward eye

Which is the bliss of solitude…

Henry Miller remarked toward the end of his life that, if he had it to do over again, he would be a gardener. I sometimes think that way myself. It is as near as I get to feeling regret.

I began this column looking to riff on something light-hearted and now I find myself brushing elbows with regret. Time to pay another visit to my garden.

• Author Bio
• Latest Posts

Frank Wilson

Frank Wilson was the book editor for the Philadelphia Inquirer until his retirement in 2008. He blogs at Books, Inq.

Latest posts by Frank Wilson (Posts)

• An illusion of precision - September 9, 2015
• Watching the passing scene - October 28, 2013
• To see like a child - June 26, 2013
• Riffing and digressions - January 21, 2013
• Life is a parenthesis between one darkness and another - September 13, 2012

Tags: environment & nature, that's what he said, by Frank Wilson // 2 Comments »