The love of flowers is a peculiar form of fandom. It is not about loyalty to a team, the power of aesthetic experience, or a feeling of intimate connection with a star, but it nevertheless involves desire, identity, and marked devotion, including rituals of cultivation, collecting, pilgrimage, and story-telling. Flower enthusiasm, especially, creates powerful social bonds; garden lovers, like sports and music fans, seek each other out to discuss their latest discoveries and insights, or to marvel at each other’s beds and plots; the American “garden club,” a phenomenon that started generally among women in the 1920s, is not all that different from the charitable organizations or concert societies forming around the same time. But flower culture has a world history that spans centuries. Historical evidence of this culture lies in seed catalogs, countless poems and books and magazine columns about flowers’ symbolism, and accounts of various “manias” for particular flowers, from the rose to the cactus. Flower-culture, like many instances of fan-like enthusiasm, has sometimes been the subject of mockery by outsiders but, for its followers, it provides a source of deep human feeling.
While gardeners love flowers' beauty, they more specifically love the process of nurturance, growth, and display. Flowers' dynamism is, in fact, often associated with people or nations and with human qualities and emotions, from Charlotte Elizabeth's "biographical garden" to preacher Henry Ward Beecher's invocation of flower-enthusiasm as an earthly leveler of all men.
From: Charlotte Elizabeth, Floral Biography (New York: M. W. Dodd, 1840).
Botany is doubtless a very delightful study; but a botanical treatise is one of the last things that I should be found engaged in. Truth shall be told: my love of flowers—for each particular petal—is such, that no thirst after scientific knowledge could every prevail with me to tear the beautiful objects in pieces. I love to see the bud bursting into maturity; I love to mark the deepening tints with which the beams of heaven paint the expanded flower; nay, with a melancholy sort of pleasure, I love to watch that progress towards decay, so endearingly bespeaking a fellowship in man’s transient glory, which, even at its height, is but as “the flower of grass.”…But there is yet another, and somewhat fanciful view, that I delight to take of these fair things, my course has lain through a busy and a chequered path; I have been subjected to many changes of place, and have encountered a great variety of characters, who have passed before me like visions of the night, leaving but the remembrance of what they were. I have frequently in my lonely rambles among the flowers, assimilated one and another of them to those unforgotten individuals, until they became almost identified; and my garden bears a nomenclature which no eye but mine can decypher.From: The London Quarterly and Holborn Review, vol. 24, p. 50, April 1865.
Floriculture adapts itself to a leading instinct of human nature. Much of the life of the florist is spent in making provision for the future. He sows his seeds in hope of a reward that is to be. Supposing him not only to cultivate flowers after the ordinary fashion, but to set himself to obtain new and improved varieties, this same instinct finds fresh scope and satisfaction. The reader must himself be a florist if he would understand with what enthusiasm the first blooms of seedling plants are watched by the expectant grower; how eagerly he notes such of them as seem to merit preservation; and what wholesome stimulus body and mind alike are apt to receive from the entire process of his occupation. Perhaps the adaptation of floriculture to satisfy certain instinctive cravings of our nature has quite as much to do with the all but universal passion for it as the love of flowers for their own sake.From Henry Ward Beecher, Pleasant Talk About Fruits, Flowers, and Farming (1874), 50.
Floral insanity is one of the most charming inflictions to which man is heir! One never wishes to be cured, nor should any one wish to cure him. The garden is infectious. Flowers are “catching,” or the love of them is. Men begin with one or two. In a few years they are struck through with floral zeal. Not bees are more sedulous in their researches into flowers than many a man is, and one finds, after the strife and heat and toil of his ambitious life, that there is more pure satisfaction in his garden than in al the other pursuits that promise so much of pleasure and yield so little. It is pleasant to find in men whose hard and loveless side you see in society, so much that is gentle and beauty-loving in private. Hard capitalists, sharp politicians, grinding business men, will often be found, at home, in full sympathy with the gentlest aspects of nature. One is surprised to find how rich and sweet these monsters often turn out to be!
