THE SENTIMENTALITY OF PLANTS
Even though I didn’t stay up to watch the Queen’s funeral this week, it wasn’t long before I caught the chatter about the beautiful flowers that adorned her coffin.
To gardeners, her funeral wreath was obviously more than simply decorative with the featuring of many humble and familiar garden plants that perhaps wouldn’t normally be used in occasions of such pageantry. There were winding limbs of rosemary, a symbol of remembrance and English Oak in the representation of strength. Cut from the gardens of Buckingham Palace, Clarence House and Highgrove were garden roses, sedum, dahlias, scabious, pelargoniums and hydrangeas. Perhaps most sentimental was the addition of myrtle grown from a sprig of the same plant used in Queen Elizabeth’s wedding bouquet in her 1947 marriage to Prince Phillip.
Words and some photography by Julia Atkinson-Dunn
The Queen’s funeral wreath - sourced
The inclusion of the myrtle pinged my heartstrings and got me thinking about how plants can anchor themselves in our memories and stories as much as places and material items can.
In my own family, my sister and I carried on the tradition of including snips of homegrown blue tweedia (Oxypetalum coeruleum) in our wedding bouquets. This began with our great-grandmother, before trickling through the generations to us. It made me feel linked to my lineage, in particular to my grandmother who died when my mother was only in her early twenties. I’m sure Mum felt this connection to her too while tucking tiny tweedia into her bouquet just a few years later.
My homegrown, home made wedding bouquet including the little blue flowers of tweedia (centre right). - Image by Charlotte Sowman
Tweedia - seeds available from Kings Seeds.
Recently a small group of us accompanied my gardening mentor Penny Zino to her childhood property ‘Wynyard’ in North Canterbury with the specific aim to view the mature stand of native planting curated by her late mother Brownie Davison. Now under the care of her brother and sister-in-law Tim and Lou Davison, we stalked its edges and explored the undergrowth, taking in many an extraordinary specimen and in turn, finding a thread of Brownie within it.
In its midst was a fantastical stand of the native Clematis paniculata. Sprawling up and around surrounding trees, its gorgeous starry white flowers glowed in the afternoon sun. This plant was an absolute favourite of Penny’s mother and the subject of many paintings of which some are dotted in the homes of her children as well as art collectors. Her passion for this clematis continued to capture the hearts of her family with Lou weaving it through her hair for her own wedding day and Penny growing it prolifically in her own garden in an ode to her mother’s memory.
Beautiful native planting at Wynyard that has connected generations.
Clematis paniculata at Wynyard, North Canterbury
Another close gardening friend of mine, Jenny Cooper shared how she recently divided up some plants to send to her daughter on the Kapiti Coast. This included a blue hosta that had belonged to her mother.
“My Mum passed away 10 years ago, and I know my daughter will cherish that this plant is from me, even when I am gone” shared Jenny. She is right in suggesting, that this humble hosta has become a meaningful, living heirloom.
Jenny also raised the idea that plants hold memories. She shared that the saxifrage she grows was given to her by an elderly woman she helped following the Christchurch earthquakes. To Jenny, that plant is inextricably linked to her and that life-changing event.
“Plants can bear witness to our lives and stopping to pay attention to who they are feels quite comforting to me. ”
I felt true delight when moving into my first home 5 years ago to discover a Japanese maple tucked away down the end of the garden. It was almost an exact replica of the one that grew outside the kitchen door at my childhood home near Hanmer Springs. Even now I look at its lovely multi-stemmed form and remembered the hot summers of twisting ourselves through its limbs. I feel compelled to introduce grape hyacinths in the ground nearby in direct reflection of the planting my mother did over 40 years ago.
Yes, it’s true that plants hold memories, the bad and the good.
While it might be the most sentimental among us (my hand is shooting up!) that attaches such human emotion to plants, they certainly are timeless, enriching bridges to our past that are perhaps easier to cope with than an enormous inherited sideboard!
Now might be just the right time to introduce a new botanical tradition to your own family story.
This is an expanded version of the article featured in my Stuff ‘Homed’ gardening column for beginners , The Press, Dominion Post and other regional papers on September 29th 2022
All words and images are my own, unless otherwise credited.