From ‘The Well Gardened Mind’

By Sue Stuart-Smith

Chapter 7 Flower Power

There are times when our garden simply stops me in my tracks. I remember once being brought to a halt by a delphinium. It was in the midst of a busy time both at work and at home. There were tasks mounting up in the garden as well: sewing the next batch of seeds, thinning the salads and herbs and hoeing the beds. But that morning, I was focused on getting jobs done before our weekend guests arrived, knowing there would soon be lots of people in the house to feed.

Heading out of the house straight towards the freezer in our shed, I steered a course past the delphiniums that line the path. As I reached the last one, its blue spike hailed me and one of its iridescent flowers caught my eye. It was a flower on the tallest spike in the stand - the deepest of deep variegated blues - and the light was shining through it. Intense colour commands your attention. It says look! Look closely! And I did. I stared into the centre of that blue flower eye.

With the other flower spikes swaying gently around me, I lost myself, and in that losing was joined by a blackbird singing in the hedge. My thoughts, which had been racing and scattered, went quiet. A sense of space inside my mind expanded and shifted out towards the hedge and up towards the skylarks singing high overhead. The birds had been there all the time. How had I been so oblivious, so deaf to their song?

It was a simple pause in a busy morning and yet it changed the whole day, rescuing my outlook from the frantic swell inside me. And more than that, it is a moment that returns to me, partly in its wonder, and partly in its warning. A reminder to take heed of the beauty that is around me.

Much like the bees, we get a buzz from flowers. The magnitude of the cut flower market testifies to this. Flowers speak to our unconscious in a way that is hard to fathom and we respond as if to an invitation that says: 'come closer, smell me, pick me, carry me with you...' Some excel in purity, some in simplicity, whilst others are more seductive - erotic even - in their form. Flowers wake us up to beauty and, like the bees we can be loyal: most of us have our favourites.