Flower: Exploring the World in Bloom,
by Anna Pavord,
Phaidon Press
£39.95
 

AT 350 pages this large format book offers beautiful, full-page illustrations of a vast variety of flowers accompanied by useful information about each one.

A stimulating introduction discusses their social, historical and symbolic significance.  

Unlike most botanical books it also functions as an art book with illustrations which range far and wide across time, cultures and types of objects. A gilded Sevres porcelain plate destined for the 19th-century courts of Europe is ornately hand painted with a central bouquet of flowers surrounded by butterflies, bows and scrolls.

This contrasts with a humble printed Japanese seed catalogue from the dawn of the 20th-century and the stark simplicity of Mary Quant’s 1966 brand logo of a single, simplified black and white daisy.

The book never ceases to delight by the rich variety of materials, modes of production and functions of objects which are adorned with flowers. The delicate intricacy with which a Macedonian goldsmith fashioned Queen Meda’s Golden Myrtle Crown into hundreds of tiny twigs and 120 myrtle flowers (about 350-336 BC) contrasts with the uncompromising verve with which an anonymous Bronze Age artist painted the bold fresco of sea daffodils in the House of Ladies, Akrotiri, Santorini in Greece.

Equally skilful were the embroiderers of flowers on a Mexican belt and John Carwitham’s sensitive botanical engravings for his mid-18th-century plant catalogue, The Complete Florist.

Albrecht Durer’s meticulously observed gouache on vellum study of an unassuming tuft of wild cowslips complete with earth encrusted roots, reveals the Renaissance spirit of enquiry into the natural world. This contrasts with the exuberant joy conveyed by Faith Ringold’s 1996 tribute to eight influential African-American women proudly displaying a splendid quilt adorned with sunflowers, overseen by a shy Vincent Van Gogh holding a vase of these, his favourite flowers.

There is much to be learned too. Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s painting The Roses of Heliogabalus (1888) appears to depict Romans at a banquet being entertained by men and women cavorting in a deep bed of flowers. But this turns out to narrate the cruel ruler’s perverted means of murdering his opponents by literally drowning them in a pit of flowers. Of course this choice of subject reveals the Victorian artist pandering to the decadent tastes of his own era’s ruling-class patrons.

The book’s numerous surprises include unexpected works by well known artists. Piet Mondrian’s early painting of a single chrysanthemum arranged diagonally across the canvas with its petals and leaves stemming from a single stalk, reveals a fascination with structure which anticipates his future geometric abstraction.

The controlled abandon with which Mary Cassatt wielded a loaded brush to convey the heady profusion of tiny, bud-like petals in Lilacs in a Window of 1880-83 defies the era’s gender stereotype, which relegated flower painting to the lowly status of a polite pastime suitable for ladies.

This book would make a wonderful gift. It offers stimulating information and a life time of pleasure.