Growing beauty

There is something immensely sad about buying your own flowers. I don’t mean the sort that you plant out in the garden, I mean the cut sort that grace various tasteful vases (how do you YOU pronounce that word?) around your home.

A man who admits to liking cut flowers and their arrangement is risking his public sexual persona because a man enthusing about a well selected bouquet of flowers is a Huysmanesque stance, a number of steps down towards the green carnation world of the man given wholly to sensual pleasure, and therefore, of course, not a real man.

Though it is worth noting that most of the truly great horticulturalists were men, and on television the garden makeover programmes are almost always led by men (with the signal exception of that strapping refugee from water features. Ms Dimmock) and the great illustrators of flowers were men and, so on.

You’ll notice the complete lack of illustrative detail of male nomenclature to give substance to my statements and the only real person I mentioned by name was female!

The rose as a symbol is positively Jungian: our responses hard wired into the very people or species that we are. You can trace the use of the rose through music, paining, illustration, tapestry, poetry, prose, photography, horticulture and wallpaper through hundreds of years, or more like a millennium, it is omnipresent part of the fabric of our lives. So why do men get uneasy if they are given a bunch. Is the rose so associated with the female that a bunch of the flowers is an embarrassment of riches an open invitation to deny the moral myth of monogamy on which our society is built?

I salute our Eastern European brothers who have been flaunting their use of flowers as an essential male accessory for ever. Who can forget (well, not me for one, I’ve only seen the newsreel footage) the first visit of the Moscow Dynamos to Great Britain for their series of football matches in the last century just after World War Two where part of the opening formalities consisted in the Russian players presenting their opposite number with beribboned bouquets before the start of the match? Or the cringing embarrassment of the British players as they took their unexpected gifts. But were our Eastern Brothers dissuaded from this un-masculine practice? No, they went on doing it, handing out pretty and strikingly arranged posies to weightlifters and hammer throwers and shot putters through all the various forms of athletic competitions that they staged.

They have now, to all intents and purposes, won. All competitions seem to be bonanzas for local florists as first, second and third placed competitors are all presented with their obligatory bunch of flowers which they can use to wave at adoring fans so much easier for them than yanking up their medals and almost garrotting themselves with the ribbon.

Competitors in major competitions now expect their floral tributes and all possible sexes accept them with grace and uneventful looks, a far cry from the expressions of earlier male athletes who always looked as they grasped their flowers in a studiedly casual way, as if they had just been presented with a dead duck billed platypus.

So, if it’s ok for muscle rippling male athletes to disport themselves with garlands gay, why has it not translated itself into a different attitudes displayed by ordinary male folk? Because it hasn’t. If you watched men buying flowers in advance of Saint Valentine’s Day it was painful beyond belief. What most men wanted to do was grab the first bunch of conventionally ‘Romantic’ looking flowers they could find. There was no debate, no mixing and matching, no holding the flowers at arm’s length to judge the overall effect. It was look, grab, go. Pure and simple.

Of course Tesco, where I do most of sociological research, does not encourage invention on the part of flower buyers. The bunches are ready-made for ease of sale. The most that you can do is buy a selection of bunches and then make up your own display, but the one or two more expensive blooms become ruinously so when you have to buy more than you need to create the tasteful melange you are striving to achieve. This is one more occasion when the economies of scale and the stripping away of assistants with an interest in selling more than the ready made units of consumer consumption that supermarkets supply works against the inventiveness of the individual punter.

It is only in the area of vegetables (and not always a full selection of those) that the purchaser is in some sort of control. With vegetables you can (should you so choose) buy a single potato, carrot, swede, parsnip, brussel sprout, green bean.

There’s a thought: Arcimboldo shows what you can do with an over active imagination and a supply of vegetation. We could tone down the wild extravagances of Arcimboldo and using a quiet methodology and flamboyant spatial awareness produce a vegetative display that would delight any man (or woman.)

Vegetables are beautiful too!