By Jennifer Potter
The lotus, lily, sunflower, opium poppy, rose, tulip and orchid. Seven plants: seven tales filled with shock and secrets and techniques. the place and whilst did those vegetation originate? what's the nature in their strength and the way was once it got? What use has been made from them in gardens, literature and paintings? those are either histories and detective tales, choked with incident, unforeseen revelations, and irony. The opium poppy, for instance, lower back to hang-out its progenitors within the West and whereas Confucius observed advantage and modesty in his local orchids, the traditional Greeks observed merely intercourse. those are plants of lifestyles and demise of purity and fervour of greed, envy and advantage of wish and comfort of the wonder that drives males wild. All seven show the iconic skill of plants to talk metaphorically - if shall we purely decode what they need to say.
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Extra resources for Seven Flowers: and How They Shaped Our World
Sample text
In Tibetan Buddhism, the colour of the lotus is also significant: the white lotus represents spiritual purity; red is the lotus of love, compassion, passion, and all qualities of the heart; blue signifies the victory of the spirit over the senses; while the pink lotus reigns supreme and is generally reserved for the highest deity. AS LOTUSES WERE indigenous to China, the country had no need to wait for Buddhism’s arrival in the first century (some scholars place it much earlier) to recognize their beauty.
This lotus, too, unlocks the shimmering heart of the meditative experience: ‘The thousand-petalled lotus flower opens, transformed through breath-energy. ’ For Jung, the ‘Golden Flower’ of ancient Chinese thought was a mandala symbol representing the universe, one he likened to drawings brought to him by his patients in the form of a geometric ornament, like a lotus-rosette, or a blossom growing from a plant. While he would increasingly visualize the mandala symbol as the rose of a Christianized western tradition (see Chapter 5), he recognized its roots in the eastern lotus.
The roots were also edible, according to Herodotus, round and sweet-tasting, ‘about as big as an apple’. He then sketched a second sort of lotus found in the Nile: ‘This resembles a rose, and its fruit is formed on a separate stalk from that which bears the blossom, and has very much the look of a wasps’ comb. ’ Herodotus could not have seen the sacred lotus for himself, as the fruit develops from the flower, not alongside it. But Alexander the Great would certainly have encountered it on his conquest of Egypt when he founded his great city of Alexandria in the fourth century BCE.