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The Brief Life of Flowers
The beauty of flowers is well known, inspiring creative minds from Botticelli to Beatrix Potter. But they've also played a key part in forming the past, and may shape our future.
Roses and thistles have served as symbols of monarchs, dynasties and nations. We wear poppies to remember the First World War, but it was the elderflower that treated its wounded soldiers. A rose might mend a broken heart, and sunflowers may just save our planet.
At once enchanting and intriguing, The Brief Life of Flowers reveals how even the most ordinary of flowers have extraordinary stories to tell.
Roses and thistles have served as symbols of monarchs, dynasties and nations. We wear poppies to remember the First World War, but it was the elderflower that treated its wounded soldiers. A rose might mend a broken heart, and sunflowers may just save our planet.
At once enchanting and intriguing, The Brief Life of Flowers reveals how even the most ordinary of flowers have extraordinary stories to tell.
232 pages, Paperback
First published November 15, 2018
9 people are currently reading
550 people want to read
About the author
Fiona Stafford
30 books37 followersProfessor Fiona Stafford is a Fellow of the British Academy and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. She works on literature of the Romantic period, especially Austen, Burns, Clare, Keats, Wordsworth and Coleridge, and on their literary influences on modern poetry. Her research interests also include late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century culture; Irish and Scottish literature (post 1700); Archipelagic literature and art; Place and Nature Writing (old and new); Trees, Flowers and their cultural history; Environmental Humanities; literature and the visual arts.
Her most recent book is The Brief Life of Flowers (2018). Like her acclaimed book, The Long, Long Life of Trees (2016), it draws on first hand observation, literature, art, folklore, mythology, cultural history, natural science, botany, history of medicine.
Her most recent book is The Brief Life of Flowers (2018). Like her acclaimed book, The Long, Long Life of Trees (2016), it draws on first hand observation, literature, art, folklore, mythology, cultural history, natural science, botany, history of medicine.
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Displaying 1 - 29 of 29 reviews
June 9, 2019
The Brief Life of Flowers is an odd book, and for me a disappointment.
It - in well written prose - discusses a number of flowers and actually gives the reader a good view of the long life of flowers in art, books, science and society.
What it misses though is any real discussion on the flowers themselves: why these flowers are like they are, why they live for fleeting moments or longer, how they adapt or don't to changes in habit and climate, and how their place in nature supports other flora and fauna.
Illustrations are just sufficient but all are in pencil/line drawn black and white. A book about the beauty of flowers and the colours they bring to people's lives and our history is quite strange to then have no colour plates.
Other reviewers on GR and elsewhere have given it higher ratings and far more positive commentary, but for me it wasn't the display of colour on why flower's lives are so brief that I'd hoped for.
It - in well written prose - discusses a number of flowers and actually gives the reader a good view of the long life of flowers in art, books, science and society.
What it misses though is any real discussion on the flowers themselves: why these flowers are like they are, why they live for fleeting moments or longer, how they adapt or don't to changes in habit and climate, and how their place in nature supports other flora and fauna.
Illustrations are just sufficient but all are in pencil/line drawn black and white. A book about the beauty of flowers and the colours they bring to people's lives and our history is quite strange to then have no colour plates.
Other reviewers on GR and elsewhere have given it higher ratings and far more positive commentary, but for me it wasn't the display of colour on why flower's lives are so brief that I'd hoped for.
June 21, 2020
My other half is a gardener and out front and back gardens are full of flowers in amongst the fruit trees, it does make sitting in the garden quite nice, and even when I’m in the office, the view out the front window is a sight to behold. Flowers are the beautiful and occasionally garish parts of a plant that are primarily evolved to attract an insect or bird to aid pollination. For some people, they are an irrelevant part of their lives, but their impact has permeated our culture in many ways.
Fiona Stafford has had a lifetime of enjoying flowers, from the gaudy red and yellow snapdragons, soft mounds of aubretia gladioli spikes and a huge rambling clematis, that made her childhood summers. Every time they moved her mother would begin to garden once again in the new property. The way flowers permeated her life is reflected in wider society, the loss of a loved one is often marked by flowers by the roadside, a couple on their wedding day have some sort of spray to hold and poppies are worn to remember those lost in wars long gone.
In this book, Stafford has selected fifteen flower species that are significant to her in one way or another. Beginning with the first of the late winter flowers, the snowdrop, that for me is the first hint that the world is still turning and spring is coming, she moves through the other flowers, such as daffodils, foxgloves and thistles as they appear in the year.
For each flower she has chosen there is a little potted history of each mixed with some personal memories and a little folklore and cultural and contemporary anecdotes mixed in. She talks about some of my favourites, bluebells, roses and lavender and ends on that most elusive of plants the ghost orchid.
I think overall I preferred this to her first book, the Long Long Life of Trees. Good as that was, this had the edge in a couple of ways. First her passion for her subject is very evident in the prose and secondly her writing as she deftly weaves between contemporary and historical anecdotes about her subject plants is a pleasure to read.
Fiona Stafford has had a lifetime of enjoying flowers, from the gaudy red and yellow snapdragons, soft mounds of aubretia gladioli spikes and a huge rambling clematis, that made her childhood summers. Every time they moved her mother would begin to garden once again in the new property. The way flowers permeated her life is reflected in wider society, the loss of a loved one is often marked by flowers by the roadside, a couple on their wedding day have some sort of spray to hold and poppies are worn to remember those lost in wars long gone.
In this book, Stafford has selected fifteen flower species that are significant to her in one way or another. Beginning with the first of the late winter flowers, the snowdrop, that for me is the first hint that the world is still turning and spring is coming, she moves through the other flowers, such as daffodils, foxgloves and thistles as they appear in the year.
For each flower she has chosen there is a little potted history of each mixed with some personal memories and a little folklore and cultural and contemporary anecdotes mixed in. She talks about some of my favourites, bluebells, roses and lavender and ends on that most elusive of plants the ghost orchid.
I think overall I preferred this to her first book, the Long Long Life of Trees. Good as that was, this had the edge in a couple of ways. First her passion for her subject is very evident in the prose and secondly her writing as she deftly weaves between contemporary and historical anecdotes about her subject plants is a pleasure to read.
February 10, 2019
This is an absolute gem of a book. The author takes 15 flowers and gives them each a chapter in which she discusses, in perfect prose, not just their history but their significance, as well as literary and artistic references. I particularly enjoyed the chapter on the sunflower "this lion of a flower with its broad, round face and bright, shaggy mane". She has a wonderful way with words and you will never look at these flowers in the same way again.
My one disappointment was that not one of the illustrations is in colour - what a wasted opportunity! I only hope that she will follow this with a second volume which will have illustrations as beautiful and colourful as the writing.
My one disappointment was that not one of the illustrations is in colour - what a wasted opportunity! I only hope that she will follow this with a second volume which will have illustrations as beautiful and colourful as the writing.
April 7, 2021
"I can measure my entire life in leaves and petals [...] throughout the year, windowsills, bookcases and mantelpieces would be adorned with ever-changing arrangements, from fans of daffodils to spikier, red-berried evergreen displays. [...] Flowers are always there at the critical moments of life: as gifts to celebrate a birth or anniversary, as bouquets to adorn a bride, as wreaths to accompany the deceased to the grave and as memorials to comfort those who mourn. [...] The perpetual seasonal cycle of the world is marked by flowers."
— Fiona Stafford, 'The Brief Life of Flowers' 🌸♥.
Estas frases, extraídas del prólogo de este precioso libro, muestran los motivos que llevaron a Fiona Stafford a escribirlo. Su vida, la mía y, estoy convencida, la de muchos de vosotros, puede medirse en hojas y pétalos.
Las flores siempre están ahí, en los momentos más importantes de nuestras vidas y también en los más triviales. En un paseo por una de nuestras ciudades, como un oasis de color en medio del cemento; en la cuneta de una carretera, vislumbradas en apenas un instante; en un prado primaveral cuando tenemos la suerte de escaparnos 'lejos del mundanal ruido'.
Son tantas y tan variadas las flores que alegran nuestros caminos, que pasaríamos días enteros para citarlas. Sin embargo algunas de ellas, por su excepcional belleza, por su perfume o por un rasgo característico están envueltas en un aura mítica. Se han convertido en símbolos anunciadores de buenas o malas noticias; acompañantes de reyes, reinas, hadas, viejas solteronas o soldados caídos...
Estas quince flores, seleccionadas por Fiona Stafford, son algunas de las más representativas y las más queridas por los británicos. Galantos, prímulas, narcisos, campanulas, rosas, dedaleras, cardos, amapolas...su imagen ha inspirado a los artistas siglo tras siglo, y así, cada pequeña flor ha ido forjando su propia historia.
Siguiendo el ciclo de un año, empezando por el rudo invierno, la elegante y delicada prosa de Fiona Stafford nos guía a través del tiempo; entre bosques, jardines, poemas y pinturas en busca de estas míticas flores.
He adorado los capítulos dedicados a las prímulas, los narcisos, las campanulas y la lavanda; en realidad, de todos y cada uno de ellos he aprendido algo nuevo.
Quizá he echado en falta algún capítulo dedicado a las flores de otoño: al majestuoso crisantemo o a la magnífica dalia, pero esta pequeña falta no puede empañar el disfrute que me ha proporcionado esta lectura.
No podría haber escogido un mejor compañero para estos primeros días de primavera.
Fiona Stafford dedica este libro a todos los hombres y mujeres que han consagrado sus vidas a las flores.
A todos aquellos que han mostrado a sus amigos y familiares que las flores importan. Si como yo no podéis imaginar una vida sin ellas, este libro también lleva vuestro nombre.
— Fiona Stafford, 'The Brief Life of Flowers' 🌸♥.
Estas frases, extraídas del prólogo de este precioso libro, muestran los motivos que llevaron a Fiona Stafford a escribirlo. Su vida, la mía y, estoy convencida, la de muchos de vosotros, puede medirse en hojas y pétalos.
Las flores siempre están ahí, en los momentos más importantes de nuestras vidas y también en los más triviales. En un paseo por una de nuestras ciudades, como un oasis de color en medio del cemento; en la cuneta de una carretera, vislumbradas en apenas un instante; en un prado primaveral cuando tenemos la suerte de escaparnos 'lejos del mundanal ruido'.
Son tantas y tan variadas las flores que alegran nuestros caminos, que pasaríamos días enteros para citarlas. Sin embargo algunas de ellas, por su excepcional belleza, por su perfume o por un rasgo característico están envueltas en un aura mítica. Se han convertido en símbolos anunciadores de buenas o malas noticias; acompañantes de reyes, reinas, hadas, viejas solteronas o soldados caídos...
Estas quince flores, seleccionadas por Fiona Stafford, son algunas de las más representativas y las más queridas por los británicos. Galantos, prímulas, narcisos, campanulas, rosas, dedaleras, cardos, amapolas...su imagen ha inspirado a los artistas siglo tras siglo, y así, cada pequeña flor ha ido forjando su propia historia.
Siguiendo el ciclo de un año, empezando por el rudo invierno, la elegante y delicada prosa de Fiona Stafford nos guía a través del tiempo; entre bosques, jardines, poemas y pinturas en busca de estas míticas flores.
He adorado los capítulos dedicados a las prímulas, los narcisos, las campanulas y la lavanda; en realidad, de todos y cada uno de ellos he aprendido algo nuevo.
Quizá he echado en falta algún capítulo dedicado a las flores de otoño: al majestuoso crisantemo o a la magnífica dalia, pero esta pequeña falta no puede empañar el disfrute que me ha proporcionado esta lectura.
No podría haber escogido un mejor compañero para estos primeros días de primavera.
Fiona Stafford dedica este libro a todos los hombres y mujeres que han consagrado sus vidas a las flores.
A todos aquellos que han mostrado a sus amigos y familiares que las flores importan. Si como yo no podéis imaginar una vida sin ellas, este libro también lleva vuestro nombre.
August 21, 2019
A more recent companion book to The Long Long Life of Trees. This is a shorter book, with shorter chapters but follows the same basic idea. A few select flowers are profiled and described, in short chapters that are ordered more or less in seasonal order, starting with snowdrops and ending with poppies with a very short final chapter on ghost orchids and including a chapter on lime (linden) flowers, whose scent is one of my favourite smells of the countryside . There is also a chapter on 'gillyflowers' which considers just what is the gillyflower - popular in literature but actually non-existent in floral identification books. The flowers are examined in terms of their contribution to landscape and culture. It's a fascinating book, well worth reading if you're interested in British flowers.
December 17, 2021
A sweet but somewhat uneven read. I particularly enjoyed the chapter on roses, the alphabet structure worked really well and I felt Stafford dived into some really interesting topics. I guess an intrinsic difficulty with a collection like this is that some flowers just have far more associations than others! When this was good it was fascinating, where it faded for me slightly were some of the chapters that felt more like lists than cohesive wholes.
October 12, 2020
Stafford's musings on the history and culture of various flowers. That's it. If you're looking for something more scientific and less meandering, you'll want to find another book. But if you're just looking for a soothing read about a few different kinds of flowers, this is lovely. The only real disappointment is that the publisher didn't splurge for color illustrations. (Also, it's kind of unnerving that one of the flowers on the cover illustration looks exactly like the coronavirus....)
Read
August 6, 2024this is a lovely little book! it's very seasonal, so I'm glad I read it when I did, although it's been raining a lot and doesn't feel very summery.
I agree that each chapter is pretty short, and isn't by any means exhaustive, but I still enjoyed the information and the beautiful nature writing. Stafford is exceptionally skilled at descriptive writing and it's a joy to read.
I agree that each chapter is pretty short, and isn't by any means exhaustive, but I still enjoyed the information and the beautiful nature writing. Stafford is exceptionally skilled at descriptive writing and it's a joy to read.
January 8, 2024
Beautiful and very informative book
September 25, 2019
This is a lovely book, which explores some of the most common flowers of the British Isles through their history and appearances in literature and art. If you're expecting a botanical textbook, you'll be disappointed, but a carefully reading of the blurb should make it clear that's not what this book is.
Part memoir, part prose poem, part history, part literary criticism, this book brings a new appreciation for the commonest of our flowers and why they are so loved.
Part memoir, part prose poem, part history, part literary criticism, this book brings a new appreciation for the commonest of our flowers and why they are so loved.
March 9, 2021
Reading this first of all reminded me of talking to one of my colleagues, a nice, but overly enthusiastic man who spouts non-stop 'fun-facts' at you and never stops talking (though to be honest, the actual first thing this book reminded me of when I picked it up, was the coronavirus...just take a peek at the cover). This book, while often interesting, similarly leaves no breathing space to process what you've just learned: it's an endless stream of 'did you knows' and 'here's something elses' with not that much background to it. Stafford's sentences are sometimes a bit overwrought, to the point I had to go back over her lines multiple times to fully understand what she was saying, and often skipped half of them because it was just a description that could have been half as long and way less...flowery.
After a while, however, I started to appreciate Stafford's style much more, and got used to the way she sets up her chapters like little essays. Some of these were done better than others (I quite liked the 'ABC' theme for the chapter about roses, for instance), but overall, this collection proved to form a well-rounded whole. I think maybe I was initially looking for a more in-depth and scientific description but realised that that's not what this book is for, as it's more concerned with the cultural significance of the flowers. Stafford is is a professor of English, and therefore focuses a lot on how flowers appear in literature and poetry, which I thought was a nice and original touch.
It's hard to rate this book properly, as I found it quite unique and, in the end, a great example of English nature writing. However, I'm not entirely sure it's my cup of tea. I just prefer my nature books to be a bit more focused on the scientific side.
After a while, however, I started to appreciate Stafford's style much more, and got used to the way she sets up her chapters like little essays. Some of these were done better than others (I quite liked the 'ABC' theme for the chapter about roses, for instance), but overall, this collection proved to form a well-rounded whole. I think maybe I was initially looking for a more in-depth and scientific description but realised that that's not what this book is for, as it's more concerned with the cultural significance of the flowers. Stafford is is a professor of English, and therefore focuses a lot on how flowers appear in literature and poetry, which I thought was a nice and original touch.
It's hard to rate this book properly, as I found it quite unique and, in the end, a great example of English nature writing. However, I'm not entirely sure it's my cup of tea. I just prefer my nature books to be a bit more focused on the scientific side.
June 9, 2024
This book was so cute, a delight to read.
It’s a reasonably small book, 232 pages, and features 15 chapters each dedicated to a different flower. The chapters discuss the brief cultural relevance the flower has/had across the world some fun facts about the flowers anatomy or cultivating processes.
For someone who has little existing knowledge about flowers except that they are pretty and I like them it was so nice to read a book that combined a mixture of information into each chapter, also mentioning the classic literary and mythological relevances some of the flowers hold, it held my attention so so well which is why I was able to read it in 8 days, I read about 1-2 chapters a day.
My favourite chapters were about Lavender, Bluebells, Foxgloves, Elderflowers and of course the final chapter on Ghost Orchids which has inspired a new tattoo for me.
It’s a reasonably small book, 232 pages, and features 15 chapters each dedicated to a different flower. The chapters discuss the brief cultural relevance the flower has/had across the world some fun facts about the flowers anatomy or cultivating processes.
For someone who has little existing knowledge about flowers except that they are pretty and I like them it was so nice to read a book that combined a mixture of information into each chapter, also mentioning the classic literary and mythological relevances some of the flowers hold, it held my attention so so well which is why I was able to read it in 8 days, I read about 1-2 chapters a day.
My favourite chapters were about Lavender, Bluebells, Foxgloves, Elderflowers and of course the final chapter on Ghost Orchids which has inspired a new tattoo for me.
September 20, 2019
Thoroughly enjoyed the fascinating stories tied to these beautiful flowers. By the end of the book I had an overwhelming desire to fill my garden with flower seeds and bulbs. If only my town was not in the grip of such an awful drought right now …
Want to read
December 8, 2020Sadly not available in U.S. kindle, but you can listen to Fiona Stafford on the BBC The Meaning of Flowers seasons one and two, each five episodes long for free.
dnf
October 7, 2021DNF @ pg 43
unfortunately this book was pretty dense to read for me, although the synopsis sounded so interesting :-( honestly I just wanted an easy read about flowers but this was filled with too much information that weren't really focused on the flowers itself
unfortunately this book was pretty dense to read for me, although the synopsis sounded so interesting :-( honestly I just wanted an easy read about flowers but this was filled with too much information that weren't really focused on the flowers itself
March 7, 2020
I really loved this little book. The way the facts rambled around like shoots and tendrils. I only would have liked to maybe read more about the writer's personal experiences w all the flowers.
September 2, 2020
Sweet, enchanting and lyrical book about the various tangled meanings of wild flowers in British culture
October 10, 2020
Beautifully written and a book I will pick up again for reference on various flowers.
December 21, 2020
De betekenis van bloemen... Occasioneel het gebruik ervan. Veel Britse accenten.
January 25, 2021
Lovely. The perfect book to read before bed to leave you dreaming of the wonders of nature, art and literature.
May 14, 2021
Fascinating, beguiling little tales of the flowers I love. The only thing I wanted was more!
February 24, 2022
Enchanting.
May 9, 2022
Gorgeous tour of English flowers, from the beloved roadside daisy to the primary school sunflower while veering to the medicinal properties of elderflower
September 20, 2022
A delightful read 😊
May 6, 2023
Short and fun book. Lots of reference and information to each English flower.
September 2, 2019
Follows the same formula as the previous book to the letter. Preferred the crisper, factual parts to Stafford's self-conscious attempts at fine writing. And an entire book about flowers that never quotes D.H. Lawrence...?
Want to read
January 15, 2019Recommendation from @mirandasbookcase - 1/14/2019
Displaying 1 - 29 of 29 reviews