Strange Bright Blooms: A History of Cut Flowers

Description

Virginia Woolf's novel famously begins - 'Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.' Of course she would: why would anyone surrender the best part of the day to someone else? Flowers grace our lives at moments of celebration and despair. 'We eat, drink, sing, dance, and flirt with them', writes Kakuzo Okakura. Flowers brighten our homes, our parties, and our rituals with incomparable notes of natural beauty, but the 'nature' in these displays is tamed and conscribed. This book analyzes the transplanted nature of cut flowers - of our relationship with them and the careful curation of their very existence. It is a picaresque, unpredictable ramble through the world of flowers, encompassing paintings, murals, fashion, and public art, glass flowers, pressed flowers, flowery church hats, weaponised flowers, deconstructed flowers, flower power...and much more.

Randy Malamud, Regents' Professor of English at Georgia State University, has written eleven books including Reading Zoos: Representations of Animals and Captivity, The Importance of Elsewhere: The Globalist Humanist Tourist, and Email.

"Examining all things floral from paintings, fashion and pressed flowers to decorative church hats and flower power, this generously illustrated book takes cuttings from one aspect of the human urge to tame and curate nature." * Apollo * "Strange Bright Blooms will convince you that flowers don't just stand there looking pretty. Malamud makes intriguing arguments that flowers not only attract but directly interact with us. While their beauty has inspired great art, blooms have likewise been repurposed as symbols of sexism and racism. Poisonous in warfare, flowers also have been signs of peaceful revolution. Like an unexpected delivery of flowers, this book is a surprise and a delight." -- Marcia Reiss, author of "Lily" and "Apple'" "Malamud's new book explores our endless attraction to cut flowers as a 'shortcut to beauty' but also as a medium in which to explore all manner of concerns around love and war, class and race, life and death. Who would have thought that Marie Osmond's paper roses, Jeff Koons's tulips, Mae Reeves's hats, T. S. Eliot's sleeping dahlias, and Banksy's Flower Bomber (among many, many other wonderful blooms) would combine to make such a fabulous arrangement?" -- Kasia Boddy, author of "Geranium" and "Blooming Flowers"