The Genitals of Spring: Flowers in the home.
Dear Laurie,
Why do we put flowers in vases?
Love Ashley
Dear Ashley,
The easy answer is that we want to bring the beauty of the garden indoors. A lovely bouquet can cheer up the dullest room. I suppose it's convenient too. Cut flowers are easier to maintain than house plants as they’re already dead. It’s the difference between buying a lamb chop rather than the actual sheep. Less watering. Cut flowers also offer a higher level of promiscuity. You can have as many noncommittal arrangements as you please without any dependency issues or social judgement. Saying “those flowers need tossing out” is never seen as callous, whereas if you were to say “Todd’s past his best” and then flick him into the bin, there'd be heads turned and repercussions.
I don’t think we fundamentally register cutting flowers as homicide. But it's far more intentional than, say, accidentally standing on ants. Flowers don’t pick themselves and it’s probably worth noting that the flowering part of any plant is usually its genitals. You could argue that we’re not actually killing the plant, just nipping off its reproductive organs. If you think of a bunch of flowers as a bunch of tits and dicks it gets weird really quickly. I guess that is why it's not really spoken of.
“Picking flowers” sounds better than “castrating plants”. If you say “I’m just going to castrate a plant and display its genitals in a vase on my kitchen table” some people will think you're a psycho. But not me Ashley. I know you're a psycho. And to circle back to your initial question, this is why you put flowers in vases. Imagine throwing a dying toddler face down in a paddling pool and after a week, instead of calling the police, just changing the water to freshen up the posie. Wow! That's taken it too far Laurie! Wrong. I’ve heard the lavender crying. I've held a tulip’s trembling leaf while my wife skipped off with its ovaries.
A vase is basically an open casket. I think it's normal to think of a flower head as the face of a plant, even though we now know that's not true. Regardless, let's just pretend. Flowers are the heads of plants, the personality bit. The stem, rather obviously, is the neck, the thing that connects the head to the body. Together this is the usual tandem that we furnish our vases with. Severed heads on sticks. The trouble is, like all severed heads, they don’t really stand up very well without a body and this is where the vase comes into its own. The vase gives us stability and tidies up the tatty edges that remind us of our unconscionable slaughter. If I was wrong you’d happily place the flowers head first in the vase like a dead man bobbing for apples. But you don’t, because you live in shared housing and it's smarter to keep the hombres ignorant of your machiavellian kinks.
Let's agree. We put flowers in vases to remind the other flowers who’s the fucking boss and to keep the rest of the garden in line. We put flowers in vases because any death but our own is tragically beautiful in that it reminds us of our dwindling permanence. We put flowers in vases because if we put them in drawers nobody would ever see them. We put flowers in vases to let the muggles know our kind walk among them. Imagine, in ten years time my old cock may be freshening up the desk of some horrible super computer. The methodical indifference of florists may be the greatest scourge of our time. I hope this answers your question.
XL
Image* Flower Still-life With An Alabaster Vase. Gerard van Spaendonck 1783