© Rev Rex A E Hunt, MSc(Hons)
16 October 2022

THE ‘HILLS ARE ALIVE’: ALL FLOWERS, BRIGHT AND BEAUTIFUL…
(Six Cameos)

Right now, in my home state of Victoria,
but particularly in the Gariwerd (also known as the Grampians) on Djab Wurrung Country,
the hills are still alive with wild flowers.
        Pink Heath
        Thryptomene
        Blue Tinsel Lily
        Flying Duck Orchid
        Parrot Pea
        Native Fuchsia

Once described as the 'garden of Victoria’,
the region is home to more than one third of Victoria's flora.
        Wild flowers are a beautiful salute to nature.
        But I draw the personal line at a neighbour’s smothering Jasmine!

oo0oo

During the first days of winter this year,
my wife and I were in Canberra and decided to visit the National Gallery.
        I particularly wanted to view and experience
        the Indigenous Art Triennial display called ‘Ceremony’.

Featured were the works of 38 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists from across Australia,
which revealed how ceremony sits at the nexus
of Country, culture, and community.

But just before we entered the first of several ‘Ceremony’ display areas
we passed some other paintings also on display.
        And among that display were several by the late Australian artist,
        Margaret Preston (1875–1963).

Having recently come across her work I stopped to look through the display
hoping to see her six-panel work Australian Wildflowers.
        But alas, it hangs in another gallery!

During the late 1920s Preston set out to make Australians see beauty in native flowers,
“and gradually they came to dominate her still lifes, sometimes mixed with non-natives, combining English and Australian identities, two hemispheres, and two social eras—one the colonial era of Australia’s history, the other the modern era of sovereign nationhood.”

She was also one of the first non-Indigenous Australian artists
to use Aboriginal motifs in her work.
Years later Preston claimed Aboriginal artists focus
“not only the flower but the whole plant; the roots are of equal importance as the blossoms”.

In indigenous art, flowers are about much more than beauty.
They engage Country, cosmology, environments, ecologies, totalities of being.

oo0oo

Several autumns ago I discovered the writings of John Palka.
A professor of biology, he says
“the very first love of my scientific life was the world of plants. It was peering through a microscope at the brightly colored petals and stamens of an Emperor tulip during my first college course in biology that got me hooked, that literally kept me up at night trying to learn as much about living things as I could…”

Let me share with you some of his thoughts on flowers…
As, over the past month or so, our TV scenes and news films
        have been full of flowers!

Millions of people around the world grow flowers in their gardens.
We give flowers as gifts on special occasions,
whether as a simple thank you for an invitation to dinner,
or as a sign of congratulations,
or as an acknowledgement of bereavement.

We associate flowers with love, with joy, with sympathy, with sorrow, with death.
Their symbolic power in our lives is immense…

Though flowers affect us deeply, they are given to us by nature.
They are the products of evolution
and play their own role in the great web of life.

This role is independent of human feelings.
Flowers are what they are.
Humanity breeds many varieties of flowers to make them yet more affecting to us,
but they are nature’s creation, not our own.

oo0oo

Many decades ago, in the spring of 1936,
while waiting for his beloved to arrive from London for their wedding,
“and germinating the ideas that would bloom into Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four”,
George Orwell (1903-1950) planted some roses in the garden
of the small sixteenth-century cottage that his suffragist, socialist, bohemian aunt
had secured for him in the village of Wallington.

Three and a half years after he planted them,
        and after thirteen seasons of tending to them, Orwell’s roses
        were struggling to bloom for the first time.

World War II had just begun. Orwell recorded in his diary:
‘Cut down the remaining phloxes, tied up some of the chrysanthemums which had been blown over. Difficult to do much these afternoons now it is winter-time. The chrysanths now in full flower, mostly dark reddy-brown, & a few ugly purple & white ones which I shan’t keep. Roses still attempting to flower, otherwise no flowers in the garden now…’

This man. most famous for his scrutiny of totalitarianism and propaganda,
and an unyielding political vision, had planted roses!
“That a socialist or a utilitarian or any pragmatist or practical person might plant fruit trees is not surprising,” wrote author Rebecca Solnit.

“They have tangible economic value and produce the necessary good that is food even if they produce more than that. But to plant a rose — or in the case of this garden he resuscitated in 1936, seven roses early on and more later — can mean so many things…

If war has an opposite, gardens might sometimes be it, 
and people have found a particular kind of peace in forests, meadows, parks, and gardens.”

oo0oo

Yesterday a woman was planting flowers in her garden.

Her activity was more than a hobby, even more than a pleasure.
She was digging, dirtying, straining, mulching and lugging,
under the power of plants which do not yet even exist,
but whose images have taken up residence in the atoms
and cells within her imagination.

Weeks or months will elapse before her labour is fulfilled.
Patience and faith will sustain her until, under the majesty of Earth’s dominion,
the unprepossessing little bulbs and seeds will explode into
daffodils, tulips, irises, freesias, geraniums, pansies, daises, and sunflowers.

A war will have been won by soft and coloured things.
The yellow eyes of asters, the purple tongues of irises, and the crayola pansies
have raised their banners above the turrets of Earth’s soil
to defy the dark cold space that pervades almost all of everything else. (Fleischman 2013)

It is Spring.
Hosanna! Not in the highest, but right here. Right now. This. (Goodenough 1998)
        A Newer Testament.
        The gospel of the natural present moment.

oo0oo

Today, in the spirit of persistent women
as presented in the biblical ‘justice’ scenario (Luke 18:1-8) and
patience and faith experiences captured through beauty and nature, independent of the gospel story,
we honour the spirit of flowers, of wonder, and of beauty.
“Beauty… transforms like no other encounter and sets us squarely in the realm of the sacred…. Beauty enlarges, transforms, and embraces the whole complexity that is life.  Beauty prefers to feel all and feel deeply, thereby participating in the divine act of creative transformation.”

Although flowers have featured before in church Harvest Festivals,
(for the first time in the history of this Congregation,)
we are celebrating a uniquely different Flower Communion.

Its origin goes back to 1923, after a brutal World War 1, when Norbert Capek,
a former Baptist minister and later founder of the Unitarian Church in Czechoslovakia,
introduced it to his congregation…

This year marks the 80th anniversary of Capek’s death at the hands of the Nazis.
As we celebrate the beauty of our world in flowers,
we can rejoice in all that we give to and receive from our freedom
to gather and worship and celebrate freely together
as our hearts and minds prompt us.

And be grateful.

Bibliography:
Elias, A. “Useless Beauty: Re-Politicising Australian Wildflowers”. Sydney Environment Institute. The University of Sydney. 4 September 2019. (Accessed 10 January 2021)
Farmer, P. A. “Beauty as a Spiritual Home”. Open Horizons. (nd). (Accessed 21 June 2021)
Fleischman, P. R. Wonder: When and Why the World Appears Radiant. Amherst. Small Batch Books, 2013
Goodenough, U. The Sacred Depths of Nature. New York. Oxford University Press, 1998
Palka, J. “Flower Forms”. Nature’s Depth. Posted 1 May 2016 <www.https://naturesdepths.com/flower-forms/>
Popova, M. “Orwell’s Roses: Rebecca Solnit on How Nature Sustains Us, Beauty as Fuel for Change, and the Value of the Meaningless Things That Give OurLives Meaning”. The Marginalian. 10 December 2021. (Accessed 30 January 2022)
Solnit, R. Orwell’s Roses. New York. Viking Press. 2021