I am not a flower girl - or wasn't. I'd always rejected things that screamed 'girl' - flowers, pink, frilly socks. I was horseriding bareback along the beach and surfing and skateboarding, and though I liked gardening from an early age, it was a practical kind of gardening - I'd plant thyme in pots and lug them from house to house.

But my Mum loved blue irises. Sometimes that's enough to make you love something to - that someone you love felt so strongly about something. It was enough to make me choose blue irises for my wedding bouquet - because I sure as hell wasn't having an ordinary bouquet.

Mum always loved Van Gogh. I guess it was one of the painters you were taught about at school. In my tradition of rejecting cliches, I also rejected his sunflowers, midnight skies and irises - they were too popular for me to even glance at.

But this week's Hive Garden challenge, that asks us to look at gardens in art, has me lazily turning to the irises, because I don't have time to peruse other art right now, and because I just transplanted some irises to fill a garden space after chopping down a native banksia that the rabbits were hiding under. It's Spring here, and I'm eagerly waiting for them to flower, because I'm convinced no one could not put an offer on the house once they see them in full bloom.

Van Gogh's Irises are almost as dynamic as the real thing - or perhaps more so. They fill the frame - one cannot escape them. There's an intensity to them - thickly painted and almost tactile, they swirl across the canvas. They are so intense and alive - flowers caught in time. I wonder about those flowers, and the bulbs from them - he painted them in 1889, and are those bulbs still planted in gardens today?

I'll certainly be taking them to my new place, at least a few of them. They are such a delight come Spring. When Dad died, I focussed on the irises as a symbol of life persisting. He died in September, so this month is the mark of him gone a year, and when the irises come out, I think I'll either sob or smile - or maybe both. Vincent long dead, Dad long dead, and the irises still a-bloomin'.

My favourite irises are not deep blues, but deep maroon or bright yellows - like in the painting, the irises in my garden have an individual presence, full of energy and vitality. For the first time I imagine Van Gogh as like me - looking at the natural world with admiration and wonder, and being lost within it. There's also the single white iris, apart from the cluster of purple ones - Van Gogh himself, perhaps, isolated and different, like how I feel in my day to day life. I admire that = the defiance, the non conformity. Later queer readings suggest that there is an intense expression of difference here, and the painting is a defiance of social norms - perhaps because they are so vivid and unruly on the canvas, they become a celebration of non conformity. The more you look, the more you see.

Perhaps if I had his artistry, I would paint my iris colours in thick sweeps of paint.

^{Image created at my prompting by Chat GPT}

I realise that these days I am a flower girl. They're metaphors, symbols, reminders, lessons. They are beautifully impractical (though the herbalist in me knows that there is medicinal value in almost every plant, if not all) and paralysing, at times, in their beauty. They are all the more special because they're impermanent , brief in their splendour. Nothing lasts, after all, but we can appreciate things whilst they are around.

With Love,

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