In the Seven Lamps of Architecture, Ruskin defines the first lamp, Sacrifice, as “It is a spirit, for instance, which of two marbles, equally beautiful, applicable and durable, would choose the more costly, because it was so and of two kinds of decoration, equally effective, would choose the more elaborate because it was so, in order that it might in the same compass present more cost and more thought. It is therefore the most unreasoning and enthusiastic, and perhaps negatively defined as the opposite of the prevalent feeling of modern times, which desires to produce the largest results at the least cost”. He concludes the chapter with “But of them (ie the builders of gothic cathedrals) and their life and their toil upon the Earth, one reward, one evidence, is left to us in those grey heaps of deep-wrought stone. They have taken with them to the grave their powers, their honours, and their errors – but they have left us their adoration.”
We’ve been considering the seven lamps as a model, a grouping or a limitation to impose upon our engagement with the language of plants here – Sacrifice, Truth, Power, Beauty, Life, Memory and Obedience. Last night we talked late about the language of plants, about Ruskin’s power when he gave us his direct experience of a plant, yet how loaded this always was with his personal mythology. Ruskin’s penetratingly complex description of the Hawthorn flower on the day he heard of Rose La Touche’s death is an example. We were reminded also of Edward Bach, who roamed the countryside to find plants that somehow ‘answered his condition’. This sensitivity, though it may be rooted in what we may know of a plant in botanical, gardening or medicinal terms, or memories of times and places when we have encountered it, allows us to develop our own, personal symbolic meanings.
Taking the first lamp, Sacrifice, we independently walked the Brantwood gardens today, each of us keeping in mind this spirit, the idea and ideal of sacrifice, as it was to ourselves personally. Various flowers particularly spoke to us variously – Alex was drawn to the Rose, representing as it does here an incredible complexity of meaning – and Ruskin’s uncontrollable sacrifice of his irrational devotional love for Rose La Touche. “I am so sick already for the sight of her, that – if it were not that it would plague herself – I would go to Ireland now, and lie down at their gate.” Here he describes a sacrifice. For me, I was strongly dawn, in pure response, mostly to the wild honeysuckle growing wild in the upper wooded garden – a flowerhead often in disarray within itself – yet for its sleekness of form and delicate feminine sadness of its individual flowers. Ruskin considered the plant capricious, a quality he appears to associate with feminine changefulness, unpredictability and independent wilfulness.
Proserpina exerts its ever increasing influence. Yet it’s hard to escape the presence of Rose La Touche in its pages. Reading today that Ruskin first associates the word Proserpina with Rose La Touche in a letter to Edward Burne Jones on the day after he asked her to marry him. She was eighteen. He first spoke of writing a botanical book called Proserpina three years later. He pointed out the first two letters stood for ‘pet’ and ‘rose’, and sometimes he removed the first ‘P’ and the second ‘r’, to give ‘Rosepina’. In one, something of their own language of flowers is revealed – in the ‘Veronica’ chapter, where Ruskin first outlines the scientific dissemblage of the Foxglove flower, then stating “None of which particulars concern any reasonable mortal, looking at a Foxglove, in the smallest degree” he goes on in a wonderful and mysterious passage to describe the flowers he and Rose (“any pretty young Proserpina”) would gather, and those they would not gather, together in a bouquet from his Brantwood garden.
We’ve been considering the seven lamps as a model, a grouping or a limitation to impose upon our engagement with the language of plants here – Sacrifice, Truth, Power, Beauty, Life, Memory and Obedience. Last night we talked late about the language of plants, about Ruskin’s power when he gave us his direct experience of a plant, yet how loaded this always was with his personal mythology. Ruskin’s penetratingly complex description of the Hawthorn flower on the day he heard of Rose La Touche’s death is an example. We were reminded also of Edward Bach, who roamed the countryside to find plants that somehow ‘answered his condition’. This sensitivity, though it may be rooted in what we may know of a plant in botanical, gardening or medicinal terms, or memories of times and places when we have encountered it, allows us to develop our own, personal symbolic meanings.
Taking the first lamp, Sacrifice, we independently walked the Brantwood gardens today, each of us keeping in mind this spirit, the idea and ideal of sacrifice, as it was to ourselves personally. Various flowers particularly spoke to us variously – Alex was drawn to the Rose, representing as it does here an incredible complexity of meaning – and Ruskin’s uncontrollable sacrifice of his irrational devotional love for Rose La Touche. “I am so sick already for the sight of her, that – if it were not that it would plague herself – I would go to Ireland now, and lie down at their gate.” Here he describes a sacrifice. For me, I was strongly dawn, in pure response, mostly to the wild honeysuckle growing wild in the upper wooded garden – a flowerhead often in disarray within itself – yet for its sleekness of form and delicate feminine sadness of its individual flowers. Ruskin considered the plant capricious, a quality he appears to associate with feminine changefulness, unpredictability and independent wilfulness.
Proserpina exerts its ever increasing influence. Yet it’s hard to escape the presence of Rose La Touche in its pages. Reading today that Ruskin first associates the word Proserpina with Rose La Touche in a letter to Edward Burne Jones on the day after he asked her to marry him. She was eighteen. He first spoke of writing a botanical book called Proserpina three years later. He pointed out the first two letters stood for ‘pet’ and ‘rose’, and sometimes he removed the first ‘P’ and the second ‘r’, to give ‘Rosepina’. In one, something of their own language of flowers is revealed – in the ‘Veronica’ chapter, where Ruskin first outlines the scientific dissemblage of the Foxglove flower, then stating “None of which particulars concern any reasonable mortal, looking at a Foxglove, in the smallest degree” he goes on in a wonderful and mysterious passage to describe the flowers he and Rose (“any pretty young Proserpina”) would gather, and those they would not gather, together in a bouquet from his Brantwood garden.
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