`When Daisies Pied and Violets Blue'

I was looking up something about flowers in the library when I happened upon Gary Bukovnik: Watercolors, published in 2005 by Hudson Hills Press. Bukovnik specializes in painting flowers that have intersected with humans. That is, they are rooted in pots, or already have been cut and are heaped or boxed or standing upright in a vase. Most of his backgrounds are blank and white so his rigorously detailed blooms float in space like Platonic ideals of flowerness.

Flowers are soothing. I walked into my boss’ office not long ago, revved up over some trifle, and a dozen yellow-orange roses in a vase on her desk calmed me, just their colors and fragrance. Bukovnik’s watercolors had a similar effect. November in Houston is not the monochromatic palette of upstate New York. We’re not entirely flowerless, but leaves and grass share an almost uniform brown-green-gray. Visit Bukovnik’s website for a second-hand floral infusion.

One of the minor pleasures of reading Shakespeare is identifying the more than 200 plants he mentions in his plays and poems. That’s what I was doing when I stumbled on Bukovnik’s book, at which point I got sidetracked into seeing how many of his flowers also show up in Shakespeare. I didn’t get far, but in Love’s Labours Lost (Act V, Scene 2) Don Adriano de Armado sings:

“When daisies pied and violets blue
And lady-smocks all silver-white
And cuckoo-buds of yellow hue
Do paint the meadows with delight…”

Bukovnik covers daisies and violets, but not the lady-smock (Cardamine pratensis) or the cuckoo-bud, better known as the buttercup (Ranunculus acris). And Oberon in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Act II, Scene 1) sings:

“I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,
Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine,
With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine.
Here sleeps Titania sometime of the night,
Lull'd in these flowers with dances and delight.”

Bukovnik paints violets and roses. In Act IV, scene 5, of Hamlet, Ophelia expresses her grief and madness with a lexical bouquet:

“There's rosemary,
that's for remembrance.
Pray you, love, remember.
And there's pansies, that's for thoughts…
There's fennel for you, and columbines.
There's rue for you, and here's some for me.
We may call it herb of grace o' Sundays.
Oh, you must wear your rue with a difference.
There's a daisy. I would give you some violets,
but they withered all when my father died.
They say he made a good end.”

The watercolorist paints pansies and violets but not the others. He selects his flowers from the florist’s stock, while Shakespeare’s garden is drawn from nature. (I would argue that Shakespeare created spring as we understand it, just as Dickens created Christmas.) Much scholarship has gone into interpreting Ophelia’s choice of flowers, the symbolic meanings they had accumulated in folklore by Shakespeare’s time, all of which his audience would have understood. Supposedly, she first mentions rosemary to her brother, Laertes, because it signifies remembrance and faithfulness, and she is calling up the memory of Polonius, their dead father.

Looking at Bukovnik’s watercolors and revisiting Shakespeare, Houston seems a little brighter and more pleasantly aromatic. In an interview included in Watercolors, Bukovnik, who lives in San Francisco, talks about the influence California has had on his work, and adds, “I grew up in northern Ohio where it’s cold and overcast, a very Scottish or Scandinavian [Hamlet’s Denmark?] climate.” I checked, and Bukovnik, whose ancestry is Slovenian, was born, like me, in Cleveland. Northerners cherish flowers more than most.