High Dike's Purple. Fritillaria meleagris, Snake's Head or Chess Flower, De Hoge Dijk, Driemond-Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Of our Flower writes Vita Sackville-West (1892-1962) - fine author and intimate friend of Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) - in the section 'Spring' of her long poem The Land:
And then I came to a field where the springing grass
Was dullen by the hanging cups of fritillaries,
Sullen and foreign-looking, the snaky flower,
Scarfed in dull purple, like Egyptian girls
Camping among the furze, staining the waste
With foreign colour, sulky-dark and quaint,
Dangerous too, as a girl might sidle up,
An Egyptian girl, with an ancient snaring spell,
Throwing a net, soft round the limbs and heart,
Captivity soft and abhorrent, a close-meshed net,
- See the square web on the murrey flesh of the flower -
Holding her captive close with her bare brown arms.
Close to her little breast beneath the silk,
A gipsy Judith, witch of a ragged tent,
And I shrank from the English field of fritillaries
Before it should be too late, before I forgot
The cherry white in the woods, and the curdled clouds,
And the lapwings crying free above the plough.
In Wikipedia's article on our plant I'd noticed a reference to Vita Sackville-West - 'sinister little flower, in the mournful colour of decay' - and thought it would be interesting to hunt it down. But I by-passed that reference and came to the above.
Fascinatingly awful, to my eyes. Here's a xenophobic fear of the exotic, clothed in lurid almost pornographic language. Fear of the pure English for an Egyptian/Gipsy 'net', and yet written in 'longing' language for 'her little breast' and forgetfulness. The Fritillary as a foreign plant in England, as it indeed once was. And its purple, sulky-dark in oppostion to the cherry white in the woods. Curious is the negative reference to Judith and her tent in which she slew Holofernes (usually today she's a paragon of feminism). A poem for a long series of lectures...
Of course Vita Sackville-West's 'lapwings crying free above the plough' call to mind the Dutch word for our Flower: Kievitsbloem, Lapwing Flower. Flowers in bud look like lapwing eggs.
Olymp took this photo in De Hoge Dijk, a conservation park on the west side of Driemond, where I walked the other day.
High Dike's Purple. Fritillaria meleagris, Snake's Head or Chess Flower, De Hoge Dijk, Driemond-Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Of our Flower writes Vita Sackville-West (1892-1962) - fine author and intimate friend of Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) - in the section 'Spring' of her long poem The Land:
And then I came to a field where the springing grass
Was dullen by the hanging cups of fritillaries,
Sullen and foreign-looking, the snaky flower,
Scarfed in dull purple, like Egyptian girls
Camping among the furze, staining the waste
With foreign colour, sulky-dark and quaint,
Dangerous too, as a girl might sidle up,
An Egyptian girl, with an ancient snaring spell,
Throwing a net, soft round the limbs and heart,
Captivity soft and abhorrent, a close-meshed net,
- See the square web on the murrey flesh of the flower -
Holding her captive close with her bare brown arms.
Close to her little breast beneath the silk,
A gipsy Judith, witch of a ragged tent,
And I shrank from the English field of fritillaries
Before it should be too late, before I forgot
The cherry white in the woods, and the curdled clouds,
And the lapwings crying free above the plough.
In Wikipedia's article on our plant I'd noticed a reference to Vita Sackville-West - 'sinister little flower, in the mournful colour of decay' - and thought it would be interesting to hunt it down. But I by-passed that reference and came to the above.
Fascinatingly awful, to my eyes. Here's a xenophobic fear of the exotic, clothed in lurid almost pornographic language. Fear of the pure English for an Egyptian/Gipsy 'net', and yet written in 'longing' language for 'her little breast' and forgetfulness. The Fritillary as a foreign plant in England, as it indeed once was. And its purple, sulky-dark in oppostion to the cherry white in the woods. Curious is the negative reference to Judith and her tent in which she slew Holofernes (usually today she's a paragon of feminism). A poem for a long series of lectures...
Of course Vita Sackville-West's 'lapwings crying free above the plough' call to mind the Dutch word for our Flower: Kievitsbloem, Lapwing Flower. Flowers in bud look like lapwing eggs.
Olymp took this photo in De Hoge Dijk, a conservation park on the west side of Driemond, where I walked the other day.