Expanding Our Understanding of Flora
Pulter, like many other seventeenth-century writers, invokes Flora as the goddess of flowers. References to the goddess Flora might have helped to mystify the role of women in gardens, linking them to the flowers themselves more than to owning land or cultivating it: “Gardening books from the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries may have addressed and depicted the gentle female reader as the goddess Flora or her garden’s titular deity, but it was the male reader who was seen to manage that garden, whether for use or pleasure.” While women worked in gardens, “they became almost invisible as designers, propagators, and cultivators” (Rebecca Bushnell, Green Desire: Imagining Early English Gardens [Cornell UP, 2003], p. 110; see also Jennifer Munroe, Gender and the Garden in Early Modern English Literature [Ashgate, 2008]). Flora also has a more checkered past than one might expect. “According to her myth, Flora had been a notorious courtesan in the earliest days of Rome, who left so much of her immoral earnings to the city when she died that the grateful Romans deified her. She became both the goddess of flowers and the protector of prostitutes, and Dutch pamphleteers delighted in nothing more than drawing obvious parallels between the Roman whore and the valuable tulips that had passed from hand to hand so rapidly at the very height of the mania” (Mike Dash, Tulipomania [New York: Three Rivers, 1999], p. 177). Here you will find some depictions of Flora and her ancient Roman backstory.
Flora in a first-century AD fresco from the Villa Arianna at Stabiae; now at Naples National Archaeological Museum. Public Domain.
In this satirical engraving, Flora presides over the dishonesty and scandal of tulipomania.
Crispijn van de passe, Flora’s Mallewagen (1637). Rijksmuseum. Public Domain.
Illustration from the title page of Tooneel von Flora (Amsterdam, 1637), a pamphlet about tulipomania. Koninklijke Bibliotheek, Nationale bibliotheek van Nederland. Public Domain.
Flora in Cowley’s Of Plants
As you will see in Cowley’s depiction of a contention among flowers, included in the Curation for “The Garden” (Poem 12) on Parliaments of Flowers, Cowley has the goddess Flora preside over the trial of the flowers as their judge. First, he explains her history, describing her exile from Rome and fall from power. He does not, however, link her with having been a prostitute.
- This great and joyful day,* on which she knew*the first of May
- What ’twas to be a wife and goddess too,
- The grateful Flora yearly did express
- In shows, religious pomp, and gaudiness,
- Long as she thrived in Rome, and reigned among
- The other gods, a vast and numerous throng;
- But when the sacred tribe was forced from Rome,
- Among the rest an exile she became,
- Stripped of her plays, and of her fane* bereft,*temple
- Nought of the grandeur of a goddess left.
- Since then, no more adored on earth by man,
- But forced o’er flowers to preside and reign,
- The best she can, she still keeps up the day;
- Not as of old, when blessed with store she lay,
- When with a lavish hand her bounties flew;
- She han’t the heart and means to do it now,
- But in a way fitting her humble state,
- She always did and still does celebrate.
A New Orchard and Garden: Flora’s mantle
What can your eye desire to see, your ears to hear, your mouth to taste, or your nose to smell, that is not to be had in an orchard, with abundance and variety? What more delightsome than an infinite variety of sweet smelling flowers? Decking with sundry colors, the green mantle of the Earth, the universal Mother of us all, so by them bespotted, so dyed, that all the world cannot sample them, and wherein it is more fit to admire the Dyer, than imitate his workmanship, coloring not only the earth, but decking the air and sweeting every breath and spirit.
The rose red, damask, velvet, and double double province rose, the sweet musk rose double and single, the double and single white rose; the fair and sweet scenting woodbine, double and single, and double double; purple cowslips, and double cowslips, and double double cowslips; primrose, double and single; the violet, nothing behind the best, for smelling sweetly. A thousand more will provoke your content. And all these, by the skill of your gardener, so comely, and orderly placed in your borders and squares, and so intermingled, that none looking thereon cannot but wonder, to see, what Nature corrected by Art can do.
In turn, embroidery was often an opportunity for creating fantasy gardens collecting together flowers from different seasons and climates. In The Masque of Flowers, included in the Curation Flower People, the Flower men’s costumes depend on embroidery and women are praised as “expressing” flowers through their embroidery. In Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, Belarius backs up his claim that his sons are really the king’s lost boys by producing an embroidered cloak made by their mother. As a baby, he reports, the younger, Arviragus,
- was lapped
- In a most curious mantle wrought by th’hand
- Of his queen mother, which for more probation
- I can with ease produce.
The cushion cover below is not as sizable as a mantle but it offers a glimpse of what “curious” needlework might have looked like and how it might have conjured a fantasy of Flora’s bounty.
British cushion cover (1590–1610), Accession Number: 64.101.1253, Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public Domain.
Frontispiece for John Rea, Flora, seu de Florum Cultura, or a complete Florilege (London, 1665).
- With flowers crowned, here Flora sits as queen;
- Near her, as maids of honor, stands
- The painful Ceres, and Pomona’s seen
- Begging a blessing at her hands,
- To crown her crops, and deck her trees again
- With flow’rs, the hope of fruit, corn, wine, and grain.
- The gracious queen soon granteth their desire,
- And sweetly smiling, casts a ray
- From her bright eyes, which, like Sol’s cheering fire,
- Dries up cold dews, and drives away
- The frosts, which had long locked up from our eyes,
- Beauties in beds, which with the sun now rise.
- Behold each ear with jewels hung doth shine,
- And ev’ry sprig flow’rs doth adorn:
- The pleased Pomona views the spreading vine,
- In hope as high as Ceres’ corn:
- Then both agree, of both to bring their best,
- To entertain you at the florists’ feast.
- Meanwhile, the Queen calls for her cabinet,
- And all her jewels doth expose,
- Shows what they are, and by what artist set,
- Then kindly bids you pick and choose;
- Come boldly on, and your collection make,
- ’Tis a free gift, pray wear them for her sake.