Fields of sunflowers greet one in the summer season on the way to the beach at Marina di Vecchiano. Growing in the drained wetlands backing the coastline fringed by extensive umbrella pine forests the giant florescence of these gorgeous flowers, so characteristically marking the year’s hottest season, fill me with tumescent joy.
Originally native to the Incas of Peru where they had been cultivated over three thousand years ago and symbolised the image of the sun god the seeds of sunflowers were brought to the west by Francisco Pizarro at the beginning of the sixteenth century and since that time they have decorated the gardens of Mediterranean homes and the pockets of the farmers who grow them for the excellent oil their seeds produce.
However, before even the conquistadores the sunflower also entered into Greek mythology in the legend of Clitie a nymph who fell in love with the sun god Apollo and waited every day for his chariot to take her away. Instead the merciful god transformed her into a sunflower which constantly turns its face to follow the sun.
For me besides representing the summer’s flower par excellence and being allied to my own star sign of the Lion the sunflower reminds me of three precious things.
First is the wondrous poem by Blake first published in 1794 as part of his Songs of Experience:
Ah Sun-flower! weary of time,
Who countest the steps of the Sun:
Seeking after that sweet golden clime
Where the travellers journey is done.
Where the Youth pined away with desire,
And the pale Virgin shrouded in snow:
Arise from their graves and aspire,
Where my Sun-flower wishes to go.
What does this poem signify for me? Hope for better things perhaps? A vision of the golden country? A place where sexual repression is removed? A planet where absolute love appears in all its glory to shine eternal blessings upon all humanity? Yes all these things surely! There are places where most of us wish to go. There are islands in the bluest of seas, forests of freshest sylvan green, mountains of unalloyed snow where the ideal becomes real, where every breath is tender, where every touch is soft, where but to live is to experience purest ecstasy. We have all imagined these places and the luckiest of us have also found them in the scattered corners of our tortured earth. I find them in a field of sunflowers.
My second sunflower theme is that of Van Gogh’s paintings of this divine flower. For this greatest of painters martyred by his own soul the sunflower represented the purest floral transformation of hope itself. To paint its petals was for Vincent to re-establish his identity and re-find his aims. As he wrote to his brother Theo ‘it’s a type of painting that changes its aspect a little, which grows in richness the more you look at it’. More descriptively, the Italian for sunflower is ‘girasole’ which translates as ‘turn towards the sun’. Like it we too should always turn our whole beings towards that which gives us life, warmth, love, everything that is positive and energizes our universe.
The third theme of sunflowers is that it is the symbolic flower of Ukraine – a country so sadly topical in today’s world. How could an enemy say that by bombing a popular café and meeting place in Kramatorsk, one of the few social centres surviving in a place at war now for almost two years, and killing or injuring over fifty persons including babies and teenage twins, it was targeting a military objective?
The sunflower has become, like the yellow and blue of Ukraine’s flag a universal mark of unity, resistance and hope.
Ah sunflower do not be weary of time but be here with us every summer and fill us with happiness and golden horizons!
