“It’s so curious: one can resist tears and ‘behave’ very well in the hardest hours of grief. But then someone makes you a friendly sign behind a window, or one notices that a flower that was in bud only yesterday has suddenly blossomed, or a letter slips from a drawer . . . and everything collapses. ” ~ Colette

“Flowering Garden in Spring” (1920, oil on canvas)
by Henri Martin

                   

“People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.” ~ Iris Murdoch

The Bradford pears and Tulip trees are in full bloom, and I am reminded of the year I made mother’s day cards from photos I had taken of the trees in bloom—I was very pleased with how they had turned out, but my mother looked at hers and said, “What’s this?” Lex later told me that Mom had complained that I was too cheap to buy a card; Lex tried to explain to her that I had shot the photograph, worked with it on Photoshop, and had the print made. I had thought the gesture special. Oh well.

Anyway, I have to admit that when I was clearing out the thousands of cards in my mother’s drawers, I came across almost every card I had given her in the past decade and sometimes beyond, and the flimsy free homemade card I had made her was there.

Here. Have some flowers of spring:

“Spring Breeze” (1946, oil on canvas) by Otto Torsten Andersson

“Pink and Yellow Tree” (nd, oil on canvas) by Albert Henry Krehbiel

“Sunflowers” (1958-59, oil on board) by Peter Coker

“Les Dahlias” (1921, oil on canvas) by Tsuguhara Foujita

“Apple Tree Blooming” aka “The Eternal Spring” (1908) by Maurice Denis

“Meadow” (1913, oil on canvas) by Mikko Oinonen

“Flower Garden, Pansies” (1908, oil on canvas) by Emil Nolde

“Orchard with Blossoming Trees” (1888, oil on canvas) by Vincent van Gogh

“The Poppy FIelds” (c1963) by Anne Redpath

“Glass with Wild Flowers” (1890, oil on canvas) by Vincent van Gogh

“Pink Roses” (1890, oil on canvas) by Vincent van Gogh

“Black Will-o-the-Wisp” (date unknown, ink and wash) by Takato Yamamoto

“Flowers on a Chair” (1958, oil on canvas) by Adrian Ryan

“Marsh Marigolds” (1906) by Wladyslaw Slewinski

“Paris Bouquet of Wild Flowers” (1923) by Pierre Bonnard

“Les Roses” (1925-26, oil on canvas) by Claude Monet

“Poppy Field” by Michael Creese (nd)

“Flowers by the Sea” (1965, oil on composition board) by Fairfield Porter

“Two Austrian Copper Roses III” (1957, oil on canvas laid down on board) by Georgia O’Keeffe

“Yellow Irises” (1901, oil on canvas) by Pablo Picasso

“Magnolien” (1945, oil on canvas) by Cuno Amiet

“Poppies and Grasses” (1914, oil on canvas) by Pierre Bonnard

“L’amandier en fleurs” (1947) by Pierre Bonnard

“Poppies and Violet Asters” (nd, watercolor) by Emil Nolde

“Bloomy Apple Garden” (1936) by Nikolay Bogdanov-Belsky

“Hyacinth” (1941, oil on board) by Chen Baoyi

“Still Life with Pansies and Gladiolas” (nd, oil on canvas) by Arthur B. Carles

“The Orchard” (nd, oil on canvas) by Robert William Vonnoh

“Wannsee Garden” (1923, oil on canvas) by Max Liebermann

“Petunias” (1925, oil on hardboard panel) by Georgia O’Keeffe

Music by Mussorgsky,  “Pictures at an Exhibition” (Promenade), performed by The Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra