“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:

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

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

“The Poppy FIelds” (c1963) by Anne Redpath

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Marsh Marigolds” (1906) by Wladyslaw Slewinski

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

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

“Poppy Field” by Michael Creese (nd)

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

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

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

“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

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