6 Good Reasons to Love the Humble Wallflower

A posy of wallflowers and forget-me-nots from my garden

Today I’ve decided to stray from the birth month flowers that this blog is usually about because my garden is still full of wallflowers and they’re one of my favourite flowers!

I think the wallflower is often under-appreciated, mainly because the dark red version, which seems to be the most common, can seem a bit dreary. 

And maybe it’s also because it’s so easy to grow – in fact it can seem almost like a weed when it finds its way onto a wall.

Wall in Swan Meadow, Abergavenny

But I am always pleased to see my first wallflowers in bud, knowing that by the time the flowers open, winter will finally be well and truly behind us.


Here are a few of the reasons why I’m so fond of wallflowers –



1. The colours of wallflowers can range from palest yellow through gold and fiery red to deep, dark, burgundy velvet. And the ‘Persian Jewels’ variety adds a whole range of pinks and purples to the mix. Glorious to paint, both in watercolours and in oil pastels!

2. I love the fragrance of a bed of massed wallflowers, even though it was one of the first fragrances to bring on my allergy symptoms!

3. Wallflowers bloom for a long period of time so their colour well and truly bridges the gap between the spring bulbs and the summer flowers. I think of them as mainly a May flower but in fact mine were beginning to show buds in March this year. 

They are so reliable that it’s hardly surprising that the wallflower stands for ‘intense fidelity in the throes of adversity.’

4. The wallflower represents great value both in terms of time and money spent. It is, strictly speaking, a biennial and I usually buy the plants in bundles from the greengrocer, in September, to plant out for flowering the following spring. But I find they are often bigger and bushier in the second or even the third year.  Over the years I’ve come to realise that the time to get rid of a wallflower plant and replace it with a new one, is when the plant no longer resists a gentle tug.

5. The wallflower is also a favourite with bees and as far as I’m concerned, that is a Very Good Thing.

6. There is also a true perennial wallflower and the Bowles Mauve does very well in my garden, though I’ve had less luck with the other colours. My Bowles Mauve flowers all year round, apart from taking a short break in February!

Ever since 1820, ‘wallflower’ has been the term used to describe a girl or woman who seems to be unable to find a partner and therefore, at a dance, she remains seated at the edge of the room, with her back to the wall. 

As such, it’s not a very flattering term. But in all other respects, I have great admiration and affection for wallflowers; so if I had to choose a to be a flower, a wallflower would be a strong contender!

If you had to be a flower, which one would you like to be?

Click

HERE

to see some of my

WALLFLOWER PAINTINGS

on Gifts and Greeting Cards

(some of them suitable for Mother's Day!)

Where Flowers Bloom so does Hope

This is an A4 size sheet, 300 dpi, so please feel free to save and print if you wish
- or just 'pin' it to spread a little springtime Hope around!

Where flowers bloom so does hope - so true!

Who can see a beautiful garden – or even just an early bud unfolding – and not feel a surge of hopefulness!

Flowers are full of life – in fact I think they are, in many ways, a wonderful metaphor for life. 

And ‘Where there’s Life, there’s Hope’ as the saying goes. ‘Dum Spiro, Spero’ – the motto of my ‘house’ at boarding school. ‘While I breathe, I hope.’

These wallflowers are flowering

very early this year! I usually expect

them in May, to bridge the gap

between spring and summer!

When the first spring flowers appear, snowdrops, crocuses and finally the daffodils, bringing a much-needed splash of colour to our dreary winter gardens, we very much hope that spring is not far away. 

Occasionally it snows on the daffodils, winter just reminding us that we can never be too sure that we’ve seen the last of him! But when we have snow that late in the year, it never lasts long. A fleeting glimpse of a Winter Wonderland and it’s gone, thawing before our eyes!

Hope, of course, like all good things, can get a bad reputation if it’s misused. 

Have you heard of the ‘Hope Hook’? When we keep banging away at trying to solve a problem, long after we should have taken on board that there’s no real solution and that it’s time to let go - that's when we’re caught on the ‘hope hook’. That’s when a strong dose of realism, possibly laced with acceptance, is needed.

But don’t confuse healthy realism with defeatism. 

Defeatism, loss of hope, is what characterises depression, that ‘so what?’ ‘why bother?' 'what’s the point?’ attitude that most of us experience briefly from time to time. And if you have ever been deeply depressed or met someone who is, I’m sure you’ll agree that it’s by the lack of ‘life’ that you’ll recognize true depressive illness.

Of course we can all refuse to hope so that we are never disappointed. But then we never really live!

Hope is such a commonly used word that we tend to take it for granted! ‘hope to see you soon’, ‘hope you are well’, ‘hope the weather will hold out . . .’ ‘hope someone will like my work enough to buy it!’ 

Hope is not quite the same thing as ‘expectation’; with 'hope' there’s always the chance that our hopes will not be fulfilled. And it's worth remembering that sometimes, when they are, there’s an element of luck involved.


When we sow seeds in our gardens – or window boxes! – we have no guarantee that they will grow into such beautiful and often fragrant, flowering plants. The seeds are so tiny and there are all sorts of hazards like adverse weather and bugs to contend with. 

A daffodil bulb, planted in late summer, looks very much like a dried up, well-past-its-sell-by-date onion. And yet we hope that it will survive months of waterlogged or frozen ground and push its way up through the soil to lift our hearts in springtime – and it usually does!


When Pandora opened the lid of the forbidden box, releasing all the evils, diseases and other ‘nasties’ into the world, out flew Hope as well. The myth teaches us that without Hope, like Private Frazer in ‘Dad’s Army’, we’d all be ‘doomed’.

Fortunately, for most of us, it is part of our nature to hope – Alexander Pope in his 'Essay on Man', possibly quoted from a Roman playwright, wrote, ‘Hope springs eternal in the human breast . . .’  Let's hope so!

And, without turning into insufferable 'Polyannas', let’s remind ourselves to be hopeful. 

And even more importantly, I think, let’s make sure we are (realistically) encouraging to all around us so that they too have good reason to hope!

(Oh dear - I remember when this song was new and very popular,

 though I was a teenager by then;

and I hate to admit it, but when I was younger, I did have my hair in ringlets,

 rather like one of the children in the clip!)

Twenty Minute Challenge

At the weekend, I had a lot to catch up with after all the printing and posting I'd done during the week; things like my Tax Return, people I needed to get in touch with, the ever-present ironing, the lawn needing mowing and the batteries in my doorbell urgently needing changing - the usual list of tedious tasks that seems to get longer rather than shorter. But I was determined to fit in some painting as well so I decided to see what I could achieve in a very short time in the way that artists on the 'Twenty Minute Challenge' website do.

My wallflowers are coming to an end so I, naturally, wanted to paint them before it's too late and I picked a bunch of assorted colours for my subject, set my timer and got stuck in! By the end of 20 mins I had easily finished the painting part of the exercise and my wet paper was decidely less wet. Unfortunately, I didn't think what I'd produced was worth photographing and it was still too wet to scan; so I can't post the result of the first stage. But after I'd had a quick lunch and done a few more 'odd jobs', I went back to look at what I'd done and decided that, now it was completely dry, there might be something worth salvaging if I defined the shapes of the flowers with a brown fineliner pen.

Not that it would ever be likely to become a greeting card design, but it might have some future on a white mug or even some more shoes! (These are obviously becoming my favourites when it comes to 'creating' products for my Zazzle store!)

Wallflowers Ringer Mug by helikettle
View more Wallflowers Mugs

I'm not sure that I learnt anything from limiting myself to 20 minutes as it is normal for me to work very fast and I never spend much time thinking about what I'm doing. In fact I'd probably have stopped painting sooner if I hadn't set the timer. But I did feel frustrated by the fact that I wasn't able to produce a really transparent but vibrant yellow. I tried several but they all seemed to turn murky and more like yellow ochre when they came up against the reds and merged with them.

My Keds shoes with a photographic image of wallflowers won a Today's Best Award but I actually prefer the slightly riotous look of my watercolour wallflowers -

Wallflowers Keds Shoes by helikettle
Make your own shoes online with zazzle

On the election front, I was beginning to feel a bit better about it when I read that Charles Kennedy had stood by his principles and felt unable to back the LibCon Coalition. But then I was disheartened again last night when it became clear that the women members of the BBC Newsnight's focus group had voted according to the 'fanciability' - they actually used the word! - of TweedleCam and TweedleClegg! And the men had almost all voted for them because they were more 'young and modern'! If this is what the election came down to, obviously Gordon didn't stand a chance!

Fortunately a spell of catching up with The Artistic Curmudgeon's blog, that I had neglected lately, went some way to restore my sense of proportion, as did happening upon these -

The Original Coalition Mug 2010 by Coalition_Mug
View other Coalition mug Mugs

And the jug of wallflowers, even though they are starting to droop, are still giving off a delicious fragrance - pity I have developed some sort of allergic reaction over the years that causes me to lose my voice around my favourite flowers!

Is this cheating?

Elizabeth White's book about Starting and Running a Greeting Card Business  cautions against selling at Craft Markets, advising the artist to seek out instead Craft Fairs, where the price of admission is quite high, as there will be more likehood of finding customers who are willing to pay a good price for a greeting card. So last weekend I visited our local monthly craft market to see if this was in fact true. I had explored the market when I first moved to Abergavenny some years ago and thought it seemed a very dreary affair, with nothing very interesting for sale and very few customers and had never been back since. This time was a little different. There were several stalls offering products I liked, such as this one, and there were a lot more people browsing. However, I didn't get the impression that much money was changing hands and wondered whether at least some people had come inside to get out of the cold wind and heavy, sleety showers! I didn't stay long.

Yesterday I was chatting about this with a friend from Norwich, who told me that she had just visited a craft fair in Norwich, where she had found stalls offering goods that she would have liked to buy if she had been able to afford them, but also a great many 'products' ranging from the repetitive to the downright awful. One stall that fell into the 'awful' bracket offered photographs on canvas blocks or framed behind glass and, although the stall-holder insisted they were photos, they looked more like really bad oil paintings! My friend does not use a computer and deduced that he had 'touched up' his photos with oil paints. That may be what he'd done but it's also possible that  he had used the 'artisitic' menu in Photoshop (or one of its free equivalents), something I had noticed but never really explored. But last night, when I'd finished editing some of my recent photos of the last of the wallflowers in my garden, I decided to have a little 'play on my computer' and was astonished by what could be achieved with the click of the mouse!

This is the original photograph on a mug - I like the fine detail of the veins in wallflowers' petals in close-up when you hover over them in the 'store' -

Wallflowers Mug by helikettle
cheap coffee mug with zazzle

- so I went on to make a mousepad and some slip-on Keds shoes.

But in some ways I prefer the 'oil painting' effect - it somehow bears more likeness to the way I see the world, even though my eyesight is near perfect - except sometimes, when it comes to reading the microwave instructions on the backs of frozen ready-meals! It seems to highlight the lights and darks (is this what people mean by 'tonal balance', a phrase I keep coming across recently?) and, in my view, there's a vibrancy that a sharply defined photograph often lacks.

So, with some misgivings about whether I was 'cheating', I went on to make a set of notecards and uploaded them to the online stores -

'Wallflowers' Get Well Soon Notecard by helikettle
cards from zazzle

I suppose it's the finished work that counts, not necessarily how it came about, and I like the way these turned out - but I still feel a bit as if I've cheated. It was an interesting experiment but I don't think I'll be doing it often!

Wallflower and Forget-me-not Colours

I'm not very sure what to make of this one! It was intended for the American Mother's Day, May 9th.

It took a very long time to cut out and stick down all those tiny flowers and leaves, as you can imagine, and when it was finished, I was disappointed that the 'Happy Mother's Day' didn't stand out very well. I almost didn't bother to scan it but I quite liked it in a 'Flower Power' kind of way so I did. And I don't know whether all scanners are the same, but mine shows quite a dark image in the 'preview' when it's 'warming up' and all of a sudden the image looked fine, with the forget-me-not lettering standing out very nicely.

So when the scanner had finished scanning and come up with the usual wishy-washy image, I adjusted it to make it as near as possible to the 'preview' and was quite happy with it - until I transferred it to my laptop, where the forget-me-nots were suddenly  turquoise, instead of the slightly purplish blue that they had been on my PC - the exact opposite to the difficulties I've been having scanning my seaside collages! - and the lovely deep wallflower-red border was almost black! Whatever I tried to adjust to get them back to their velvety red colour just made everything else go haywire..

Which just goes to show that, just as 'beauty is in the eye of the beholder', 'colours are dependent on the computer on which they are being viewed!'

I'm not sure whether it's worth all the time it takes to upload it, tag it, describe it and post it for sale on the PODstores; but I'd be interested to hear how it looks to others.

It rather reminds me of those municipal gardens along the Esplanade of the seaside resort where I grew up, where  the 'tour de force' was a flower bed with a map of the island and its coat of arms set out in flowers!

Just for the record...

I've been out and about a lot this week, away from the computer. On my way to the industrial estate where I get my printer paper, I discovered a little paved garden, hidden behind a high wall to the side of the tithe barn. Even as early as Monday, it was full of daffodils, whereas those in my garden are still few and far between. I didn't have my camera with me but today was such a warm and sunny day - hot even! - that I popped out to take some photos of them:

It turned out to be more difficult than I expected as there was a slight breeze so they were 'tossing their heads' in true Wordsworth fashion!

While I had my camera out I remembered that it is the equinox, so I decided to record the flowers that are blooming in my garden - some hyacinths in the window boxes:

The first tentative buds of the white alyssum:

early miniature tulips -

- and even some brave-looking wallflowers, growing by a wall, of course!

I can see that I'll soon be getting out my watercolours and doing some 'proper' painting!