The following talk was delivered by Jane Winter at the Old Orchard Church in St. Louis, Missouri in Spring 2010
The following magazine Feature is republished here with permission from St. Louis Entertains Magazine: Winter/Spring 2010 ed.
For those of you who don’t know me, I’m Jane Winter. My husband Richard and I worked in England until 1992 when we moved here with our four children. They are now grown and three of them are married. One lives in Chicago with her family and three live in England. So far we have 6 grandchildren and a seventh due in February.
In 1997 I bought a business called Wildflowers which at the time was six years old and started to work as a professional florist. I started to design with flowers soon after moving to England with Richard. I learned by using things that I found on walks and then enjoyed learning more from making gardens. I used flowers from my garden for designing in and around the manor house where we lived and worked and I had done flowers for several friends’ weddings. By the time we moved to St. Louis I had been designing for fun for 20 years, but even with that experience, taking on a business was so different and it propelled me up an extremely steep learning curve.
At Wildflowers we do weddings, parties, events, and send out daily orders for anything. I have two full time people who work with me and a host of others who come in for a shorter time.
So how did I come to want to talk on this subject? Three things happened over a period of a few years.
The first was a lecture given by Lyndon Miller, a landscape gardener who was talking about the transformation of three parks in NewYork City. One garden was an historic garden by [renowned landscape architect Frederick] Olmsted which was derelict and dangerous. It had been one of his masterpieces and was now over grown and trash- ridden, a place for drug addicts and criminals. It was on the northern edge of Central Park adjacent to Harlem in the heart of Manhattan. Miller was convinced that creating a place of beauty might give the neighborhood hope. She restored the old structures, paths and flower beds. She filled the flower beds with beautiful well thought out plantings.
In the Conservatory Garden as it was named, she saw that as she restored and planted, people started to return and the vandalism and crime stopped. She welcomed the community to use and enjoy it. She encouraged them to feel an ownership of the park by labeling all the plant material so they could engage with it at some level. She committed to maintaining it because she had seen that people come when it is beautiful but only if you keep it beautiful will they stay and respect it. She wanted people to come and stay because she knew that gardens have a transformative power for people who need to relax and escape from busy lives surrounded by concrete to a place full of beauty. And people continued to come. Pride in the neighborhood returned and community was built through neighbors getting to know each other on their visits to the park. It became a favorite place for having weddings and taking wedding photographs. One day when Lyndon Miller was there to check on the park maintenance, she came across an elderly gentleman writing in a little notebook. She was interested and asked him what he was doing. He told her he had never had a garden of his own and that he saw this as his garden, so he was learning the names of the plants in ‘his’ garden.
In another even more dangerous city park called Bryant Park, a home to serious drug dealers, she got rid of the tall dark hedges surrounding the park in order to open it to the public view and to remove the places to hide. She made it easily accessible by having several entrances and exits so that people would feel free, not trapped. A restaurant opened on the side of this park where no one would even go in daylight let alone leave a car parked there at night.
The power of beauty in these stories really moved me. I identified with it and was thrilled by what I heard. The beauty of these places drew out the good and noble in the people who lived there. Human beings are drawn to beauty and beauty draws us to what is true.
The second reason I wanted to look at the subject of beauty is that there was a period of time when I felt acute pain and heartache when I experienced beauty. This combination of pain and beauty made me want to understand beauty and how it relates to reality and what I believe about reality. I still often feel pain when I experience beauty. Because It fills me with longings – a deep desire for more, a desire almost to be part of it, to be taken up into it. I am aware that I am longing to have my life totally filled with its goodness and purity, unaffected by the brokenness which I know to be in myself and which I see around me. It is a desire for more than the earth can offer. A Catholic theologian, Dubay in his book The Evidential Power of Beauty (pg 56) says, ‘elegant splendor reawakens our spirit’s aching need for the infinite, a hunger for more than matter can provide.’ The question one has to ask is: Who created this beauty that seems to be made so especially for us as human beings?
The world’s exquisite beauty touches us so profoundly, it delights us and provides so exquisitely for us every day that we can’t help but wonder if it speaks of a designer who is showing us his Love through all of it. If there is a God, his expression of love is that of a lover who makes us feel that if our whole heart with all its ugliness were exposed we would know we are very precious and beloved.Edward Oakes so wonderfully puts it, “creation is God’s loving expression of himself to the finite other.”
In the Bible the apostle Paul writes of the creation pointing to the existence of God and of it giving us clues about His character. Psalm 19 speaks of the beauty of creation being a universal language that everyone can understand – evidence of a creator
What God has made is beautiful and it woos us. This is an important entry point to understanding and responding to truth because to experience beauty we have to respond to it, to acknowledge it. In my shop once we were making wonderful lush arrangements for a big party. The flowers were in warm tropical colors and amongst them we placed papayas cut in half to show their beautiful interior design, shape and color. A friend walked in when we were working on these and gasped, “Who can say there is no God!”
Daniel McIrney said “This is how we most often approach truth. We grasp it first under the aspect of its goodness, its nobility, its beauty, before we grasp it analytically by the mind.”
The third and very strong catalyst to my talking on this subject was a book called Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels. A young boy in Poland during WWII watches the Nazis kill his family while he is hiding terrified in a cupboard. He escapes to a frightening life in the streets until an older man rescues him. Together they manage to get to the, as yet, unspoiled safety of Crete. After some time of freedom, the Nazis arrive and again they must hide in the attic of a house. The boy noticed that the old man was always painting precise watercolors of the “basil, lavetera, poppies and broom which he collected at night for their food.” One night as he was painting, he told the boy “that nature’s harmonies can not be guessed at”. That evening the boy notes that the lesson he must learn from this is to “find a way to make beauty a necessity (and) to make necessity beautiful”. Let me read that again, “find a way to make beauty a necessity (and) to make necessity beautiful”.
I thought this was fascinating and amazing. There are many ways of approaching this but I am taking only one for time’s sake. The old man in Fugitive Pieces is expressing the existence of two types of beauty. One was the beauty he found; his, poppy, lavatera, basil and broom, the beauty that was already there. And the other was the Beauty that he made of necessity; their meal and his drawings. In theological terms, the beauty he found, was beauty created by God and the other beauty is that which he had made for his daily life from what is created.
We could say the necessities of our lives are what we create for ourselves in order to live; meals shelter and recreation. I venture to say the boy is realizing that he has learned we need to weave beauty through all of them. It might mean creating a gourmet meal or just something simple. In the first we are creating something new from what is found and in the second we are relying on the integral beauty of the object to speak for itself. The example here is of the difference between a complex arrangement and a simple one. The beauty which is found is often the inspiration for the beauty we create especially in cooking and flower design. For us to notice what it is we have to eat and to delight in its color, flavor, shape or freshness inspires our own creativity and desire to use it well. Have many of you seen Julie and Julia? Julia Child is shopping for food in a Paris market. She enthusiastically picks up a bunch of parsley and holds it to her face to take in the smell and she sigh’s deeply with delight. Do we enjoy the colors, textures and flavors of our food? I recommend carrot soup.
Another way to make beauty a necessity is to enjoy the found beauty around us like the beauty of autumn leaves, a seed head, a flower in your garden or deep red pomegranates. Take time to question, to wonder and be amazed. We can cultivate a love for the natural world and let it do its work on our hearts so that we want to live in the presence of beauty and under its influence. I am aware that this affects my ability to appreciate the splendor of God himself and the people he has made. Beauty is a necessity for us.
What we are going to do now is to first look very briefly at the classical, philosophical and scientific understanding or description of beauty, then at a theological understanding of beauty in creation followed by created beauty in flower arranging.
Defining Beauty
I want to look briefly at how beauty is and was defined and what historically were considered to be the marks of beauty. Webster’s Dictionary defines it this way, “Beauty is a thing that gives pleasure to the senses or pleasantly exalts the mind or spirit”.
John Locke said “Beauty consists of a certain composition of color and figure causing delight in the beholder”. Another definition from the poet Wordsworth is “a multiplicity of symmetrical parts uniting them in a consistent whole
There is much overlap in the philosophical and scientific descriptions of beauty but there are some interesting differences. It just means I can show more slides!
The classical philosophical words that are used are:
1) Proportion: many particular parts all with differences. The proportion is the relationship of the parts. You have to have difference to have proportion. It is interesting that the symmetry of the human face is regarded as beautiful in all cultures.
2) Brightness or Resplendence – Which is also called Radiance – This is the invisible energy of the inner element that explains the outer elements of color and proportion The duckness of a duck and the tulipness of a tulip.
3) Unity and Wholeness To get at this you could use words like grace, purity, economy, uncomplicated completeness.
The scientific words used in describing beauty are:
1) Elegant Simplicity
Meaning completeness with economy – that nothing is superfluous.
2) Perfection and Integrity
3) Harmony again
The relationship of the parts make a harmony. The whole is something more than the parts. Each little floret in this slide is a completely different shape than the overall spherical shape of the allium.
4) And Brilliance – possessing clarity itself and also shedding light on other things.
similar to radiance
To all of these we add that the beautiful is above all a Form. The word Form can be used in several ways. Form can be shape, outline, or appearance – which is the common use. Or it can be a particular mode of existence like liquid, vapor or ice. Or it can be about the arrangement of the parts of a whole. Like pattern on fabric or the form of a flower. Form is the essence of a thing. It is its inner essence that makes it what it is. It makes a lily bulb a lily and not an anemone. The form of something explains both its inner essence and its outer traits. Form and matter can not be separated they are intrinsic to each other.
Beauty for centuries was seen as part of what was called the ‘triad of transcendentals’; Beauty, Goodness and Truth. It had a crucial role in Christian thinking about the nature of God and the story of redemption.
At the beginning of the modern age, the time of the Renaissance and Reformation, significant discoveries in physics and astronomy displaced classical notions of beauty such as symmetry, balance and proportion. They were pushed aside as having no bearing on scientific truth. In Christian theology at the time of the reformation there was the beginning of a shift from an emphasis on the beauty of creation to the inner beauty of the person and a growing indifference to beauty in any other sphere. Of course one has to say there were exceptions to this. Bach being a notable one.
In the fundamentalist tradition from the early 20th Century beauty has been suspect until fairly recently when Evangelical Christians have begun to engage with the culture and have realised the significance of beauty in understanding and coming to know God.
In modern science Dubay in the, The Evidential Power of Beauty gives example after example of modern physicists who agree that beauty is the primary standard for scientific truth. James Watson who, with Crick and Wilson, cracked the DNA code, said, that beauty guided the three of them in their discoveries of the molecular structure of DNA. Heisenberg who worked in quantum mechanics said that the truth of his theory was found convincing by virtue of its completeness and abstract beauty. Einstein also believed beauty was a pointer to truth.
Some even say the elegance of an equation is better evidence than an experiment. They treasure beauty because it is a mark of truth. Beauty convinces because of its own inherent power. It has its own light which we all recognize and acknowledge. This I think points to the fact that beauty is objective and not just in the eye of the beholder.
Theology and Beauty
Now I want to look at a theological understanding of beauty. Jeremy Begbie, a concert pianist and theologian in his essay ‘Created Beauty and the Witness of Bach‘ outlines 6 very helpful theological points concerning beauty and the creation. I want to go through these to try to get to grips with it a bit more because it is very difficult to understand. His ideas are very stretching but worth the effort. I hope you can bear with me.
The first point is that “Creation testifies to God’s beauty but in its own distinctive ways and God testifies to His own beauty through creations own beauty”. Two certainties flow from this: that we can enjoy the beauty of created things, like flowers because He values this physical world and is committed to renewing it. He showed us this when he first renewed Jesus’ body at the resurrection. Jesus’ resurrection is the promise of the physical renewal of the whole creation. It will go on into eternity and be more glorious than it is now, beyond our imagining.
The second point is that God made the creation other than himself. Begbie says that this otherness is created out of the otherness of the three persons of the trinity and at the same time it testifies to a reflection of the otherness of the persons of the trinity. We see the three persons of the trinity at work with each other in creation. God is at work by his Spirit redeeming creation through the Son, meaning Jesus. Because of this work creation is full of God’s beauty. Here we see the relationship of beauty to the Holy Spirit more clearly or in a fresh way.
This idea of otherness relates to one of the things I like most about working with flowers. They require you in their otherness to pay attention to their essence or ‘radiance’. You have to work with the integrity of the flower, its form, its line, its shape and color. I have to let the flower show me how it would look best. French Tulips and poppies like to dance which means that they start to move and bend their stems after they are arranged. So an arrangement can change from day to day. They can be designed so this element of their beauty is seen fully. Even the unveiling of the poppy is part of the dance. In fact it is never just the finished product – the bloom, but it is the flowers at every stage and in every part. That means: the bulb or bud, the stem, the bloom, the leaf and the seed head.
Jesus is the one in whom creation has reached its culmination because it is through Jesus death and resurrection that the whole creation is brought back into a relationship with God and will be totally renewed. It is in the incarnation and death of Jesus that we see the renewing of the world’s broken beauty back to its fullness. It is in seeing Jesus’ life and his going to be in heaven with God that we have a preview of the earth filled with God’s glory.
We see in Jesus a beauty that knows and transforms brokenness. In the story of the old man and the rescued boy, theirs is a life of brokenness. It was surrounded and permeated by terrible mistrust, cruelty, fear and hatred. The beauty of the simple lavatera flower or a sprig of basil is a salve to their sadness. A friend of mine who works with victims of abuse said that beauty is an antidote to evil. It is a necessary reminder to her that there is goodness and redemption. Von Balthasar explains well this need to remember redemption. He says Redemption was achieved by the divine beauty of Jesus engaging directly in the world’s wounded and deformed beauty: in the Son crucified, risen and exalted we are given an anticipation of God’s recreation of the world’s beauty”.
In relation to beauty, Begbie warns us of the danger of sentimentality in which my industry indulges often. Especially on Valentines Day. Remembering the death of Jesus will prevent the pleasure of beauty from becoming sentimentality because beauty at its richest has been forged through the darkness and desolation of Good Friday. The cycle of cut flowers is a partial picture of this death and renewal. It is for this reason that I don’t work with silk flowers. I don’t want to pretend and avoid the real world where there is brokenness, decay and a need for restoration. It is interesting that silk flowers are no longer called artificial but are called permanents. The glory of real flowers fades but we will have more poppies next season and those will fade and this will happen again and again until we get to glory. The beauty of the materials I use is that they speak of God’s engagement with his creation and His renewing work every season. This gives us a preview of a glorious new creation.
Begbie’s third point and I quote, is that “Beauty is charged with a promise not chiefly about paradise lost but of the glory still to come, so beauty is a foretaste of an even greater beauty still to come. The Holy Spirit, the third person of the Trinity, is even now perfecting creation in anticipation of its future glory (Rom 8:22).Pg 28″
In the Bible in Romans 8v 20-22 it says “For creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice but by the will of the one who subjected it, in the hope that creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought to the glorious freedom of God. For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now.”
We should not try to freeze the moments but give thanks and be reminded to look forward to the future glory of everything.
To design with dried flowers one has to be careful it doesn’t tell a nostalgic story of just looking back. What is to come will be new and always changing, not static. For example, a jasmine tree changes every week. It has a beautiful scent. The flowers bloom for a week then disappear and I always feel a little disappointed or cheated but a few weeks later it flowers again and I am reminded to think of glory and be thankful.
Point Four is that because beauty tells us about the Trinitarian nature of God, that he is three persons, creation is filled with an amazing diversity of many different parts, all relating to each other. There is a unity of vase style, color, and shape but a clear variety and interest in each element. This is part of its proportion and harmony. Each part is seen more clearly because it is in relationship to others which are different. The individuality and uniqueness is brought out in the differences. This speaks also of the wonderful unity and diversity of beauty. Everything is united in the creation by the Holy Spirit who also draws out each part’s uniqueness.
The Fifth point is that beauty in creation does not have any of what Begbie calls closed harmonies, which means that it is infinite without losing its proportion and harmony. Because beauty arises out of the core of the three persons of the trinity who are infinite, the proportion can not be restricted. If the measure of beauty is divine beauty then we have to think of it in terms of infinity. The love that is received and given from one to another in the persons of the Trinity is overflowing, boundless, without measure. We are not even able to imagine it. Proportion and integrity still exist but in abundance or excess.
It was brought to my attention that the word ‘excess’ could sound as though I was saying God might have made a mistake. The way I meant it to be understand is that God gives us more than we need in fact more than we could ever ask or imagine. In this abundance is also the idea of what Begbie calls “creation’s contingency”. These would be the unpredictable things which aren’t just from the past but are improvisations on what has gone before, reinterpretations of it, and they are also consistent with what will be in the future.
The 6th and last point is that beauty provokes desire: the desire to enjoy beauty — like the gardens in New York, beautiful flowers, wonderful food or music. Beauty brightens and gives pleasure. It gives us intimations of infinity and perfection. It makes us want to explore and know the beautiful.
God’s beauty is infinite because God is infinite but it is also approachable — in creation through human beings and created things. Rusty Reno, in a review of a book by David Hart, in Touchstone Magazine says, “We are not overwhelmed by God as a sublime truth but we are romanced by God as pure beauty”.
All of the above is beauty’s answer to our fundamental human needs or longings. Wonder is fundamental. We need it to be alive to reality and astonished by its splendor. A need to Delight. God made us for ecstasy. In the new testament in I Pet 1:8 he writes about a joy that is an inexpressible and glorious joy so glorious it can not be described. We have a longing to be satisfied by Beauty. We need to pursue meaning in the midst of brokenness and a need to fall in love with the creation and The Creator. To experience and know love Dubay says is a “selfless commitment to a fascinating beloved”.
Beauty fills us with a longing for meaning beyond ourselves. Dostoyevsky, in Brothers Karamazovwrites, “Beauty is the battlefield where God and Satan contend for the hearts of men.”
“Beauty brings us to wonder. Dubay says Wonder at reality demands the humility to sit at the foot of a dandelion.” A dandelion is a simple weed that we don’t want, but it is made of such complex cells we would be in awe of it if we could see them all at work. There is a wonderful statement on wonder by G.K. Chesterton to his future wife. He writes “I do not think there is anyone who takes quite such a fierce pleasure in things as I do. The startling wetness of water excites and intoxicates me: the fieriness of fire, the steeliness of steel, the unutterable muddiness of mud.”
The paradox of Christian creativity is that in the process of making, we discover more and more what we have not made. When I confront certain flowers and I don’t know how to use them I am at a complete loss. I wish they were different and easier to use.
My task as a designer is not to just represent truth. I am called to use my materials creatively while respecting their form and integrity and in doing that, broaden and deepen my own and others’ awareness of the world we live in and our place in it.
The tulip draws one to see, delight, appreciate and love. It makes Truth easy to accept and welcome. The objective evidence for the truth of the tulip flows from its form and not only from the fact that it satisfies a person’s needs or desires.
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Jane Winter is a professional florist and owner of Wildflowers in St. Louis, Missouri.