The life of a flower is short. One day of a flower corresponds roughly to ten human years. This is why flowers force us to confront the cruel fragility of life. Flowers therefore imply much more than their beauty; they remind us that even in decay the time of life passes.

In Nature, flowers play an essential role in the reproduction of plants and in the nutrition of insects, contributing substantially to maintaining and developing the necessary biodiversity of ecosystems. Since time immemorial, flowers have helped ensure the material and spiritual survival of human beings. As Maurice Maeterlinck says, the plant’s effort towards the light and towards the spirit is concentrated in the flowers.

Origins and a little history

About four hundred and fifty million years ago aquatic plants began the conquest of the mainland and today they represent about 86% of living beings on planet Earth; the origin of flowers dates back to about one hundred and forty million years, therefore long before the appearance of humanity on the face of the Earth. It seems that the violent and feared Neanderthal Man practiced burial rituals and probably buried his dead decorated with flowers. This conclusion was reached after having found significant quantities of pollen in the places where the tombs dating back to the Neanderthal era were found.

Flowers have therefore always accompanied the human concept of beauty, but also of the ephemeral. The first speculative bubble of which we know had as its protagonist a flower, precisely the tulip (imported into Europe from the Ottoman Empire), whose “variegated” variety had come to be worth in 16th century Holland, a quantity of money equal to the salary of ten years of work of a master craftsman or a luxurious canal house.

Flowers are used to express feelings and to communicate emotions that one does not have the courage to express: jealousy, loyalty, joy, love, sadness, passion, greed; there are flowers for the dead, for weddings, for a baptism, a graduation, etc…

My Florilegio

Ultimately, flowers speak to us. I wanted to establish a conversation with them, to enhance the phantasmagorical symphony of colors, scents and life force they give us. The peculiarity is that in this vital force there is also the inevitable decadence and death, a process that in flowers is so rapid that we can say that it holds hands with vital beauty. In this way a symbiotic coexistence is created which makes death beautiful and beauty nostalgic.

 

In each image I wanted to bring together a variety of different flowers, in combinations that sometimes come to be surreal; anthology (florilegio), that is a collection of flowers extracted from Nature but in harmonic combinations whose objective is to form a new vision, with an (I hope) original aesthetic, but with a unitary treatment and meaning. Flowers of a new world in which pollination is increasingly important and where life force predominates rather than ephemeral beauty.

As in all images, even in my images time stops and consequently life stops, freezing forever and thus blocking the inevitable process of decadence which is so rapid in flowers; in this way, on the one hand I offer those who see my images the vital freshness of flowers and on the other I have the illusion of offering my flowers a permanent life, making them alive forever!

Go Further…

While creating the images of this florilegio, I paused to reflect on the fact that all existences are connected and therefore necessary. We must learn to listen and not just hear the cosmic drama that envelops those lives. Hearing is a sensory fact; listening is a matter of the heart. From this listening we must then know how to extract the essence of a new hope, to tend towards a future that sees us as protagonists.

We are like flowers: complex and beautiful; chaotic and harmonious; vital and ephemeral. We are a florilegio in diversity and in our incessant change, but we still belong to a unitary community.

To compose the images of this article, I have not in any way precipitated the already rapid times of decline of these floral creatures. No flowers were cut or damaged.