The common garden flowers “beloved,” according to many garden books, “by our grandmothers,” date beyond our grandmothers to ancestors far too remote to be included in any family tree. We are never going to know who was the first man – or was it a woman? – who snatched an ordinary flower, a rose or a lily perhaps, and stuck it in his or her shaggy hair because it was pretty. But archaeology has evidence to show us that very early indeed, in the history of the human race, there were men who cared enough about flowers to study and draw them.
Usually archaeology shows us evidence from the remote past, scratched on bone or stone, of a thing called a plant, – a stick with a knob at one end which is imaginatively referred to as a blossom or seed pod, and a series of loops down the side which are designated knees. But in prehistoric Crete, in that misty period known as the Bronze Age, flowers were drawn with such sophisticated assurance that it takes no imagination at all to recognize beautiful and naturalistic blossoms of lilies, iris, roses, and crocuses.
Earliest Rose Picture
About three thousand five hundred years ago a petty tradesman of Knossos in Crete had a room in his house decorated with two frescoes, one featuring a blue monkey, the other a blue bird. Patterned around the monkey and bird are clumps of iris and crocuses, some sort of vetch, a few strands of ivy, sprays of papyrus, and – on the blue bird fresco – what the great archaeologist, Sir Arthur Evans, believed to be the earliest picture of a rose extant. Aside from their archaeological value, these pictures are works of art, and it is interesting that a “little man” of that long ago time had the taste to want them in his house and the means to gratify that taste. Looking at those familiar flowers, one wonders what sort of man, woman, and child enjoyed them as part of home three and a half millennia ago.
On another wall in Knossos, in that same period, some lilies were beautifully painted, madonna lilies, their petals intensely white against a dull red background, their anthers yellow, their foliage green.
Saffron was a major industry in Crete so it was natural enough that the great Minoan goddess should have the crocus as one of her attributes. On several faience votive robes of the goddess, crocuses are prominently patterned on those piquantly chic skirts so fashionable in ancient Crete.
Nor were flowers lacking in the royal precincts. An exquisitely-designed game board of some sort has a border of conventionalized marguerites, and in a small store room in the palace were found treasures of the excavations the great lily jars. It is doubtful that lilies have ever been depicted more handsomely than are those tall sprays of white madonna lilies done on a purplish pottery background.
There are many other flowers to be found in this great era of Minoan civilization, but these are sufficient to sum up time period known in archaeology as Middle Minoan HI which runs approximately from 1900 B. C. to 1600-1580 B. C.
Flower-Decorated Pottery
Now to go back in time to Middle Minoan II (2100-1900 B. C.), we still find flowers on jugs and pottery vessels, – fine lily sprays again and more crocuses. Near the beginning of this period is the famous fresco of the Crocus Gatherer, or as it is more often called, the Blue Boy. Crocus Gatherer is the better title because it does not raise time question of sex. For the curiously elongated figure, nude, with the flesh painted blue, is not sufficiently defined for anyone to be entirely sure whether it is a boy or a girl.
We are peering far back in time now and all trace of sophistication has vanished. Whereas the artists of the later Minoan periods knew their technique and knew their flowers so well that they could either draw the flowers “straight” or conventionalize on the basis of their knowledge and assurance, the artists of this earlier day were more tentative. Not only is the figure of the Crocus Gatherer flabby and uncertain, but the crocuses are drawn by a man so anxious for you to know he is drawing crocuses that he exaggerates them a little to underline their crocus-like quality. Still, they are undeniably crocuses and any gardener, across 4,000 years, can cull their creator kin because he so obviously loved what he was doing.
The evidence grows scantier the farther into the past one goes, but even so, in Middle Minoan I (2,400-2,300-2100 B. C.) there is a jug decorated with flowers. This time, no less than 4,200 or 4,300 years ago, human hands fashioned that spouted pottery jar, decorated it with alternate pairs of primitive, but perfectly recognizable, red and white crocuses, fired it. and then turned it over to some customer for domestic use to hold water, wine, or oil.
Varying in its temper, of course, but there for all to see, on the cooking utensils of a vanished race, is the same emotion that sends a modern gardener out into the wind and rain to see that the stakes still hold up the tall blue spires of delphinium. Man cannot live by bread alone.
by E Kirk – 61910
