Flowers for Things I Don’t Know How to Say: A Tender Painted Lexicon of Consolation and Connection

“To be a Flower is profound Responsibility,” Emily Dickinson wrote. From the moment she pressed the first wildflower into her astonishing teenage herbarium until the moment Susan pinned a violet to her alabaster chest in the casket, she filled her poems with flowers and made of them a lexicon of feeling, part code language and part blueprint to the secret chambers of the heart. The symbolic language of flowers peaked in Dickinson’s time, seeded by Erasmus Darwin’s radical romantic botany a century earlier and popularized by books like The Moral of Flowers, but humans have long heavied flowe...