Following on from Susan Rushton’s post about faded roses, I thought I would look for beauty in last week’s flowers. It’s been warm this week so they are following the path toward decay. The Japanese Iris has taken on marvellous marine blue stripes and intense veining.

Is it beautiful? Shapes, colours and textures are equally or more interesting. Fading flowers in the garden have less of a sense of decay, more of a sense of transmutation as seed pods or berries replace the flowers. With cut flowers it’s the idea of decay and death that holds an emotional recoil for me, not the aesthetics.

Paintings of flowers withering or fruit rotting and/or with insects have been made in the past as ‘memento mori’, to remind one that death is coming and it might be soon. I was thinking about this as I photographed the flowers and sure enough, a fly appeared, amazing looking, part of nature, but again that recoil. Dianthus ‘King of the Blacks’ gets nearly black as it withers.

The pollen stands out. It’s everywhere, spilling on the petals.

I think I’m in denial about the ‘fleeting nature of life and experience‘.