Wild Flowers

Patricia Morley is professor emerita of English and Canadian Studies at
Concordia University. She is the author of several books, including The
Mountain Is Moving: Japanese Women’s Lives, Kurlek and Margaret
Laurence: The Long Journey Home.

In her foreword, Kathryn Bridge describes how “this small treasure”
came to be written. Emily Carr composed the 21 vignettes during the
autumn and winter of 1940–41, when she was recuperating from a stroke
suffered the previous June and had been ordered by her doctor to spend
one day each week in bed. Those days were put to good use. Carr’s
short texts, which stand opposite each full-page painting of a
wild-flower branch, are beautiful, quietly colourful against neutral
backgrounds.

Readers unaccustomed to walking in woods or untended meadows will be
astonished by the variety of wild flowers that Carr has documented and
displayed for all to see. She came to think of wild flowers almost as
creatures with minds of their own and, as in her description of
Tigerlilly and Columbine, flowers that would “never tolerate
transplanting to the confines of a garden.” Mock-orange, a beautiful
four-petalled flower, grows “quite as comfortably in a nursery garden
as in the woods,” and is an understudy to true orange blossoms.
Popular with brides in June, Mock-orange “blesses every bride, that of
rich man, poor man, beggarman and thief.”

One of Carr’s most enchanting tricks is her habit of treating flowers
as people with minds of their own: “Firewood is exceedingly touchy and
flops in a wilt at any provocation.” Nevertheless, Firewood is also
“a ministering flower, a hider of scars, a healer for a new country
which must suffer cruel disfigurement in the process of taming.”

The botanical illustrations have been created by Emily Henrietta Woods
(1852–1916), who taught art to Emily Carr. The paintings are
exquisite. Woods’s fine detail provides the perfect complement to
Carr’s impressionistic descriptions. Wild Flowers is a delight to
read, and to return to for relaxation and pleasure.