The Peacefulness of Pink

Today was spent planting out the bedding plants I got yesterday and catching up with some house work. It was another lovely Autumns day with no wind.

I brought this cyclamen yesterday to cheer me up.. I do loving having flowers in the house. The cyclamen flowers for along time inside and then I plant them in the garden once they have finished flowering.

Did you know that the cyclamen was, with the columbine, one of the flowers of choice for Leonardo Da Vinci at the beginning of the 16th century, and he covered the margins of his manuscripts with it.

The 17th century Flemish painters scattered cyclamens on the meadows where Jesus had just picked some flowers under the watchful eye of the angels.

Louis XIV received them in bunches, along with many other flowers, to flower the lounges of Versailles.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau spoke in his Promenades of the wild cyclamens he discovered in the Alps.

After obscurity in the 18th century, the cyclamen came back in fashion in the 19th century, when gardeners cultivated it in Grenelle, near Paris.

Emile Gallé and the artists of the Nancy School made it one of their models for their prints and paintings.

Its popularity was exported as far as Japan, together with roses and carnations, which symbolise the era of western modernity for this Far Eastern country.

And Robert Desnos sung about it too: "The cyclamen of Clamecy,
                          Who regrets Savoy so much,
                         Proclaim here, proclaim there,

                               At the top of his voice.
                           But he is on the right track,
                    The cyclamen will return to Savoy.