Lavender
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| Lavandula augustifolia |
Lavender or
Lavandula includes some twenty-eight
species of evergreen shrubs with grey- green foliage and small purplish flowers
which are extremely aromatic when they bloom from June to September (Hogan 800).
A member of the mint family, also including sage and rosemary, it is native to
the Mediterranean region where it grows well in bright sun in sandy soil.
Although there are hundreds of named varieties, most popular lavenders fall
into one of two groups: Lavandula
augustifolia, aka English lavender, has leaves which bunch around the base
of the plant and long, slender stems with flowerets on the ends; with the same
growth habitat Lavandula stoechas, often
referred to as French lavender, is distinguished by the characteristic
top-knots out of which the flowerets emerge like cockaded feathers on a tall
hat.
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| Lavandula stoechas |
Lavender
has been cultivated for millennia, for a variety of uses mostly associated with
its strong scent and the oil produced by its flowers, both of which led to its
use in cleansing, medicine, and aroma therapy (Staub 128). In fact, its name is
said to derive from the Latin lavare to wash (Staub 128 and Platt 1)
as the Romans used it “to perfume and disinfect their baths”; a guidebook on
growing lavender suggests that it was probably brought to Britain by the
invading Roman legions (Pratt 1). While another herbal guide quotes nineteenth
century sources to the effect that lavender was introduced into England in
1568, by all accounts it was “so identified with the freshening of linen that,
in medieval and Renaissance Britain, laundresses were customarily referred to
as ‘lavenders’” (Staub 130), The medical use of lavender has royal warrants:
Queen Elizabeth I used it to treat migraines, and Queen Victoria was
enthusiastic about the uses of lavender essence (Staub 130). It was hawked as a plague remedy, and
lavender oil was actually used as a topical antiseptic in the trenches in World
War I (Staub 130).
Through the years lavender acquired
some additional, less savory meanings and associations. One source refers to it as being an
aphrodisiac, quoting the English rhyme “lavender-blue dilly, dilly” which
originally contained the lines “Whilst you and I diddle, diddle” (Staub 128).
The poverty of washerwomen meant that such “Lavenders” were also associated
with prostitution (Pratt 18). In the late nineteenth century, with the
invention of the color mauve as a synthetic dye and its popularity amongst the
dandies of both France and England, the color lavender began to be linked with
homosexuality and the aesthetic movement in general.[1] In
fact the third definition for lavender in the on-line OED refers to its use “in reference to effeminacy or homosexuality”,[2] despite
Oscar Wilde’s injunction in The Portrait
of Dorian Gray “Never trust a woman who wears mauve. . . It always means
that they have a history” (Wilde, Chapter 8; qtd by St. Clair, 170).
As Wilde suggests, lavender is also
sometimes linked with older figures and with mourning. In The
Winter’s Tale, Perdita groups the herb with flowers of “middle summer”
given to “men of middle age: “Hot lavender, mints, savory,
marjoram;/The marigold, that goes to bed wi' th' sun” (Act IV, sc iv ll. ). By
the Victorian era, lavender had become one of the acceptable colors of
“half-mourning,” slightly less sad than black,[3]
and so became characteristic of the dress of older women. As early as 1830,
Tennyson was evoking the plant in the final stanza of his elegiac “Ode to
Memory” where he imagines meeting a dead friend in a garden “upon level plots/ Of crowned
lilies, standing near/ Purple-spiked lavender.”
Woolf evokes lavender
the plant some sixteen times, the color less frequently. Her use of the herb is
remarkably consistent. Aside from an
early quotation from a poem by Walter de la Mare in 1918 about “lean-stalked,
purple lavender,” which rather recalls Tennyson’s similarly phrased description
(E2 253), every time that lavender is mentioned, it is in the context of its
use as a calming and refreshing balm. In
August of 1921, constrained by illness and annoyed with not being able to take
her usual long afternoon walk, she imagines how delightful it would be to be
“coming through Fire woods, dusty & hot, with my nose turned home,
every muscle tired and the brain laid up in sweet lavender, so sane and cool,
and ripe for the morrow’s task” (D2 133).
Two years later, in a letter to Desmond McCarthy, she passes on the
praise she has heard about the memoirs of Desmond’s wife, Molly McCarthy, then being
sporadically published in the Nation, with
another wry reference to lavender’s calming effect: “Her praises never cease
ringing in the oddest quarters—Leonard’s mother, Rylands’ mother, elderly
ladies of discretion, burst out in enthusiasm, and say M.M.’s memoirs are by
far the best thing yet appeared in the Nation: and the young men too, seem
enthusiastic—but all this is not balm and lavender
to me” (L3 73).
to me” (L3 73).
The old-fashioned use of lavender in
sachets appears repeatedly both in Woolf’s fiction and in her life. Near the end of Orlando, as the eponymous character inspects their house, now
fitted out for public tours, lavender is part of the preservation of the past:
“everywhere were little
lavender bags to keep the moth out and printed notices, 'Please do not touch',
which, though she had put them there herself, seemed to rebuke her” (232-3). Coincidentally, some months before the
novel’s publication Woolf had written a note to Ka Arnold Foster, thanking her
for “the bag of scent—thyme, lavender?” sent home with her after a
Christmas visit in Cornwall. A year later, in 1930, lavender is used as a form
of domestic protection for keepsakes in Woolf’s short story “The Lady in the
Looking Glass”: “In each of these cabinets were many little drawers, and each
almost certainly held letters, tied with bows of ribbon, sprinkled with sticks of
lavender or rose leaves” (CSF 222). That same year Woolf spins another fantasy
of a house sprinkled with lavender in a letter to Ethel Smyth about an unmet
invitation to visit one of Ethel’s friends: “I love other people to have those
houses, mats, tables chairs, pictures, china and tapestry over the 4 post bed,
with lavender in the chamber pots and biscuits in a box shd. one wake hungry in
the night” (L4 217). She receives a second bag of scent at the end
of 1930 from a “Mrs Wilson whom I remember vaguely through a wild letter she
wrote me, enclosing a bag of lavender and a bunch of heather” (L4 270).
Perhaps
because of her age -- she was nearly 25 years Woolf’s senior --Ethel Smyth is
again joined with lavender in the summer of 1931 in a couple of joking asides
recorded in their voluminous correspondence.
In June Woolf compares Smyth to a Cornish pig or wild boar who can “roll
and trample and bellow” over the people of her village “because not
another soul in Woking but lies under you like sweet lavender” (L4 349). The
faintly sapphic implications that Ethel rolls over others as if they were herbs
scattered on sheets spread below her fall away in August as Woolf, fretting
over the proofs of The Waves, laments
the lack of letters from her elderly admirer: “And from the lilies and lavender
of Woking will come no answer” (L4 367).
The single
densest gathering of lavender comes in Woolf’s last novel, Between the Acts, where it appears in the pageant of English
history no less than six times. The
first reference, in the parodic restoration comedy, repeats the theme of being
laid up in lavender sheets, as Lady Harpy Harraden flirtatiously attempts to avoid
frankly stating her desire to be married to Sir Spaniel Lilyliver: “My meaning,
Sir? Must I disrupt my modesty and unquilt that which has been laid in lavender
since, my lord, peace be to his name—’tis twenty years since—was lapped in
lead?” (BTA 99). Despite this rather scandalous reference, however, all the
rest of the play’s lavenders are repetitions of the song of a street seller’s
call, “A Pot Pourri,” which announces the beginning of The Nineteenth Century
portion of the pageant: “Lavender, sweet lavender, who’ll
buy my sweet lavender” the tune trilled and tinkled” (107). The words and the tune are picked up and
hummed by Old Mrs. Lynn Jones, a widow (107-8), and reappear as part of the
“scraps, orts, and fragments” mistakenly broadcast by the gramophone at the end
of the play, a random reminder of an England which has passed (BTA 128).
Although
this is an entry about flowers rather than colors, Woolf’s evocations of the
fashionable hue follow similar conventional lines with several early references
verging on comic dismissal. For example, in 1918, she writes in her dairy about
a visit to Will Arnold-Foster’s London apartment, whose atmosphere she found
overly mannered: “
Nor did I like the pale acid decorations of the
room—the lavender walls, & the one white rose drooping against them” (D1
212). Her early review of a biography of
Theodore Roosevelt by William Roscoe Thayer concocts a hilarious scene of the
French ambassador on a camping trip trying to maintain his sartorial standards
while crossing a river: “Then I, too, for the honour of France, removed my
apparel, everything except my lavender kid gloves. The President cast an
inquiring look at these but I quickly forestalled any remark by saying, “With
your permission, Mr President, I will keep these on, otherwise it would be
embarrassing if we should meet ladies” (E3 226). Shortly after, in Jacob’s Room, Woolf makes fun of the Impressionists’ obsession with
violet in describing the seascape being painted by Charles Steele: “It was too
pale—greys flowing into lavenders, and one star or a white gull suspended just
so—too pale as usual” (JR 4).[4]
Despite
these gentle jabs, Woolf herself seems to have liked the color lavender, at
least in its lavender-blue manifestation. In August of 1929, in the wake of
extensive renovations to Monk’s House undertaken thanks to the profits garnered
from sales of Orlando, Woolf penned a
frantic request to her artist sister Vanessa for advice on mixing up a batch of
lavender-blue paint to replace some decorative dots on the mantelpiece: “Could
you tell me how I could make lavender blue? That inconceivable donkey, Daggett,
has re-painted the mantelpiece; and dotted it with sea-green. But if I go to a
colour shop, should I ask for oil paint?—and is lavender blue a mixture? of
what? Perhaps you remember the colour of the blue dots” (L4 37). A recent picture of the large downstairs
sitting room at Monk’s House shows these dots replicated not on the mantelpiece
but over the front door, a last trace of Woolf’s lavender.
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| https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/af/Sitting_room_-_Monk%27s_House_-_Rodmell%2C_East_Sussex%2C_England_-_DSC05197.jpg |
See Works Cited Page for full documentation
[1]
See Christobel Hasting’s article in the CNN Style section on “How lavender
became a symbol of LGBT resistence” https://www.cnn.com/style/article/lgbtq-lavender-symbolism-pride/index.html
Updated June 4, 2020. Accessed July 24, 2020.
[3] See the article on “Funeral and mourning clothing” by Alison Petch on the Pitt-Rivers Museum website: https://england.prm.ox.ac.uk/englishness-funeral-clothing.html Accessed July 25, 2020.
[4] In her fascinating collection of information
on seventy-five colors, The Secret Lives
of Color, Kassia St. Clair discusses the “violettomania” of the French
Impressionists and quotes Manet’s announcement that the true color of the
atmosphere is violet: “Fresh air is violet” (174-5).
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