From where I sit at my computer, I have a view of a spectacular Prairie Fire Crabapple tree that is in full bloom at this time of year. A glorious cloud of deep pink blossoms sway gently with every soft spring breeze. It’s one reminder of the miracle of flowers that reappear in colorful abundance each year at this season. This got me thinking about the role flowers play in literature. It’s not all a bed of roses.

In Daphne du Maurier’s haunting Rebecca, here’s the description of the flowers seen by the second Mrs. De Winter (who is never referred to by a first name) on the first approach to her new home, Manderley: “The woods had not prepared me for them. They startled me with their crimson faces, massed one upon the other in incredible profusion, showing no leaf, no twig, nothing but the slaughterous red, luscious and fantastic, unlike any rhododendron I had seen before.” How quickly the innocent “faces… in incredible profusion” become “slaughterous red, luscious and fantastic”. The flowers, cultivated by the deceased first Mrs. De Winter – Rebecca of the book’s title – are an omen of things to come, the evolution of welcoming grace into some very luxurious yet dangerous darkness. Flowers – their colors, fragrances and how they grow — make symbolic appearances throughout the novel to powerful effect.

In Hamlet, Shakespeare uses flowers almost exclusively in relationship to Ophelia. Implying that Hamlet’s love for her is fleeting, Laertes calls that love “A violet in the youth of primy nature”, comparing it to a charming, fragrant but short-lived flower. Throughout the play, Ophelia hands out flowers that symbolize different qualities in other characters. Even Ophelia’s death takes place as she is picking flowers and falls into a brook where she drowns: “Clambering to hang, an envious sliver broke,/ When down her weedy trophies and herself/ Fell in the weeping brook.”

Harper Lee used flowers memorably in To Kill a Mockingbird. In this story, the camellia represented justice. Just as Jem must nurture Mrs. Dubose’s white camellias, he must nurture the courage he needs to deal with the emotional upheaval of his young life. Fighting her own struggles before she died, Mrs. Dubose prepared a wax camellia for Jem, a camellia that would endure, as his courage must. Although they were not a focal point of the narrative, red geraniums also play an important, symbolic role. The description of Mayella Ewell’s property is like the “playhouse of an insane child.” Yet: “…against the fence, in a line, were six chipped-enamel slop jars holding brilliant red geraniums, cared for as tenderly as if they belonged to Miss Maudie Atkinson. People said they were Mayella Ewell’s.” While the Ewell family was not known to be caring and loving, the presence of the flowers symbolized the predisposition to good that still exists in everyone, no matter how corrupted they might be.

Now and through the coming months, don’t just stop to smell the roses you encounter. Think of what flowers symbolize to you. And give them more thought as you encounter them in the books you read.