Nature and Artifice

Weird Plants by Chris Thorogood

                    At the same time that his literary tastes and artistic preferences had become more refined, recognizing only such works as had been sifted and distilled by subtle and tormented minds, and at the same time that his distaste for accepted ideas had hardened into disgust, his love of flowers had rid itself of its residuum, its lees, had been clarified, so to speak, and purified. 

                    It amused him to liken a horticulturist’s shop to a microcosm in which every social category and class was represented—poor, vulgar slum-flowers, the gilliflower for instance, that are really at home only on the window-sill of a garret, with their roots squeezed into milk-cans or old earthenware pots; then pretentious, conventional, stupid flowers such as the rose, whose proper place is in pots concealed inside porcelain vases painted by nice young ladies; and lastly, flowers of charm and tremulous delicacy, exotic flowers exiled to Paris and kept warm in palaces of glass, princesses of the vegetable kingdom, living aloof and apart, having nothing whatever in common with the popular plants or the bourgeois blooms. 

                    Now, he could not help feeling a certain interest, a certain pity for the lower-class flowers, wilting in the slums under the foul breath of sewers and sinks; on the other hand, he loathed those that go with the cream-and-gold drawing-rooms in new houses; he kept his admiration, in fact, for the rare and aristocratic plants from distant lands, kept alive with cunning attention in artificial tropics created by carefully regulated stoves. 

                    But this deliberate choice he had made of hothouse flowers had itself been modified under the influence of his general ideas, of the definite conclusions he had now arrived at on all matters. In former days, in Paris, his inborn taste for the artificial had led him to neglect the real flower for its copy, faithfully and almost miraculously executed in indiarubber and wire, calico and taffeta, paper and velvet. 

                    As a result, he possessed a wonderful collection of tropical plants, fashioned by the hands of true artists, following Nature step by step, repeating her processes, taking the flower from its birth, leading it to maturity, imitating it even to its death, noting the most indefinable nuances, the most fleeting aspects of its awakening or its sleep, observing the pose of its petals, blown back by the wind or crumpled up by the rain, sprinkling its unfolding corolla with dewdrops of gum and adapting its appearance to the time of year—in full bloom when branches are bent under the weight of sap, or with a shrivelled cupula and a withered stem when petals are dropping off and leaves are falling. 

                    This admirable artistry had long enthralled him, but now he dreamt of collecting another kind of flora: tired of artificial flowers aping real ones, he wanted some natural flowers that would look like fakes. 

Joris-Karl Huysmans 

Against Nature 
Robert Baldick (trans.)