The Puritan preacher William Bridge (c. 1600–1670) cautioned ‘When you have good meat in a dish, possibly you wil lay flowers upon it … but a wise man knowes, that the meat is never the better for the flowers.’ His sermon was published in 1656, seven years after the beginning of the Interregnum and two years before the death of its Lord Protector, Oliver Cromwell (1599–1658). In the same breath, Bridge informed his readers that the biblical king Solomon's temple was ‘a Glorious building, much Gold and Silver in it,’ yet the meaner building that housed Christ ‘was beyond the Glory of the first.’

Bridge's flowers called for simpler forms of worship. His Puritan theology jarred the established English church to the extent that when he was forced to flee to Holland in the 1630s, Charles I (1600–1649) commented, ‘we are well rid of him.’

Bridge repatriated to England in 1641, supporting Parliament in the Civil Wars that led to the king's execution. His sermon in 1656 implicitly criticised Charles's religious policies, including his penchant for the material beauty of the mass that appeared to some contemporaries dangerously close to Catholicism. Bridge's dismissal of Solomon, so soon after his mention of flowers, reads as a reference to a state that needed neither flowers nor kings.

Talking Flowers

In 1629, English herbalist John Parkinson (1567–1650) dedicated Paradisi in Sole Paradisus Terrestris, a book of the ‘pleasant flowers’ of the garden, and the ‘herbes, rootes, & fruites’ of the kitchen garden and orchard, to nineteenyear- old Queen Henrietta Maria (1609–1669). Parkinson described his book of flowers as a ‘speaking Garden, that it might informe you in all the particulars of your store, as well as wants, when you cannot see any of them fresh vpon the ground …’

Parkinson's flowers ‘speak’ through shapes and colours of England as a ‘paradise.’ Yet the language of flowers in the early Stuart court was not meant for the queen's ears alone. In 1614, male courtiers danced on-stage as flowers for the marriage of James VI/I's (1566–1625) favourite, Robert Carr, earl of Somerset (1587–1645), to the recently divorced Frances Howard (1590–1632). Appearing before the king, these ‘happy flowers’ had their ‘leaves’ transformed to ‘fine hair,’ ‘stalks to bodies,’ ‘sprigs to limbs,’ ‘verdure to fresh blood,’ and ‘smell’ to ‘breath.’ Sometime later, the poet Lady Hester Pulter (1605–1678) was to anthropomorphise her own garden of plants.