Friday Five :: Songs about flowers

Songs about flowers

I am not a fancy flower girl. I’ve never been fond of roses (they bring to mind death or pain, or apology, to me), or bouquets of any kind really, especially not as gifts, though I do love fresh cut flowers that seem wild and random warming up a house. I’ve been known to buy them myself at the local Trader Joe’s, or the flower mart downtown the few times I’ve been. My favorite though are wild daisies growing in untamed clusters or bushes, the kind I grew up with, that my Mom would braid into my hair as a child, and that I would later associate with a lover who used to call me Daisy sometimes.

I love found flowers, the ones out in the world growing out of cracks in the pavement, or in deserted fields. Desert flowers have always been an unexpected surprise, blooms from cacti promising oasis in the dry desolation. I like tall, tall sunflowers like the ones I first saw on my cousins’ farm in Idaho where I spent a week during Summer once when I was eleven years old. Daises though, they are forever my flower, enough so that I have small one tattooed on my right leg. What is your favorite flower?

“The earth laughs in flowers.” ~ Ralph Emerson

“It’s so curious: one can resist tears and ‘behave’ very well in the hardest hours of grief. But then someone makes you a friendly sign behind a window, or one notices that a flower that was in bud only yesterday has suddenly blossomed, or a letter slips from a drawer… and everything collapses. ” ~ Colette

“Let us dance in the sun, wearing wild flowers in our hair…” ~ Susan Polis Schutz

“I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,
Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine,
With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine.”
~ William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream

“These flowers will be rotten in a couple hours. Birds will crap on them. The smoke here will make them stink, and tomorrow a bulldozer will probably run over them, but for right now they are so beautiful.”
~ Chuck Palahniuk, Survivor

Here are my top five flower songs for this week’s Friday Five. This one was hard to narrow down as I came up with enough to make a full playlist. What are your favorites?

1. Daisy :: Ben Lee

“My muse is just a daisy with the most beautiful nature,
that will one day fall back in my flower bed.”

2. Roses Grow :: Concrete Blonde

“Up through the cracks,
up through the broken glass,
in the hot red light of a black and white,
roses grow.“

3. Wild Flowers (live) :: Ryan Adams & Nick Casal

“And everything went up in smoke like wild flowers,
wild flowers, dear.”

4. Faded Flowers :: Shriekback

“These faded flowers,
precious as memory.
A veil of cloud,
correct as energy.
We had some good machines,
but they don’t work no more.
I loved you once,
don’t love you anymore.”

5. Where the Wild Roses Grow :: Nick Cave & Kylie Minogue

“They called me the Wild Rose,
but my name was Elisa Day.”