Blue Flower, Blue Flame

Secrets of the Cornflower Blue

Joan Mitchell Les Bluets 1973

The Bluet

And is it stamina

that unseasonably freaks

forth a bluet, a

Quaker lady, by

the lake? So small,

a drop of sky that

splashed and held,

four-petaled, creamy

in its throat. The woods

around were brown,

the air crisp as a

Carr's table water

biscuit and smelt of

cider. There were frost

apples on the trees in

the field below the house.

The pond was still, then

broke into a ripple.

The hills, the leaves that

have not yet fallen

are deep and oriental

rug colors. Brown leaves

in the woods set off

gray trunks of trees.

But that bluet was

the focus of it all: last

spring, next spring, what

does it matter? Unexpected

as a tear when someone

reads a poem you wrote

for him: “It’s this line

here.” That bluet breaks

me up, tiny spring flower

late, late in dour October.

—James Schuyler Selected Poems (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1988)

I love a makeshift garden once cared-for but now a bit wild and I took a picture of this one the other day and was reminded of the blue flowers that grew in my front yard for a year or two that I don’t think anyone planted that stay blue even when they dry out. They reminded me of the spice store in Paris with every imaginable edible thing where I bought the tiny jar of dried cornflowers that I thought I would use for a medieval blue risotto that I was reading about. I also always meant to make them into ink but never did.

Vincent Van Gogh Wheatfield With Cornflowers 1890

Helena Almeida, Study for Inner Improvement, 1977.

Centaurea cyanus, better known as Cornflower or Batchelor Button, is endangered in much of Europe but grows like a weed in North America. It is one of those few truly blue wild flowers. They are called Bluets in France although that is also sometimes the name for blueberries in French too and the word became the title of Maggie Nelson’s book before she knew its meaning and after that Joan Mitchell Painting which also interested Lydia Davis. A year after Joan Mitchell’s painting there was James Schuyler’s poem (see above) which I love but it turns out he was talking about a different flower houstonia caerulea or Azure Bluet. There is an old Vermeer colour called cornflower blu,e and a cornflower derived natural pigment called Boyle’s Blue, and a Pantone colour that doesn’t look like cornflowers to me at all. In most of Europe they are a companion for corn or cabbage protecting crops from insects. In France they are a companion in the fields to poppies and act as a flower of remembrance like poppies. In England, added to loose leaf Earl Grey tea, their dried petals glitter with something like royal blue. In Germany and Prussia, the flower signals nationalism. In Russia they colour vodka blue. I understand why I was drawn to the cornflower, it’s sturdy, weedy, versatile, steeped in poetry, art, and obscure medieval recipes, and it’s an ink plant. But there’s something else there, something in that almost electric colour that suggests some further secrets.