A project in progress, the text for this lecture is as follows:

“She vomited green waters; the whites of her eyes had turned green, and she told her doctor that “everything she looked at was green.” In her final hours, she had convulsions every few minutes until she died, with “an expression of great anxiety” and foaming at the mouth, nose and eyes. An autopsy confirmed that her fingernails had turned a very pronounced green and the arsenic had reached her stomach, liver, and lungs.”

Matilda Scheurer’s capillaries pumping and spreading her arsenic laced blood soaking every bit of tissue. Her emerald tinted glasses. Eyes and tongue and fingernails like tendrils escaping seeds. Delirious and writhing. 

Imagining her eyes seeing nothing but green I am reminded of the ghost of my aural migraines. When under a hormonal medication I would occasionally get these small white floaters in the middle of my vision. Brilliant white orbs with a faint shadow of green as they trailed by. My eyes became unable to focus during these visits, text became a blur. I would close my eyes and watch as they made their path across my lid in a repeating line of white to faded green. Their absence brought on the debilitating headache, confusion, and vertigo. Green rims the afterimage, the shadows seen after sneaking a glance at the sun.

Oscar Wilde’s carnation sitting in a cut glass vase filled with with a solution of Scheele’s green and water, the toxic green concentrating at the petal’s frilled edge. In the symbolic language of flowers applied to Victorian nosegays and bouquets, the carnation represents fascination and a woman’s love. If it’s striped it is refusal, yellow it is disdain. The dye spreading through the pure white flower, like one of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal, it’s gorgeous in its artificiality grown out of polluted modernist soil.

In Robert Hitchen’s satirical novel The Green Carnation, Lady Locke refuses the advances of Wilde-esque Dandy, citing “If you would take that hideous green flower out of your coat … I might answer your question differently. If you could forget what you call art, if you could see life at all with a simple, untrammelled vision, if you could be like a man, instead of like nothing at all in heaven or earth except that dyed flower, I might perhaps care for you in the right way. But your mind is artificially coloured: it comes from the dyers. It is a green carnation; and I want a natural blossom to wear in my heart.”

Wilde declaring that “A really well-made buttonhole is the only link between Art and Nature.” The orfice upon which the flower’s stem can penetrate. 

“Crumpled like a carnation, mauve and dim

It breathes, cowering humbly in the moss

Still wet with love which trickles down across

The soft slope of white buttocks to its rim”

The butterfly’s proboscis piercing through to jewels of nectar.

Whistler’s ink drawings of Loie Fuller in her Serpentine dance, the dancer turned “woman-flower, woman-bird, woman-dragonfly, woman-butterfly”,  seducing with the unfurling of her winged silks. Each pulse revealing new shades to only fold back in on itself. Morning glories opening up to the sun and curling back in at night all seen in the blink of an eye. In Butterfly, Violet, Lily, Orchid, Black Moth  she skims the ground with her bamboo rods becoming both flower and pollinator. The endless shift from petal to wing. A hermaphroditic self-pollinating hybrid.

Eyes to the ground, nose to the dirt. Spring in it’s ever-growing dampness sprouts it’s own flowers of evil.

“The wakeful Anther in his silken bed/ o’er the pleas’d Stigma bows his waxen head”

The undercarriage musk of Bradford pear knocks me sideways before my foot even exits the door.

Trout Lillies unfurling like a flayed fish, a discarded spotted glove. 

The translucent ghost of Dutchman’s breeches. 

Sapphic violets, purple veins a guideline.

Ham-fisted unfurled magnolias, dominating but fall to pieces with one heavy rain storm.

The vegetal arousal of a hyacinth. 

I trail curling green sprigs of field garlic down to their base. Knuckle deep in mud trying to unroot its pearl of a bulb. Teeth breaking down cell walls, the fiery allicin setting my throat aflame. Its defense turned into a pleasurable medicine.

Green of veined jade, green of nausea. Green of sweet peas popped between teeth, green of mold on bread. Green of moss springy with dew, green of necrosis. 

A green impossible, medieval guild regulations forbade dyers of cool tones to also produce warm tones.

My eyes are meditating on the ground looking for the same seductive glow of slivers of fresh shoots. Recognizing it’s broad round leaves and small white flowers I pull out bloodroot for the same reason Carl Wilhelm Scheele mixed potassium and white arsenic in a solution of copper vitriol. There is a carnal drive to control, capture, replicate natural vibrancy. I chop up the long rhizome, its brick red flesh (hence the name sake, Sanguinaria) is full of poisonous alkaloids. High concentrations can destroy animal cells. It can burn off superficial tumors, often the base of black salves. This destructive blood is what is most valuable about this plant. A traditional First Nations dye plant, when boiled it turns the deep orange of iron laced clay, of the sun just before it’s about to dip under the horizon, of marigolds, rich yolks. It hue hits the same pleasure centers as a shot of vitamin D.

So I understand why those women in Industrial grey-skied Victorian England risked rashes, destroyed finger tips, carrying enough arsenic in one petticoat to kill fifty people easy all in order to shroud themselves in grassy hued brocades still bright under oil lamps. There in a primal urge to harness the allure we find in something at the high of it’s vitality. Much like the other Victorian practices of taxidermy and mourning jewelry made from a loved one’s hair, the importance placed on a monument to the memory of living. 

At what cost? Matilda Scheurer applying powdered Scheele’s green to cloth leaves for another’s Easter bonnet. The corrosion at her fingers allowing a continuous inoculation of poison. Like the miners of William Morris’s cooper mines, sickened by arsenic residue that would later be embedded in his wallpaper designs, did she appear “bitten by witch fever?” One of 4011 young workers in these flower workshops in London. The only workshops without vermin due to the carpet of dye on the floor. The youngest hands being four years of age. Sewing together toxic bundles of imitations of life with oozing hands to be placed upon the swelling breast, to bring the comparison of flushed cheek to flushed rose, engorged petals. Budding.

Bees capable of seeing in ultraviolet, are able to read the language painted upon petals unseen to our eyes. A map that trails to the well of sugar and pollen. What would they see if they were to land onto a lady’s headpiece of arsenic laden flowers. What they look past the soft curl of satin to the pains and horrors that lay there? What bits of blood would they pick up on furred legs? Or would they be fooled, the brightness seen as sweetness, and fall crumpled to the floor with green on their tongue?