Strange Flowers: Divining Lily

Divining Lily (Lilium divinus)

In time, all cities will give way to ruin.

Monuments and parkades will crumble. And the shuttered puppet theatres and slaughterhouses will be reclaimed by the forest. And wild bison will graze on overgrown gardens and toboggan runs. And the silence of those leprous streets will be broken only by the laughter of the feral things that hunt rodents amidst the ruins.

The lilies that grow in these spaces are as old as the surrounding ruins. The stories of the city are contained within their blossoms, waiting to be read by a skilled diviner, like the creases in the palm, the sediment of tea leaves, the geometry of fracture lines in a shattered ox scapula.

Should the aspiring botanist stumble across a Divining Lily during the course of his journeys, he is encouraged to spend a few moments scrutinizing the contours of its strange flowers. He may be rewarded with tales of adulterers creeping through windows at night, of madmen wailing from bell towers, of heartbroken royalty swallowing hemlock.

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This excerpt will be a part of my upcoming magazine project – a surrealist botanical “Field Guide“ complete with full-colour illustrations. The magazine will be available for purchase in the near future. Stay tuned!