What Flowers Symbolize Alice'S Journey In 'The Lost Flowers Of Alice Hart'?

On the simple level of the eye, Thornfield’s gardens are contrasted with the wild untamed bush which surrounds it. In the cultivated flowers of the gardens there is a great symbol and in them Alice enters the world of Thornfield, the world of beautiful order and of artistic floral arrangement created by her grandmother to bring order and beauty out of the foreground of chaos. But as against the symbol of the beautiful cultivated flowers in the gardens of Thornfield there is the wild untamed bush, a mass of growth uncertain, knotted, sometimes dangerous, and yet alive and powerful in its wildness. This is the symbol of Alice’s true self and of her journey. The journey of Alice is the journey between being made and shaped by another and growing wild according to her own nature.

This image connects with me because of the image of pressed flowers. The women in the novel, including Alice’s grandmother, press flowers to preserve memories of moments in time. Throughout Alice’s journey, she preserves and examines many painful memories. However, pressed flowers are static. They do not grow. In reading this novel, Alice must preserve her memories and then plant them in her current situation to allow them to help her grow but not to define her.

The story of The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart by Peter浩fulness felt like a long walk through a botanical garden of human emotions as I read it. Each of the many flowers that Alice encounters in her journey through life mirrors each chapter of her life. Of all the flowers she encountered the black orchid is the most striking as it grows in the dark to represent her great talent locked up by her great pain. The firewheel is perhaps the next most powerful as it grew wild and free in the disturbed soil of her parents’ arguments to represent her few moments of rebellion and search for identity. The native Australian flowers represented her growth to healing and recovery of her various traumas. The waratahs of strength and the everlastings of endurance to mention but a couple. There were also simple daisies to represent her brief moments of innocence as a child. Not just metaphors for Alice’s growth, the flowers are living, breathing creatures on her journey as well. The language of flowers becomes her silent means of expression, especially as she works at her family’s flower farm into her early adult years. The heart-shaped leaves of the lovely but poisonous cyclamen will mirror her often fractured relationships with others, while the banksia with its many hard, and knifelike branchlets will represent her defense mechanisms. By the end of the novel it is clear that Alice has grown from a lost little girl to a strong and introspective woman who no longer uses flowers as a means of expression, but rather arranges them as she re-arranges her life now to better reflect her true self. The flowers and their symbolic meanings are woven throughout her story like a rich tapestry that one could get lost in analyzing even the smallest of details such as the shape of a single petal. How the often short-lived yet ever changeable nature of the many flowers at the center of her life mirrors her many homes and phases of life, and how the very seasons of growth for the various flowers follows her many stages of grief and healing.

One could argue that the novel’s use of floral imagery doesn’t add much to the plot of the novel, and instead serves to ground the reader in the location and the psyche of the protagonist. In choosing which flowers to keep in her life, Alice is giving testimony to her own worth. Each flower is drawn with the same care and detail that has been used to draw the protagonist of the novel. The poisonous oleander of her past is contrasted with the healing of the lavender fields that she creates in later life. The author’s use of horticulture is so alive and so integral to the main character that it is rare to read a novel of this type where flowers are more than just a pretty face. The title of the novel, The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart, refers not just to the lost flowers of the title but to the lost parts of Alice that she retrieves throughout the novel, one petal at a time.