Chrysanthemums on All Saints Day

I've been admiring since late September the banks of bright chrysanthemums blooming in pots outside grocery stores and garden centers as well as in gardens, still freeze-free here in the south of Iowa.

We think of mums principally as landscaping plants, welcome because they come to bloom and burst forth just as other garden flowers are winding down.

But in much of Europe, chrysanthemums are the flower of All Saints Day and All Souls Day --- Nov. 1 and 2, when the culturally Christian remember their dead and use pots and bouquets of mums to decorate graves and tombs.

This has nothing in particular to do with the character of the plants, but rather availability as autumn settles in.

So if you were in France or Italy today, let's say, you'd discover that it is a public holiday, the flower stands are full of mums and for many the focus is on cemeteries. 

Here's a painting by José Gallegos y Arnosa (1859-1917), a Spanish-born artist who settled in Rome. It's a depiction of All Souls Day in Rome and while the flower-stall chrysanthemums are bright and cheery, the faces of customers and passers by are somber and reflective.

"Memorial Day" in the United States --- observed in early summer when fresh flowers are plentiful and appended in a muddled sort of way to a holiday designed originally to honor our war dead --- has replaced these traditional days of remembrance. But no one would mind if you took a few mums to an appropriate cemetery today.