Chrysanthemum

The chrysanthemum, Chrysanthemum and its cultivated forms, is a daisy-family flower of Chinese origin whose name means golden flower. In East Asia it is one of the most honoured of blooms. In China it is the flower of autumn and one of the Four Gentlemen of painting, an emblem of the noble scholar who keeps his integrity as the year declines, and of longevity: it flowers in the ninth month and is central to the Double Ninth Festival, when chrysanthemum wine was drunk for long life. In Japan the chrysanthemum is the flower of the emperor, giving its name to the Chrysanthemum Throne, and a stylised sixteen-petalled chrysanthemum is the imperial seal.

A relative of the garden chrysanthemum, Tanacetum cinerariifolium, the Dalmatian pyrethrum daisy, is the natural source of pyrethrin, one of the oldest and still most widely used plant-derived insecticides, extracted commercially since the nineteenth century and still grown as a cash crop in parts of Kenya and East Africa today, a genuinely important agricultural chemistry quite separate from the ornamental chrysanthemum's ceremonial and artistic reputation. The chemical relationship also explains why chrysanthemums and their relatives are mildly toxic to cats and dogs if chewed, a real veterinary caution worth noting alongside the flower's more famous symbolic meanings.

The chrysanthemum shows as sharply as any flower how differently traditions read the same bloom. In China and Japan it stands for long life, nobility and the endurance of virtue into the autumn of things, a wholly auspicious flower honoured in festival and in art. In much of Europe, by contrast, the chrysanthemum is the flower of the dead: in France, Italy and elsewhere it is the flower brought to graves and laid at memorials, especially around the feast of All Souls, so that to give it in other contexts can jar. The one golden autumn flower thus signifies imperial dignity and long life on one side of the world and mourning and the grave on the other.

Japan's highest state honour, the Order of the Chrysanthemum, established in 1876 and still awarded today to heads of state and figures of the greatest distinction, both civilian and royal, formalises the flower's imperial standing into the modern honours system, one of the oldest orders of chivalry still in active use anywhere in the world. In parts of Europe the funerary association is strong enough that florists and etiquette guides still specifically warn against giving chrysanthemums as a general gift, particularly in France and Italy, a live piece of cross-cultural etiquette rather than a historical curiosity, since the same bouquet that honours a grave in Lyon might simply look cheerful in London.