Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Gardens and flowers have a cultural as well as a horticultural life. They are entwined in art and literature. They are sometimes exactly observed; almost always selected for significance. Readers and viewers need to repay their artists and look and listen attentively. Critics of poetry and curators who caption art tend to be blind to important details of flowers and trees. After years of looking and gardening, I try not to be.Of all imaginary landscapes, none has been envisioned as flowery more often than paradise, derived from an old Persian word that became applied to gardens too. In Christian art and texts, paradise is usually presented as strewn with flowers. One of my top 10 flowery paradises is visiting Oxford this year. It is in the Wilton Diptych, the priceless masterpiece of late 14th-century painting. Until September 1 it is on show in a focused presentation at the Ashmolean Museum, on loan from the National Gallery during restorations of the Sainsbury Wing. I want to kidnap it for Oxford and keep it close to young minds.It has two hinged panels, painted on each side. The outer one shuts over the inner one. The inner pictures show three saints, the Virgin Mary, Christ as a baby and 11 girlish angels, all blonde haired and dressed in blue, some with arms entwined in friendship, all with exquisite wings, shading from white through grey to tips of black. The diptych is small but packed with tiny meaningful details. It was a patron’s devotional picture, and as the gold and lapis lazuli are so costly, the patron was the king himself, Richard II, who is shown kneeling as if in his early youth. His diptych was not a public panel. It was his portable artwork that he could contemplate, while praying, surely, on travels round his kingdom.Allusions to his second wife’s emblems place it in 1396, when the king was in his late twenties. It shows how he envisioned himself then, at his coronation, undertaken in his 11th year. I will cut through a jungle of misinterpretations and state what explains it best.On earth, without flowers, the boy king is kneeling, protected by three saints, John the Baptist, Richard’s personal favourite, in a camel-skin cloak, and two royal martyrs, related to onslaughts from Europe. One is King Edmund, killed in Suffolk in the 9th century. The other is Edward the Confessor, who died in 1066, year of the Norman conquest. Richard, in a superb red and gold robe, waits to be given a white banner by an angel beside Mary in heaven. The infant Christ is blessing the banner and its unfurling red cross. It is the flag of St George, patron of England, long before its soccer team existed.Roses were traditional items in Christian paradise but I also see them as an allusion to England as Albion, the land of alba roses, pinks as well as whitesThe angels in heaven stand on a flowery floor. Their looks, their poses, their arms linked in friendship are wondrously lively. There are 11, one for each year of Richard’s life at his coronation. They wear necklaces and badges that link them closely to Richard. Their necklaces, like Richard’s, show the seed pods of broom, that useful garden shrub: broom-devices were current in France, home of Richard’s new wife. Their badges show a kneeling white deer, or hart, forerunner of the White Hart hotels in England. This badge had already been used by Richard’s mother and in 1390 was given out by Richard to his personal friends at a tournament. The giving of badges by nobles to their cliques in England was increasingly limited by law; King Richard could give as he wished.In paradise, the 11 angels are Richard’s supernatural sorority: their frat pins replicate his personal badge. The banner has an amazing topping, rediscovered in 1992. Dillian Gordon, curator at the National Gallery at the time, described to me how an orb at the top of the banner’s staff emerged during cleaning. It shows a tiny image of an island with a white shining castle set in a sea of silver. Off it, a boat is sailing.The island is certainly England and the boat is coasting in the Channel. In Shakespeare’s Richard II, old John of Gaunt, nearing death, memorably praises his beloved England as this other Eden, a “precious stone set in a silver sea”. Shakespeare surely cannot have known this tiny detail in a private image two centuries earlier, owned by his king. It is a fascinating coincidence, a double tribute to England, long before plans to spoil its demi-paradise by quotas of housing imposed on green fields.Flowers are important in two of the panels. On an outer one, the white deer kneels among plants. One is certainly rosemary and another a fern, emblems used by Richard’s first wife, Ann of Bohemia. Others are blue pimpernels, emblems used by Isabelle, whom Richard married at Calais after Ann’s death: she was just about to be seven, so young that she brought her dolls with her in her trousseau. She also brought a big fortune; just what Richard needed. Behind the white hart, Gordon explains to me, the flowers in long grass are lilies, now faded and damaged. They too relate to Isabelle, the child bride from France.Inside, in paradise, the angelic sorority wears garlands of double roses, pink but now faded. Roses were traditional items in Christian paradise but I also see them as an allusion to England as Albion, the land of alba roses, pinks as well as whites. Fallen double yellow roses lie on paradise‘s floor with fallen pink ones. I interpret the white daisy-flower beside them as an amaranth, a mysterious flower that scripture seemed to attest, unfading, in heaven. The blue ones nearby have been misread as violets. I read one as a periwinkle and the other an iris. Irises and periwinkles were associated with the Virgin Mary. Like her robe, they are blue.The flowery details cohere. The picture’s general drift is that Richard at his coronation was closely favoured by major saints, two of them personal to England, by angelic fan-girls and by the Virgin. He received from heaven the flag for his kingdom, blessed by Christ in Mary’s arms. England, contemporaries said, had been Mary’s dowry from God. Eleven years later, a group of nobles deposed Richard, but he soon took back control. His diptych shows how he then looked on his monarchy, divinely blessed and reinforced by tiny details on his and St Edmund’s robe. He wears rosemary, his bride’s emblem, a white hart and broom pods, emblems of his badge and jewellery, and eagles, symbols of empire that he also professed.On earth, he kneels in an unflowery setting, edged by bare forest. On the outside of the other panel, his white hart kneels on flowers linked to his wives. I also notice tiny mushrooms. On the ground of paradise, similar mushrooms are painted. In later stories, a type of mushroom is linked to St George and was sometimes picked on his day. In these panels I think they are symbols of the earth’s fertility. They are not a hallucinogenic species. The artist, surely French, shared in styles devised in Italy. He did not need to risk a trip to envision his imagery. We need to strive to grasp its brilliant details again.Find out about our latest stories first — follow @FTProperty on X or @ft_houseandhome on Instagram
