The chrysanthemums arrive at the studio looking folded rather than grown — hundreds of petals turning in on themselves, the head heavy enough to nod. I set a bucket of the bronze ones by the door last week and nearly everyone who came through put a hand in them, which I've noticed is particular to this flower. People look at roses. They touch chrysanthemums. The November birth flower has a texture you want to confirm with your fingers before you believe it.
It is also the only flower I sell that means two opposite things depending on where the person in front of me grew up.
What the November Birth Flower Actually Is
Chrysanthemum, on essentially every list, which is worth saying plainly because these traditions are usually messier than that. British almanac lists and American florists' lists disagree about several months outright, and I've had to hedge before. November is the unusual one — both traditions land on the same flower. Some American lists tack on peony as a second November bloom, which I've never fully understood in a month when no peony I know of is flowering, and I tend to leave it off.
The name is plain once you hear it: chrysos, gold, and anthemon, flower. Linnaeus described the genus in 1753. But it had been a cultivated plant for a very long time before Europe had a word for it — grown in China as a flowering herb as far back as the fifteenth century BCE, and by 1630 more than five hundred named varieties were on record. It reached Japan somewhere between the eighth and twelfth centuries and became, eventually, the imperial crest: a sixteen-petal design settled in 1869. The throne itself is named for the flower. Japan still keeps a chrysanthemum day on the ninth of September, and the wish attached to it is longevity — a long life, said with a flower.
The Two Reputations
Then the other half. In France, Italy, Spain, Belgium, Poland, Croatia and Hungary, chrysanthemums belong to the dead. Not as a soft association — as a rule. You carry them to graves at the start of November, for All Saints', and you do not carry them to a dinner. The timing isn't coincidence. The flower blooms exactly then.
So now I ask. A woman stopped at the Flower Van on Abbot Kinney one autumn, looked at a bucket of white incurves — the tight closed globes — and went quiet. Her mother was Polish. What I had arranged on a folding table in Venice read to her as a cemetery. She was gracious about it. I moved the bucket.
Neither tradition is wrong about the flower. It just means the chrysanthemum is a question before it's a gift, and asking costs nothing.
What They Do in Los Angeles Light
Los Angeles gives this flower an advantage most of the country can't. Our Novembers run long and dry, and the light drops low and coppery by four in the afternoon, which is precisely the light these were built for. Bronze, rust, a muddy antique pink that looks like nothing at all under a fluorescent tube and turns lit-from-within on a west-facing table at five. The spider varieties — petals loose and wiry, curling off in every direction — actually throw shadows. I use them where a rose would simply sit there being a rose.
There are thirteen recognized flower forms in the genus, by the National Chrysanthemum Society's count: incurve, reflex, spider, quill, spoon, anemone and the rest. That's an unusual amount of range for one plant. In the studio I keep reaching for three of them — a tight incurve when an arrangement needs weight low down, a spider when it needs movement, and the small single daisy forms when it needs air. Left in clean water they'll outlast everything else in the vase by a week, and they dry standing upright, which is a second life you get for free.
If you have a November birthday, or you're buying for someone who does, what I'd say is that this is a flower that rewards close looking. Most of them photograph worse than they hold up. Come by the van on a weekend and put your hand in a bucket of them — that's most of the argument, and it doesn't require me to make it.
