By October the light here changes its angle before it changes its temperature. We can still get a week in the high eighties, wind coming down through the canyons, and yet by four in the afternoon the shadows have gone long and everything looks gilded whether it has earned it or not. Which makes it the right month for the October birth flower, because the marigold is very nearly the color of that hour. Although if you ask a different florist you may be told October belongs to the cosmos, and they will not be wrong either.
Most current lists give the month two flowers and leave it at that. The older habit is to name the marigold first and file the cosmos as the alternate, the second answer. I have stopped trying to referee it. Two flowers that could hardly be less alike, both native to Mexico, both at their best just as the year starts to turn — the month can have both.
Marigold, and the Trouble With the Name
The marigold most people mean is Tagetes, native to the Americas and grown in Mexico for well over two thousand years. The English name is a contraction of "Mary's gold," said to have been given for the Virgin Mary: a European name laid over an American plant, which tells you something about how it traveled.
It also creates a small mess worth knowing about before you order flowers for anyone. The "pot marigold" in the seed racks is Calendula officinalis, a different genus altogether and not a true marigold, and some birth-flower lists quietly include it anyway. Two plants, one name, different flowers.
The meanings attached to the marigold are warmth, joy, optimism, prosperity, good fortune — and, running alongside those, a long association with death. That is not the contradiction it looks like. In Mexico the flower is cempasúchil, and it is the flower of Día de los Muertos, where the color and the heavy green scent are what guide the dead back to the people waiting for them. In this city you can watch that happen at scale: the altars at Hollywood Forever every autumn, thousands of flowers and garlands built by hand, and the community altars at Grand Park, designed by Chicana artists since 2013. I can't think of another birth flower that makes its case so publicly, in the same few weeks as the birthdays it belongs to.
Cosmos, Named for an Orderly Universe
The cosmos is the quiet one, and also Mexican — thirty-three of the thirty-five known species grow there. It's in the daisy family, which you can read off the flower in a second: a flat ring of broad petals around a yellow center, held up on a stem so thin it looks like a mistake.
The name comes from the Greek kosmos, the ordered world, for the neat and even arrangement of the petals; some accounts trace it instead to kósmima, jewel, for the colors. It reached Spain in the sixteenth century and England in the eighteenth, and everything it has come to mean follows from that first name — order, harmony, balance, peace, and in a relationship, a steady kind of devotion. There is a chocolate cosmos, Cosmos atrosanguineus, so dark it reads as black in low light and smells faintly of cocoa in the heat of the day. It is one of the strangest things I have ever put in someone's hands.
The October Birth Flower in a Vase
They behave very differently once cut. Marigolds are sturdy, cheap in the best sense, and honest about their smell, which is sharp and green and which some people love and some people will quietly move to another room. I use them in quantity or not at all — a few stems scattered through an arrangement look like an accident, and a mass of them looks like a decision.
Cosmos are the opposite: fragile, papery, short-lived in water, and worth it. They move. In a room with any air at all they tremble on those wire stems, and an arrangement with cosmos in it never sits still. For an October birthday I'll often build low and warm — marigold, rust, a little ochre — and then let three or four cosmos stand above the rim, doing the thing a photograph can't hold.
If someone you love was born this month, come by the studio, or find the van on Abbot Kinney and see what came in that week. October gives us good material to work with.
