Flowers of July: Devil’s Claw, Love-in-a-Mist, and the Sunlit Marigold

July 16, 2020

Today’s celebration belongs to the flowers of July—the glowing company of petals that fill our gardens in midsummer.

By now, the borders are overflowing, colors deepened by heat, scents heavy in still air. The gardener’s year balances here, between flourishing and fading, where each bloom has its say before the high light begins to lower. Three poets and writers, centuries apart, give voice to this vivid moment in the life of the garden.

The English garden author Geoffrey B. Charlesworth begins our bouquet with an ode to one of the lesser-known treasures of the alpine world, the Physoplexis comosa, commonly known as the Devil’s Claw or the Tufted Horned Rampion. His delight lies not only in its beauty but in that mysterious quality all gardeners feel when certain plants speak more deeply to the soul than others:

We like people not just because they are good, kind, and pretty but for some indefinable spark, usually called “chemistry,” that draws us to them and begs not to be analyzed too closely.

Just so with plants.

In that case, my favorite has to be Physoplexis comosa. This is not merely because I am writing at the beginning of July when the plant approaches maximum attractiveness.

— Geoffry B. Charlesworth, garden author, On the Physoplexis comosa or the Devil's Claw or Tufted Horned Rampion

That “indefinable spark” marks the truest kind of horticultural love—the sort that transcends reason. Every gardener knows the feeling: a particular bloom simply grips the heart, its charm unexplainable. In July, Charlesworth’s alpine jewel opens its curious, delicate flowers like horns of lavender flame, and it’s easy to understand his affection.

From the alpine to the romantic, Algernon Charles Swinburne turns his attention to the poetic Love-in-a-Mist (Nigella damascena), that airy, blue-flowered annual beloved of cottage gardens. His poem of the same name captures both the ethereal quality of this plant and the unspoken emotions it symbolizes—beauty wrapped in mystery, love veiled within mist:

Light love in a mist,
by the midsummer moon misguided,
Scarce seen in the twilight garden if gloom insist,
Seems vainly to seek for a star whose gleam has derided
Light love in a mist.

All day in the sun, when the breezes do all they list.
His soft blue raiment of cloudlike blossom abided
Unrent and unwithered of winds and of rays that kissed.
Blithe-hearted or sad, as the cloud or the sun subsided,
Love smiled in the flower with a meaning whereof none wist
Save two that beheld, as a gleam that before them glided.
Light love in a mist.

— Algernon Charles Swinburne, English poet, Love in a Mist

Swinburne’s wistful rhythm mirrors the delicate sway of the flower itself—a haze of tendrils and petals half-hidden in summer light. The bloom, like the emotion it names, is fleeting yet unforgettable.

Finally, we greet the sun itself in John Cleveland’s lively portrait of the marigold, “the courtier’s flower.” His seventeenth-century verse observes this loyal blossom as it follows its monarch—the sun—through his daily rise and setting:

The marigold, whose courtier’s face
Echoes the sun, and doth unlace
Her at his rise, at his full stop
Packs and shuts up her gaudy shop.

— John Cleveland, English poet, The Marigold

Here, the marigold becomes a servant of light, opening her golden shop at dawn and closing it at dusk with royal obedience. The imagery is cheerful, witty, and wonderfully apt—the flower’s folding and unfurling a sunlit clock for the July garden.

Together, these three voices open the garden gate onto midsummer: Charlesworth’s quiet admiration for the rare alpine, Swinburne’s romantic vision of blue mist, and Cleveland’s golden ode to devotion.

Whether subtle or showy, cultivated or wild, each flower reminds us why we garden—to be undone by beauty, to be surprised by affection, and to be surrounded, for one brief and shining season, by living poems rooted in the earth.