The Language Of Flowers by Vanessa Diffenbaugh

The book club met just the other day. We had a wonderful meeting. It was absolutely fabulous to see everyone. We always have a good discussion when we gather. This month was a little bit special though… Because this is the month in which Wildflower Farm began. Every year I get a cake for the June meeting to celebrate this little club that I worked so hard to get off the ground. It is always so wonderful to stop and think about how far we have come and how the club has grown over those 4 years. I look around and I see the faces of a small sisterhood of sorts. One that loves books and loves each other. We also love a good debate and discussion. In the beginning, I used to spend a lot of time trying to grow the club. Trying to bring in more people. But recently, I looked around and realized, we have plenty of people for the intimate little meet in person book club I 0nce dreamed about in moments I felt isolated here on my farm… Over the last 4 years, I have built a community. One with heart. one that is full of laughter. Intelligent women, discussing books. I never knew how much I was missing until I got this club off the ground.

The book this month, The Language Of Flowers, was also about isolation. The isolation that shaped a child into an adult in the foster care system. The main character, Victoria, was given up as a baby and never knew her parents. She grew up passed home to home, regularly into homes that were less than adequate or were down right abusive. Until… She moved to the farm to live with Elizabeth, who wanted to adopt her. The first person in her life to ever love her. Elizabeth, had a family and a history though not the same as Victoria’s it was full of enough difficulty and suffering that caused her to learn the victorian language of flowers as a child. It also made her able to break through the hard shell that Victoria, built around her heart. They developed trust, Victoria, learned the language of flowers from Elizabeth, starting with the flower for misanthropy, the thing she most wanted to express when she first arrived at Elizabeth’s farm… For someone who has been through the system, it is not a simple thing to develop trust like the kind Victoria was developing with Elizabeth. It is even harder to form attachments…. Inevitably those things are so terrifying that someone coming from such circumstances will often blow up a good thing. Victoria, is a pretty classic foster kid in that respect. When she explodes her good luck, she is sent to a group home where she ages out of the system and is offered a room in a house for young women like herself that is paid up for several weeks. At the end of that time, she must be stable enough to pay the low rent or leave to live somewhere else. Anywhere else, a park bench, a garden in the woods of a local park…. It doesn’t really matter. This is the start of Victoria’s adult life, losing the roof over her head.

The loss, forces her to stop processing the tragedy of her life and get a job. She is able to find one with the local florist. She works hared and the florist feeds her well, helps her get off the street among a great many other things, and they form a friendship of sorts, going to the flower market together regularly to buy flowers for decorating weddings. Victoria, runs into a blast from the past but it has been so long she doesn’t even recognize him as he sits there selling his flowers. This encounter leads to an exchange of flowers and the shocking discovery, he speaks the old victorian flower language fluently also! I don’t want to say too much about this mystery man…. But they do develop a relationship and eventually, the girl who grew up in the system, finds herself alone barely housed, with an infant of her own sucking her dry. She is completely unprepared to deal with this little needy human she has brought into the world. She leaves her with her father. But she never stops thinking about her child and it isn’t long before she goes to check in. To be so close to having the family you always dreamed of and yet so far away…. How do you travel the distance when no one has taught you how? How do you connect and trust? Where do you find the strength to rise above such a crippling beginning that leaves you completely unprepared to function in the world? To give her child everything she didn’t get, Victoria, will have to change and become more than the sum of what made her the cut off person she is.

I will stop there… I don’t want to say too much and ruin the story. Because it was absolutely brilliant. I was able to see in the character of Victoria, several children who passed through my family’s home when I was young and my folks took in foster kids. One of our members is a social worker who often works with children having the difficulties we experience when living through Victoria. Another member of our group is the child of a social worker that works trying desperately to get kids like Victoria, into wonderful homes. We have a teacher that also runs into children going through all this in the public school system where she works with some frequency. I think many of us run into children or adults who survived similar things to Victoria. Many of us dismiss and have no patience for their difficulties. This book asks the question what could they become if we did have the patience? If we did have the generosity of spirit? If we did find our best selves where they are concerned? What might be possible for them then? What might we find in ourselves through relationships helping people who have been through this travesty of a system? The truth is, most of us know someone who has been through the system. Each one of us has a best self within us. There is no reason we can’t answer these questions both by reading the book and by taking the lesson it offers to the streets and making that lesson part of ourselves and how we approach the world and other people. I am really glad I read this. We had an incredible discussion. At the end of the book, you learn about the author’s organization to help foster children trying to acclimate to a world they are completely unprepared for. I would encourage everyone to look it up and donate.

I liked the writing style. It was well written and wonderful to read and absolutely beautiful. No one in attendance had a bad word to say about this one. A rarity. We are all very different people and we often have disagreements or differences of opinion about a wide range of stuff from the text. This one melted every single one of us. We loved it. I would absolutely encourage others to read it. It is important to understand that some people have a very different journey through life than we do. It is important to step up for them again and again as many times as it takes, when someone comes from the background Victoria, came from.

Moving on from this book is hard… But, it is what we do as a club.
Each month we share a new reading experience.
Our next one will be Mad Honey.
I have heard good things about it.
Thank you so much for reading
Amanda of Wildflower Farm