For a long time I didn’t know how I felt about marigolds. Despite featuring one of my favorite flower colors—orange–I just couldn’t quite decide. Weren’t they TOO bold, TOO everyday, TOO pungent? In short, too much.
Then I went to Mexico City, and it settled the question.
Recently, I’ve marked the end of the flower season with a trip. Last year I visited Monet’s Garden at Giverny and this year David and I traveled to Mexico City. I chose the date because it fell around the typical first frost. It hadn’t occurred to me that we would also be there in the days leading up to the Day of the Dead, (Día de los Muertos).
Twenty three million people live in Mexico City and some days it feels like every single one of them is in a car. The city is a bundle of contradictions, chaotic and beautiful, run-down and revitalized, sinking and figuratively rising up.
While I was there the whole city was engulfed in marigolds. Every street, every business, every plaza had a marigold display. It was cloudy while we were there, but it was as if the sunshine was rising up from the ground, and the sight of so many marigolds could not help but make the whole sky feel brighter.
Marigolds were so prevalent because we were visiting in the days leading up to the Day of the Dead, and marigolds are featured prominently. Their brightness and fragrance are believed to lead the souls of dead loved ones back to those who are missing them.
I thought there were a whole lot of marigolds all over the city, then we went to the 24-hour a day flower market. This market is a city all of its own. There are rows and rows of flowers, and in between and behind the stalls are people cooking food. There are fruit stalls and meat stalls. You could literally survive there for weeks, and maybe some of the people working there do.
The flowers themselves were memorable. I literally saw every flower I could think of, everything from dahlias and ranunculus to stock and snapdragons to ammi and goldenrod. The blooms were enormous and the stems unimaginably long.
In addition to cut flowers, many booths sold already created arrangements–clearly from the FTD style featuring floral foam and mounded designs. Moving through the market was treacherous. I was there on a Monday morning and the place was packed. In addition to moving between all the people, there were also men pushing handcarts piled above their heads with thousands of bunched stems.
People were hawking, shopping, haggling, and sharing stories. It was effervescent with human emotion and flowers in quantities I could not have imagined before seeing them. With that backdrop, I noticed the marigolds anew. They were big, bold, and a little chaotic, completely themselves, and a lot like the city that clearly adores them.
I walked away with the indelible impression that marigolds capture all of it. They manifest presence. They aren’t afraid to show off, to be authentically themselves, big, bold, and fragrant, with no apologies. If that isn’t a reason to love a flower, then surely, the fact that they are meant to guide the spirits of our deceased back to us, is.
Look out, next year, in celebration of authenticity and deep comfort in being exactly who we are, I’m growing lots of marigolds.
