Rita and the Magnolia
How to think about death and flowers
The magnolia at the Rita Angus Cottage is flowering again.
Outside of New Zealand, you may not have heard of Rita Angus - she is New Zealand's best known woman painter, working in those difficult times for women artists, the 1930s-1960s. The house where she lived and painted is now an artist’s residence and I am a volunteer gardener there.
My own house is very close to the cottage. A composer who lived close by, very much admired - Douglas Lilburn - had a lifelong friendship and a sort affair with Rita. And Rita became pregnant. She was overjoyed, seeing a beautiful future family. But Lilburn was apparently not so happy. He was not the slightest bit interested in settling into a domestic situation. Then the baby miscarried and Rita was terribly bereft.
Every year the magnolia in the garden flowers profoundly, magnificently.
It’s quite a famous magnolia, Rita painted it quite a bit. That’s the magnolia in the background of this self portrait.
And its fatally ill, terminal. Honey fungus is consuming the tree from the inside, destroying the core of the tree.
The flowers just get more and more intense. It flowers with almost hysterical abandon. People are puzzled - why would a tree flower so much when it is dying? Shouldn’t it’s weakness be expressed by conserving energy and not flowering?
It is flowering so much because it is dying.
Trees expend all of their energy into reproduction, via flowers, with the last of their energy, as they die. This is it, there is no future except through flowers.
A younger, more vigorous tree will put a chunk of its energy into growing. So it doesn't flower as much as a dying tree, a tree with nothing left to put its energy into except immortality.
I get scared of death a lot. So now I see myself in Rita’s garden, with my fingers buried in the earth. My hands are in the soil and the soil is the bodies of tiny insects and plants. I am holding the stuff of death. I see those tiny insects eating the plants and the plants dying. I can see more plants growing up in the sunshine in the space they have left. I hold onto this thought of the death of plants and know its good, it’s okay.
I shift my perspective and I see the birds eating all the insects, and the birds dying in the garden. And I hold this thought until it is okay again. I hold the insects eating the bird’s bodies, and the plants growing from the birds bodies and I see the flowers we have planted growing bigger and more lovely.
I see all the plants growing without us, the gardeners. How all the growth here is not the result of our work, but is working without us, in spite of us, beyond us. How we can only just guide a shoot here and there, pull away another bit of plant growth there, and how all the work we put in is nothing really but makes a garden somehow.
Matter aggregates, into something beautiful . And then it disaggregates
I never really got beyond birds in my death visualisation - it is still hard to face death, hard.
I think I am making art because of death, too. I aggregate matter into something beautiful. I only started working seriously, properly, in my forties. I realised I was the same age as my mother was when she became too ill to work properly in her life. I was in danger of not trying to do my work here until it was too late, until I had no more chances left. This is it, there is no future except through the flowers.
More on Rita Angus here and here
I think getting the Substack app is a great idea- there are so many great writers on Substack. Reading great writing on the app is completely replacing my doom-scrolling habits. And the app is a good place to read it all, much better than in your emails.
"It is flowering so much because it is dying." thank you for that.
Beautiful, Helen! Thank you for sharing Rita’s story (I’m in the USA and was not familiar) and for this thoughtful reflection. A lovely meditation with which to start my day.