The Botanist's Son

“And this one, my boy, I call a chalice, brimming with sunlight.”

My earliest years are to me a flux of images. The first chapters in the story are not really linear, and this makes it quite difficult for me to keep track. I haven’t made sense of it all just yet. There are, however, a few facts that remain my frame to cling on, defiant columns rising from the sea. Firstly, I know my father was a scientist. More specifically, a botanist. The man loved flowers, and he could tell you a lot about them. Often too much. I’ve been told that he possessed the conversational quality of a single C-sharp note, sustained on an organ; at first one was curious to hear it, then one became bored, then one would be forced to take leave before their lack of tolerance became too obvious and, more than anything, impolite. His lectures were notorious for being at once zesty and unbearable. But, as a boy, I was rapt with them. Something I’d inherited from my mother.

We’d moved house for my father’s job. Another fixed point in my history. He had a position doing “less interesting work” than his anthology at a power plant nearby, which allowed him ample time for his passions to simmer and ensured he would always return home bubbling to visit his Eden; his paradise; his back garden. There he tended to every stem of every flower with the meticulousness that only love can elicit, cupping their petals as if they were the hands of his own infant children. And all the while I was allowed to sit and listen in the emerald haze, as he savoured each educating syllable, letting them fall as dominoes off his tongue. It is all too easy for me to become lost in the liquid luminescence of those evenings, the splashes of colour animated by the sun, and I have long been scared of forgetting his winged words. When Armageddon came, I was ready with a pen and post-it notes, and in the fallout, I have written some of his finest orations all over my walls. You see, my father was a man of simultaneous precision and poetry. Whilst he knew his Dendranthemum from his Aruncus, they were as much objects of beauty as fascination to him. A slightly curled nose, some round, panda-like glasses, a thinning head of hazel hair, and a singularly content smile dissolved into the landscape the moment he opened his bard’s mouth.

Of course, it is only right that I reveal his favourites. Each had a wholly different meaning to the man. There were those that it suited him to admire, like the tulips he gave to my mother on their first date (“the petalled wine glasses of lovers”); those which made him giggle, namely any kind of orchid (“Theophrastus’ large-bollocked progeny”); and those which were simply too magnificent not to be admired (“tell me, son, where else can one find such a lilac nebula as exists within every single cherry blossom?”). And yet, above all, there was one flower that he would pepper his garden with, and the rest of the earth for that matter, given the chance. Tagetes. The Marigold flowers. These were robust, capable of growing everywhere with little cultivation. They were omnipresent in his own cultural heritage, the subject of poems, songs, and Ukrainian folklore. They were his. The Marigold flower given unto him by his mum was the static sun that had ignited his life’s work. It was thus that he so lovingly called them his “chalices, brimming with sunlight”.

The final defining fact from this point in my life is what followed. The explosion. The sound of vengeful gods, and the visions of inferno that came with them. The weeks of sirens and struggle distilled into the confusion of the flurry of nuclear winter. My father’s less interesting work, quite literally, became the death of him, and as the radioactive snow fell on the station, it weaved a white gauze around his body, veiling his remains from us to this day. From that point on, life and the flowers alike have seemed to be the features of an old photograph from which the colour has seeped away for a lack of care, leaving only a fragrance of the beauty it once trapped. I’ve had a few years to move on, but it hasn’t been easy. I’m still only thirteen, after all. My earliest years are to me a flux of images. The first chapters in the story are not really linear, and this makes it quite difficult for me to keep track. I haven’t made sense of it all just yet.

But if there’s one thing I’ll hold onto, one pebble of sanity to keep in my pocket, it’s the laying of those marigolds everywhere I go.