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Celebrating Pride in a Vase on Monday

In honor of Pride Month, today’s vase celebrates love. My vase includes the colors of the rainbow flag, designed by Artist Gilbert Baker at the behest of Harvey Milk, the first openly gay politician.

Colors have been added and subtracted to the flag over the years based on practical reasons (the cost and availability of the dyes) and the need for further inclusion. I didn’t realize before today that each color is symbolic.

Here is a screenshot from Wikipedia:

I managed to include everything but turquoise. The representative flowers are pink (geranium), red, (sweet peas and Acer seed pods), orange (nasturtium, a flowering succulent and a self-seeded annual), yellow (salvia), green (nepeta, lavender, and nigella seed pods), blue (hydrangea), and indigo/violet (salvia).

Juno Dawson wrote the book pictured in today’s post. It was assigned reading when my eldest son attended university. It’s considered “young adult nonfiction, ” which tells me it should also be required reading in high school.

This Book is Gay, one of the Guardian’s Best Books of the Year, is described as “The book every LGBT person would have killed for as a teenager, told in the voice of a wise best friend. Frank, warm, funny, USEFUL.” Patrick Ness.

Sadly, I live in a country with powerful yet hateful, fearful, right-leaning folks that want to ban books and defend gun rights, strip women of reproductive rights and demonize anyone that doesn’t fit into a narrowly defined norm.

These flowers celebrate love and inclusion, compassion and understanding, and hope. They celebrate Pride. They celebrate Love.

Please visit the Cathy’s to see what they’ve created for IAVOM.

41 thoughts on “Celebrating Pride in a Vase on Monday”

  10. I loved every word and the information. I’ll look for the book because it will be banned soon if not already. The flower arrangement was just sweet. Fear is such a useless emotion in life.

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    • Thank you, MH. You are always so positive and upbeat. We all remember Harvey Milk, from his trail-blazing years, his senseless death, and the amazing movie staring Sean Penn. That said, I didn’t know that Mile had commissioned the artist who came up with the Pride flag.

      From where I set, banning books is the ultimate in censorship and control.

      On the lighter side of this post, I had fun coming up with flowers in each color. Blue is the hardest to pull off, but a fading hydrangea was just the think.

      I think of you daily. xo

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  13. Like the others I didn’t know that each colour represented an aspect of our lives. So thank you. I love your posy, Alys. Flowers are the perfect, gentle way to overcome some of the hate.

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  15. Love is Love! Your PRIDE bouquet is just lovely, Alys. What a meaningful way to gather the flowers for your bouquet! Thank you for sharing the meaning of each color. Last weekend, we attended a local PRIDE Fest and learned so much. So many dedicated people are working hard for change! We learned about a new PRIDE flag design that has been designed to be even more inclusive. We must never stop learning and growing! Such a great post, Alys!🩷

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  16. What a great idea for a vase – I am wondering what blooms might have filled the turquoise gap….? I had no idea what the colours of the flag represented, so thanks for enlightening me

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    • Here’s what I found: the Himalayan poppy
      The one plant that contains blue pigment is the rarest in the world, the Himalayan poppy. The plant is native to Tibet, where the soil’s weather conditions and acidity help protect these rare flowers. This plant thrives at 11,000 feet above sea level and withstands freezing conditions.

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      • Oh yes, that would work well – there are varieties of it that can can grow in parts of the UK, but conditions have to be just right, particularly with rainfall I believe – although the highest part of the UK is only a little over 4400 feet, so the height doesn’t seem to be crucial…

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