...of flowers

Well. Then we had the irises, rising beautiful and cool on their tall stalks, like brown glass, like pastel water momentarily frozen in a splash, light blue, light mauve, and the darker ones, velvet and purple, black cat's-ears in the sun, indigo shadow, and the bleeding hearts, so female in shape it was a surprise they'd not long since been rooted out. There is something subversive about this garden of Serena's, a sense of buried things bursting upwards, wordlessly, into the light, as if to point, to say: Whatever is silenced will clamour to be heard, though silently. A Tennyson garden, heavy with scent, languid; the return of the word swoon. Light pours down upon it from the sun, true, but also the heat rises, from the flowers themselves, you can feel it: like holding your hand an inch above a an arm, a shoulder. It breathes in the warmth, breathing itself in. To walk through it in these days, of peonies, of pinks and carnation, makes my head swim.

[The Handmaid's Tale, Atwood, M.]