Fairies and Flowers
You’ve just learned about how important trees are to certain breeds of fairies. Many fairies are also intricately connected with flowers and flora in general.
Each type of flower has a secret meaning to fairies, so be careful about what flowers you put in a vase in your room or plant in your garden. Here’s a short list of common flowers and what they symbolize in the fairy realm:
Carnations: friendship
Freesia: sweetness
Lavender: cooperation
Lilies of the valley: eternal youth
Peonies: indifference
Roses: truth, honesty
Tiger lilies: lies, aggression
Violets: celebration
Tulips symbolize loyalty, and a little bouquet of them on the kitchen table will do wonders in terms of making local fairies like you. Fairies cherish loyalty, which is one of the reasons they like dogs, the most faithful of animals.
Certain flowers are not flowers at all but are fairy creatures disguised by spells. The names of these blooms are surprisingly obvious: snapdragons and birds-of-paradise. The snapdragons do indeed become fairy dragons: their petals turn into scales and their stems become long green poisonous tails. Birds-of-paradise are beautiful to behold, either as flowers or fairy birds—but make sure to cover your ears if you see them in creature form: their song is shrill and terrible and sometimes causes a seven-year deafness.
Marigolds are important to fairies. At night, they wring the juice from the little petals on the underside of the flower into tiny glass jars and use that marigold extract for medicines and perfumes. Many gardeners today use marigolds everywhere from tennis clubs to store parking lots in the summer, since they’re so hardy when it comes to the hot sun. If you look beneath a marigold plant and see lots of twisted loose petals, it’s likely that fairies visited there recently.
Poison ivy leaves are home to the tiniest known species of fairy—practically microscopic—called the Maledendrom fairies. Each poison ivy leaf can contain as many as a thousand Maledendrom fairies, which hang upside down from hooked feet and wait for clueless campers and other victims. Their dartlike fingers are filled with a nasty toxin, which causes the rash you get when you touch the plant.
A Special Note
to Those with Gardens
If your family has a garden in your backyard, you would be wise to make some sort of welcoming gesture to the local fairies.
Take ten little rocks and make a circle near the garden’s entrance, or on its left side if the garden has no gate. This is a universal sign to fairies that they can help themselves to growing vegetables and flowers.
In return, they will often ensure that your plants bear the sweetest tomatoes, the plumpest raspberries, or the most brilliantly colored hydrangeas. This practice has been used by knowledgeable farmers and gardeners for centuries.
Some gardeners leave dishes of salt nestled in the dirt to kill snails and slugs. The salt instantly dissolves these creatures; some humans even take pleasure in pouring the salt right on top of them. I strongly advise against doing this, since many fairies detest this cruel practice and will take offense. The result will surely be shrunken, hard green beans, uprooted turnips, rotten potatoes, and so on.
On another note, fairies love scarecrows. They think they’re hilarious.
Why You Should Watch Your Step
on Baseball Fields,
Soccer Fields, and Other Vast Lawns
Be careful to stick to smooth, shorn parts of the grass, or you may have the misfortune of accidentally stepping on an enchanted tuft of grass that casts a nasty spell when trod upon.
Emerald-colored and stubbornly resistant to the blades of lawn mowers, these “Stray Sods” are relatively easy to spot. They are also impossible to uproot, and if you dig around the plants in the dirt, their fire-red roots retract from human sight, squirming like worms as they go. Fairies invented Stray Sods and use the milk from their roots for medicines.
People who stomp on a common Stray Sod are doomed to walk in circles for hours. As you can imagine, this would not be especially helpful if you stepped on one while playing a game of soccer, football, or baseball.
Other, more exotic breeds of Stray Sods contain highly specific spells that make you forget your name, or what year it is, or the word for “rain” or “snow” or “milk,” and so on. These tend to be reddish in color and should be avoided at all costs, as the effects of the spells are permanent. Children who trod on the name-forgetting Stray Sod used to have to wear iron bracelets bearing their names until the end of their days.
Old Irish manuals advise you to wear your coat inside out when walking in fields, which apparently protects you against these odd spells. So next time you are playing ball in a field, it might be a good idea to turn your uniform shirt inside out—or wear an inside-out shirt under the uniform at the very least.
As you will see in the next story, Stray Sods and poison ivy fairies are not the only dangerous “flower fairies.”
Setting the Record Straight
About Ringing Bluebells
People have long believed that if you hear bluebell flowers “ring” like real bells, you are actually hearing your own death knell. In Scotland, the nickname for bluebells is “dead man’s bells.”
This is not true. If you hear ringing bluebells, it means that a fairy funeral is taking place nearby.
If you hear lilies of the valley chiming, on the other hand, you are near a fairy wedding.
Tale No. 2
A Face Made
from Flowers
When something has been unfair for a very long time, you’d think that someone would sort it out. But some unfair things never get sorted out: wars still happen all the time; storms ruin crops and sometimes even cities; some people live shorter lives than they ought to.
Another unfair thing that’s been happening forever: in every family, some siblings seem to get all the lucky breaks, while another gets left in the cold.
That’s definitely how it was in Daisy’s family: her three undeserving older sisters were pretty, and Daisy was not. Like Daisy, her sisters had all been named after flowers—Rose, Lily, and Violet—and they looked as though they’d all been shaken from the same flower-seed packet and teased up from the soil of a sunny garden.
Daisy, on the other hand, might have been clipped from a hemlock patch: she was quite peculiar-looking, with a high moon of a forehead and an elegant arched nose that belonged on someone much older. Her ears stuck out, as though they didn’t want to miss a single whisper.
Her mother never forgave her for falling short of her winsome name, and her sisters made fun of her.
“Your new name is Velma,” they informed Daisy at breakfast one morning.
Daisy, who was eight, just stared at them.
“Don’t you want to know why?” asked Rose. “Because ‘Daisy’ is too pretty for you. We stayed up late last night to come up with a name that would fit you better. So from now on, you’ll answer to ‘Velma’ around here.”
And later, the letters V-E-L-M-A appeared in pink nail polish on Daisy’s bedroom door. Even after three coats of white paint, a hint of that insulting combination of letters remained.
I’m sure that you will rush to say, “Well, those sisters sound like nasty pieces of work, and they certainly prove that pretty isn’t everything,” and I would absolutely agree with you. But Daisy’s family did not think the qualities that made Daisy special (sweetness, inquisitiveness, imagination) counted for very much.
But the beastly sisters did not know about Daisy’s most extraordinary quality, which was, as you probably guessed, her fairy sight. Even so, the family knew that something was different about her, and the strangeness that always powdered the air around Daisy made her even less popular. Fairy sight makes you act very odd sometimes, when you’re constantly seeing things that normal people are not. People might catch you talking to a fairy and think you’re talking to yourself, or they might se
e you wearing your socks inside out all the time (for reasons you learned about in “How to Protect Yourself from a Dangerous Fairy”).
Here’s an example of Daisy’s strange behavior: sometimes her mother would wake up to strange noises in the middle of the night. She would stumble out onto the upstairs foyer and squint through her cold-creamed eyes and see Daisy’s shadowy shape creeping down the stairs.
“Where do you think you’re going?” her mother would yell, and Daisy’s little shoulders would clench up and she’d scamper back into her room. But one night, Daisy’s mother didn’t hear the stairs creak and by chance looked out the bathroom window at three in the morning and saw her youngest daughter sitting alone in the backyard of their Brooklyn house.
An explanation was insisted upon as Daisy was hauled back up to her room.
“I was sitting in the fairy ring,” Daisy said at last, after ten minutes of stubborn silence.
“What are you talking about?” demanded her mother, and when Daisy pointed out the window at a round patch of very green grass in the backyard, her mother scowled even harder.
“That’s just where the table was last summer, which shaded the grass below and made it greener,” she snapped.
“It’s a fairy ring,” insisted Daisy. She climbed onto her bed and buried her face in her pillow and refused to say another word.
Her mother stared at her. “Why do you have to act so odd all the time? Where did I go wrong?”
But these are questions that no little girl should ever have to answer; Daisy didn’t even try, and so her mother turned out the light and left her daughter alone in the moonlight.
Later that week, in art class, Daisy and her classmates were given an easy assignment: create a picture of an object that you find beautiful. Paint jars and brushes were handed out, the scrape of brushstrokes and hum of concentration filled the room, and then it was time for show-and-tell. One of the girls held up a picture of her horse. A picture of a beach at sunset followed.
Then it was Daisy’s turn.
“What is that?” someone shouted out.
“It’s a flower fairy,” explained Daisy.
“It’s horrible-looking,” said one girl. “Its hair and arms are made of thorny vines. Fairies are supposed to be pretty.”
Daisy studied her picture and frowned. “This is a special kind, one that lives in fairy rings. I think it’s beautiful.”
The bell rang. The art teacher stopped Daisy on the way out.
“I think your picture is beautiful too,” she told Daisy. “There are many different kinds of beauty in the world. Some beauty is very unusual and can even be scary. Most people don’t understand that.”
Daisy looked at her picture for a moment and then rolled it up.
“I’m tired of everyone thinking that I’m strange,” she said. “Things would be easier if I was plain-pretty like my sisters.”
“That’s probably true,” sighed the teacher, who remembered Rose and Lily and Violet from her old classes. “But you don’t want to be like them. It’s always better to be beautiful in a unique way. You’ll appreciate that when you’re older.”
Daisy’s eyes showed that her thoughts had drifted elsewhere.
“I think I’d like to be a flower,” she said after a minute. “Or even a whole garden. Everyone thinks they’re pretty. No one hates flowers.”
The teacher smiled gently and smoothed down Daisy’s hair. “No,” she said. “No one hates flowers. Even the late-blooming ones.”
Later that night, Daisy took the rolled-up picture out from under the bed, where she’d hidden it from her sisters. She looked at it for a long time. When she was done looking, she tiptoed down the stairs and then outside in her nightgown. The sky was black and moonless and it was very hard to see. Daisy glanced back at the house, but no sour midnight faces appeared in the windows.
She sat in the dark green patch of grass where the table had been last summer and waited.
Now, if you had been sitting next to Daisy in the dark, it might have struck you as odd, how the grass began to fill with little glimmers of gold light. You might have thought that lightning bugs had nestled between the fat emerald blades, until you remembered that lightning bugs hover in the air and do not cluster by the hundreds in the grass. And then you would have to shield your eyes as the glimmer grew brighter and rose into the air until it wasn’t dark at all anymore, but was instead brighter than heaven at high noon.
That’s how it had been for Daisy the first time she sat in the fairy ring in her backyard; for a moment when all of that gold light came, she’d thought that she’d died and that angels were coming.
But angels did not come.
What did come with all the light would have frightened most children, but Daisy wasn’t scared.
Vines began to stem from the ground. Soon you could see that these vines weren’t vines at all. They were creatures that resembled tiny, grotesque humans, with thorn-covered, vinelike arms and legs and hair, and glowing luna-moth wings unfurling from their backs. Dozens of them emerged from the earth, and with silent industry, they went about setting up their nightly feast.
I probably don’t have to tell you that active fairy rings are difficult to come by in the modern world. And just what these rings are, exactly, has long been the subject of much debate. Some believe that they mark the site of an underground fairy court or realm. Others think the rings are fairy graveyards.
The ring in Daisy’s Brooklyn backyard just happened to belong to an extremely rare type of winged fairy, thought to be extinct until Daisy’s story first got pieced together by today’s fairy scholars, myself included. First seen in ancient times, these creatures were known in Greek as anthothirios (or “flower beasts”) and in Latin as Circaea lutetiana (or “enchanter’s nightshade”), due to their vinelike appearance and the fact that they only appear at night. Both the Greeks and the Romans wrote about the dangerous spells weaved by these creatures.
Such “flower beasts” are not mentioned in fairy literature again until the late 1500s. I came across the diary of an early Dutch explorer named Henry van der Hoots, who spent quite a bit of time with Native Americans in the area that eventually became Brooklyn.
Look at this curious entry written by van der Hoots on August 15, 1598:
Tonight the Indians told me about a circle of land, not far from their camp, where they upon occasion see a “midnight shine” that rises like flames from the ground. During the day, the site of the “shine” is only a round patch of dark grass, about six feet in diameter. The Indians call it a place of dark spirits and claim that several years ago an Indian child who wandered into the midnight shine disappeared like dust on the wind.
These Native Americans called the tiny, leafy creatures that scuttled about near the circle “midnight-shine spirits.”
But in honor of the only little girl to see these “midnight-shine” fairies in centuries, I shall refer to them henceforth by Daisy’s simple name: flower fairies.
Daisy watched the fairy feast in quiet fascination.
They ate terrible things like roasted ants and grasshoppers, and afterward they danced. If she moved, the fairies would stop abruptly and gaze at her and then resume their festivities, but they never invited her to join in. This lucky-and-unlucky girl never sensed that her situation was really quite perilous. As you will soon see, the ancient Greeks and Romans knew what they were talking about when they deemed this species dangerous.
But the flower fairies themselves never gave Daisy any hint of malice, and being near them soothed her, because she understood what it felt like to be considered ugly and odd and because they accepted her as she was and let her bathe in the gold light of their world. She thought about her sadness and wondered how to make it go away.
On this particular evening, the golden light in the fairy ring was brighter than usual and the flower fairies danced more beautifully than ever, and as she watched them, Daisy suddenly had an idea. A grim and gorgeous idea, and she made
this idea into a simple plan.
She put the plan into action the very next day.
Have you ever noticed that all hardware stores smell the same? You can go into a hardware store in Lonely Hill, Alabama, and it will smell the same as one in Topeka, Kansas, or the one on Hudson Street in New York City. That afternoon, after school, Daisy ambled into her neighborhood hardware store, which smelled of the usual utility and determination and plaster and paint.
A man with red eyes and a bushy handlebar mustache peered down at her from behind the counter.
“What’ll it be, half-pint?”
“I’d like to buy some seeds, please,” said Daisy politely. “For flowers.”
The watercolored seed packets were almost as pretty as any flower could be, and since Daisy wanted them all, she stayed for an hour making difficult choices. The hardware-store man gave her a brown paper bag, and when Daisy left, that bag contained seeds for sweet peas, foxgloves, meadowsweet, lady’s slippers, and snowdrops.
Her sisters pounced when Daisy walked through the front door.
“What’s in the bag, Velma,” Lily hollered, trying to snatch it away from Daisy. But instead of going limp as usual, Daisy elbowed her way free and ran up the stairs, the brown paper bag hugged to her chest.
“I’m going to make something,” she shouted back down at their mean little plain-pretty faces. “Something too beautiful for you to understand.”
And she ran into her bedroom and locked the door.
Daisy turned the packets over and over again in her hands and she read the printed Latin names of each to herself until they became a strange, dead-language spell in her mind:
Galanthus nivalis,
Modern Fairies, Dwarves, Goblins, and Other Nasties Page 3