Blanket Flower (Apricot)

Its shape is daisy-like and there are many daisies in Shakespeare, some associated with troubled emotional states, others with lightheartedness.   

Daisies may suggest springtime joy, as “daisies pied, and violets blue…/do paint the meadows with delight” [Love’s Labours Lost]), or youthful freshness and innocence. Daisies are included in Ophelia’s language of flowers (in Hamlet), where they are commonly seen as referring to “self-sacrifice for love,” as well as “dissembling love and the folly of believing such deceits” (Painter and Parker).  

Daisies are associated with Alcestis, a figure in Greek drama and story. She is a sacrificial wife who agrees to die in place of her husband and then returns from the land of the dead.  In Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale, a wife symbolically returns from the dead in an act of reconciliation.  Much has been lost, but her return is an act of hope.  

We planted orange flowers in memory and to honour the children who died in residential schools.