July 2025, 6 Minutes

The Bloom and the Buried

The Hidden Roots of Beauty, Growth, and Meaning

Flowers are pretty things. Everyone likes them. And if you ever come across someone who doesn’t, I would strongly suggest running fast the other way.

But, for all their niceness, they are not self-reliant – to exist, they need roots.

So, what is a root, besides a nuisance we trip over on the forest floor?

Well, a root does four things:

It anchors.

It absorbs.

It stores.

It transports.

And it typically comes in one of three forms:

Taproots (one thick main root. Think: carrot).

Fibrous roots (a tangle of thin roots. Think: grass).

Adventitious roots (roots that grow from parts of the plant other than the root zone. Think: corn).

The beauty of a flower begins underground; If you want flowers, you need roots.

Hidden from view, roots spread through soil in darkness, anchoring the plant and drawing in the water and minerals it needs to grow. Yes, we do indeed admire the bloom, but often forget the quiet labour of the roots. Without their persistence and resilience, the flower could not exist.

Our “roots” are equally important to our blooming; they are our foundations. Childhood experiences, ancestral history, language, memory, trauma, culture, love. This is who we really are, us at rest, us unobserved, us sui generis.

As with nature’s roots, they are usually buried, unseen. And yet, from these roots spring everything visible: our achievements, our personalities, our creativity, our expressions of joy and sorrow. The novelist draws on personal experiences of grief and struggle. The dancer performs using a body conditioned by years of disciplined training. The revolutionary communicates truths shaped by long histories of silence and injustice. The poet creates from a place of deep introspection and, so very often, isolation. And the photographer captures moments shaped by hours of observation, hard-earned technical skill, and an eye trained to see what others overlook.

Each one of us, artist or otherwise, have roots. Some go deeper than others, and some prefer to ignore – or outright deny – their existence. In my estimation, if you do not acknowledge their existence, you can never properly feed them, and without nourishment, the flowers they produce – if they can gather the power to do so – will be of the mediocre variety.

Decay – that oh-so essential element of life – feeds roots, too. Compost, waste, disintegrating life - these all nourish the ground. So too it is in our lives: our failures, our heartbreaks, our moments of collapse…they become the nutrients for later growth. We observe that pain can deepen empathy. Loneliness can foster creativity. Mistakes can shape wisdom.

Therefore, to properly understand the flower, one must understand the root.

Our culture rewards the surface. Social media, celebrity, hiring practices, news media, fashion – these industries and cultural expressions typically prioritise the immediate, the easily digestible, the uncomplex. influencers gain attention through curated aesthetics, filtered beauty, and staged “authenticity,” often regardless – and perhaps in direct opposition – of actual knowledge or character. Trends prioritise quick and visual impact, even if the content lacks depth or even accuracy. Politicians spam the world with nice sounding lies, sound-biting their way to war and famine. Headlines gotta be hot, and they gotta go “viral”. Fashion’s gotta be fast, and it’s gotta POP.

Conversely, Roots are not glamorous. They do not seek praise. They work quietly, constantly, and that work is dirty. But they are what allow us to bloom, and to keep blooming.

Roots are people too. No, not like that, but also kinda like that. Parents, siblings, teachers, first and last loves…the vast array of everyone who comes into our lives – all of them have the potential to feed and shape our roots, to help them grow, or cause their withering. One (maybe me?) could argue that people are the most important roots of all. That there is no greater source of energy or enervation. If this is the truth (trust me, it is), then we should choose who we allow water our soil wisely. Very wisely.

Flowers are temporary. They bloom only when they must, and only then when they can. But roots are permanent, and the deeper they grow, the brighter your flower will burst.

And where would life be without flowers?

Tournesols

“The sunflower is mine in a way.” - Vincent van Gogh in a letter to his brother, Theo

One such person who understood how empty life would be without flowers was the penner of the quote that begins this section of my article.

Meet the man. Average height, wiry, eyes as light as his hair, a face angular and unfinished, usually to be found wearing workingmen’s clothes – a fashion complemented by his rough, paint-stained hands. In later years he would be found with a mutilated left ear.

If you were lucky enough that he stopped for a word, he would be able to do so in his native Dutch, as well as French, German and English. Despite being a school dropout, he was a big reader – so expect plenty of references to the Bible, the French naturalists and realists, Dickens, and even Shakespeare. If he was in a manic episode, he would rush through his words, making plenty of tangents, and doing it all in an excitable manner. If he was in a depressive phase, you would be confronted with philosophical reflections, delivered gravely, his exit to quickly follow.

Van Gogh was a man for the heliotropic, big-faced sunflower. He studied them with a lover’s eye, and depicted them in various states, from newly blossomed, to wilting, to decayed. Normally, they would be arranged in vases or bouquet-d on a table, freshly plucked, an implication of them just being brought into a home. Sometimes they were in bunches, other times solitary.

Van Gogh expert Christopher Riopelle understood that the sunflower art produced by the artist as key to understanding the man himself. He described this series as a turning point in van Gogh’s work, writing, “The sunflower paintings are a moment at which van Gogh, having struggled for so long, having suffered so much, finally, finally finds a motif that is central to his imagination, and he goes to town with it.” Adding with a flourish only a lifetime appreciator of art could muster, “He becomes ever braver and bolder in how he paints, new freedom, new rhythms that enter in.” If you’re one of the few left on earth who smokes a pipe, stick that in it.

Now, bear in mind, van Gogh never explicitly said his sunflowers were about suffering, so I’m taking permission from myself and my own interpretations here, but I am not the first, nor the only, to do so.

Beyond the aforementioned Riopelle, art historians Meyer Schapiro and John Berger have interpreted van Gogh’s florals as more than decorative. Schapiro notes that the flowers are “imbued with emotional urgency”, while Berger suggests van Gogh's use of paint is a direct conduit of inner torment, even when the subject is “simple” or “cheerful.” Personally, I would argue that van Gogh chose the cheerful to represent this inner torment not on occasion, but as a matter of form. His letters reflect this: “Instead of trying to reproduce exactly what I see before me, I make more arbitrary use of colour to express myself more forcefully.”; “There is already too much misery in this world: I wish to paint the world as I wish it to be, not as it is.” Thus, the 19th centuries greatest artist was not naïve in his subject choice; not incidental, but deliberate.

Painted just before his betimes death, van Gogh’s Tree Roots (1890) is a striking and often overlooked painting, yet it holds profound emotional and symbolic weight - especially when viewed through the lens of his troubled final days. The piece portrays an entangled mass of tree roots and undergrowth, painted with urgent, swirling strokes and vivid blues, greens, and ochres. At first glance, it appears chaotic and abstract, but beneath the surface lies a potent implication for the painter’s psychological state.

Unlike the tranquil pastoral scenes he painted in the same period, Tree Roots offers no horizon or sky. Instead, the viewer gets only dense, loamy, tangled earth. Art historians, some of whom I have already spoken of, have interpreted this as van Gogh confronting the ground itself, both literally and metaphorically, as he flew chaotically into despair. The painting suggests a return to origins, a grappling with the past, with trauma, and with identity. Because it must also be understood that, though roots are what hold and anchor us, they can also ensnare.

Notably, the painting contains limited yellow - used sparingly at that - a colour-choice so key to so much of his other work, a colour so synonymous with the sunflower. Personally, I don’t think this an accident. The artist was turning from the flower which had given him joy and meaning, and looking downwards, beyond the long stalk, digging a bit with frantic hands, trying to find the source of it all.

Therefore, this work may be seen as van Gogh’s raw, final attempt to wrest meaning from the chaotic forces of nature and of the mind that surrounded and increasingly consumed him. Rather than a farewell to this, the cruellest of all worlds, Tree Roots feels more like a confrontation: with mortality, with memory, and with the soil from which his art, and suffering, grew, having been watered in ways so deeply personal, only an artist could ever begin to comprehend them.

The subheading for this part of my work is the French word for sunflower. It was also the name of the series on the flowering plant van Gogh developed: Tournesols, “to turn to the sun”.

If you get the chance to, do.

Always do.

To Look Up, Look Down

In life we celebrate what blooms - achievement, expression, beauty - and rightfully so. But we must also take the time to acknowledge and reflect upon the roots that make them possible.

The visible is always built upon the invisible: discipline, memory, repetition, pain. Van Gogh’s sunflowers, in all their radiating defiance against the Great Sad, were grown from isolation and suffering.

The flower is what we see; the root is what we survive. To truly understand creativity, growth, success, we must look down. Perhaps then, what’s to be found there deserves a bit of praise, too.

Tend to your roots; protect your soil. Honour your past. Nourish your foundations. Let the darkness be fertile. Because nothing beautiful appears above without the good stuff beneath.

Postscript
Van Gogh was my age when he died by his own hand. On a sunny Sunday in July, he walked out into a wheat field and put a bullet in his chest. It took him a while to die, and he managed to walk back to his lodgings before he did so.

His alleged last words, whispered agonally to his beloved brother, Theo, after midnight in a candle-lit room at the Auberge Ravoux, were: “The sadness will last forever".

No, dear Vincent, I don’t think it will. I think you’re alright now.

All blossoms fall, but spring is the kindest season.

Photo by: Muhammet Çolak