The Flower of Weddings and of Funerals

The calla lily holds the two ends of life in a single flower. Its whiteness and its association with purity made it a favourite bridal flower, carried at weddings as a sign of virtue and of holy love; and the same qualities made it equally a flower of death, banked at funerals and painted on memorials as an emblem of the resurrection and of the soul restored to purity. In Christian art it can stand, like the Madonna lily, for the Virgin Mary. This double life, the flower of the bride and the flower of the grave, rests on a single meaning, purity, read at the beginning and the end of a life alike from the flower's immaculate white form.

Native to marshy ground in southern Africa, the calla lily has become naturalised and in some regions genuinely invasive where it has escaped cultivation, notably in parts of coastal California and Australia, where conservation authorities now list it among the plants that crowd out native wetland vegetation, an ecological footnote quite at odds with the flower's cultivated reputation for refined purity. It remains, nonetheless, one of the most requested flowers for both weddings and funerals across the modern Western world, its sculptural simplicity suiting the formal photography of both occasions in a way few other flowers can match.