When we were flowers

I found the handkerchief in the street - Borough Lane, Eastbourne - next to a walled garden full of flowers in the same colours as those embroidered on the handkerchief.

"Like spiders spinning webs from their own bodies or birds feathering their nests, women also adorned their homes with what they were. [...]
As women themselves were conventionally idealized as flowers, by depicting flowers they again symbolically represented themselves in their work."

Classen, Constance (2005), Feminine Tactics: Crafting an Alternative Aesthetics in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, in Classen, Constance (ed), The Book of Touch, Berg, Oxford, New York 2005, pp 234, 235