Kew Gardens

Flowers are a common symbol associated with the innate beauty of nature. In “Kew Gardens,” flowers signify not only physical beauty, but spiritual beauty connected to an enlightened appreciation for the natural world. As seen through the ponderous woman’s character, flowers further the theme of The Connection Between Humanity and Nature by serving as a brief respite from everyday habits. Flowers feature heavily in the narrative’s more descriptive passages, for example:

The petals were voluminous enough to be stirred by the summer breeze, and when they moved, the red, blue and yellow lights passed one over the other, staining an inch of the brown earth beneath with a spot of the most intricate colour (83).

As the visual characteristics of flowers are described in greater detail than any of the human characters, they become an emotional presence in the story.

The setting of the story is not just Kew Gardens but a specific flowerbed. This flowerbed is depicted as an ecosystem in itself: various flowers bloom, dew refracts light, and the snail experiences his daily trials. Significantly, the story’s narration only follows the human characters as they pass the flowerbed. By anchoring itself around a single flowerbed, the story demonstrates the ways that multitudinous lifeforms interact in a single day.