More than a decade ago, I shot weddings to pay my way through school in San Francisco. I remember those flowers, tall, showing up in almost every arrangement. I never knew what they were called. A decade later, I found myself filming them again. This time, I finally learned they are called snapdragons. That small discovery sent me down a rabbit hole.
It turns out snapdragon has been carrying stories for a long time. Native to the rocky edges of southwestern Europe, it grows where other flowers might hesitate. Through stone walls, in narrow crevices, under hard sun, it finds a way to bloom. In old European folklore, snapdragon was believed to carry protection. A flower that grows from rock needs no reassurance.
Long before it became a garden favorite, snapdragon had a place in European herbals. Its leaves and flowers were gathered in summer, dried, and saved for old remedies associated with ulcers, swellings, and inflammation.
Jan Brueghel the Elder included snapdragon in Flowers in a Wooden Vessel, painted around 1606–1607. In this encyclopedic bouquet of rare flowers, 130 species in total, snapdragon appears not as a decorative filler, but as part of the early European fascination with observing and preserving the natural world through painting.
Centuries later, snapdragon appears again in Georgia O'Keeffe's Red Snapdragons from 1923. There, the flower is no longer a small thing growing from a wall or pressed into an old herbal. It fills the frame with heat, color, and presence.
We filmed them in a studio, in still air, away from any wall or garden. And somehow they still looked like they were growing toward something. I hope you get to see them in the wild one day. With love, Choosh.
Brueghel the Elder, Jan. Flowers in a Wooden Vessel. 1606–1607. Oil on panel. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Austria. Available at: Google Arts & Culture
O'Keeffe, Georgia. Red Snapdragons. c. 1923. Oil on canvas. Precisionism. Available at: WikiArt
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