As spring flowers bloom, May, the “month of Mary,” presents opportunities to reflect on Marian artwork with floral symbolism — a growing area of the Marian Library Art and Artifacts Collection.
Artists often depict Mary with flowers that symbolize her traits or events from her life. For example, the Madonna lily, Lilium candidum, symbolizes Mary’s purity and is associated with the Annunciation. According to legend, when Mary touched a scentless lily presented by the angel Gabriel, it suddenly became fragrant.
The John Stokes and Mary’s Gardens collection in the Marian Library documents the Marian symbolism of hundreds of flowers and plants. John S. Stokes Jr. and business partner Edward McTague shared their research through gardening guides and seed packets sold by their company, Mary’s Gardens. Popular in backyards and in shared spaces such as parish gardens, Mary gardens are a devotional practice that combines ecology and faith, often with a statue of Mary surrounded by flowers and plants rich in symbolism.
“Floral Madonna and Child (An Homage to Abraham Brueghel),” by Holly Schapker, is a 2021 oil painting purchased with endowment funds by the Marian Library at the 2023 Angelico Project juried art exhibit. This painting was recently on display in the University of Dayton’s Chapel of the Immaculate Conception during the 2026 Marian Forum, organized by the International Marian Research Institute. The portrait of Mary and Jesus is surrounded by a garland of flowers in the style of the 17th-century Flemish painter Abraham Brueghel. In her talk at the Marian Forum, Schapker said, “The Flemish masters surrounded her in impossible garlands — roses from July blooming beside tulips from April — flowers that could never share a season made to share a canvas because in her presence, all seasons are gathered and held.”
Schapker went on to say,
Mary and her life are the perfect sermon. She is the lily that said yes to the angel. She is the rose that bloomed through sorrow without losing its fragrance. She is the violet that grew low and close to the ground and became, in that humility, the most beloved flower in the garden of God. And what she is, she invites us to become. She is not a distant ideal, pressed between the pages of a missal, beautiful but untouchable. She is a mother and a gardener. She tends the soil of our souls. She knows which season we are in, and she is patient the way a gardener is patient because she has never doubted that the seed God planted in us is capable of magnificent bloom.
Researchers, artists and gardeners use the Stokes collection to continue these traditions and create new ones, such as Marian associations with plants native to Ohio, an effort spearheaded by the Marianist Environmental Education Center. A gardening guide from the St. Kateri Conservation Center suggests plants native to North America as alternatives to the mostly European flowers in Stokes’ research. Native plants may be more hardy and benefit the environment by providing food and habitat better-suited for insects.
In “Hail Mary Monarch,” a 2023 oil painting by Ann Marie Coolick and Megan Coonelly, Mary, with a halo in gold leaf, is surrounded by monarch butterflies and purple coneflowers, Echinacea purpurea. The gardening guide from the St. Kateri Conservation Center suggests that purple coneflowers, “Mary’s Flower of God,” can be a replacement for daisies. Of the artists’ collaborative process, Coolick writes that Coonelly “starts the pieces and paints Mary with a single-tone background. She then adds the gold leaf. For this piece, she added the two butterflies on top. She then shipped it to me and I added all of the thick paint, the bottom two butterflies, the yellow daubs of paint on the top butterflies, and the coneflowers.”
Whether impossible combinations of flowers from different seasons or dynamic wildflowers, floral symbolism can lead to a deeper understanding of Mary.
— Bridget Retzloff is an assistant professor and the coordinator of art collections and exhibits.
