Mum for Moms

Chrysanthemums are colorful, low maintenance, easily available for relatively low price, so they have a few things going for them. Gift your mom a mum on her birthday. Every month has a certain flower (or two) that represent it, and for November, the mum is the official flower. They’re a hardy flower that can survive into the chillier months, Chrysanthemums are often associated with the autumn season, and the reason they’re the bloom that represents November birthdays.

Originating from China in the 5th century, the mums have invaded the rest of the world since the 17th century. But mums have allegedly been cultivated as a flowering herb — believed to hold the power of life — for medicine in China for couple thousand years before that, but only the nobility were permitted to grow them. Then from China, migrating Buddhist monks are said to have brought the Chrysanthemum to Japan. The Chrysanthemum quickly becomes Japan’s national flower, although most people would think of the cherry blossoms or the Sakura instead as Japan’s national flower.

The word chrysanthemum comes from Greek words meaning gold flower. That’s because when mums were first cultivated, they initially only grew in golden yellow hues.

Hybridizers have been long at work evolving the original small daisy-like golden-yellow flowers to one of varying sizes and colors.

Now, the blooms come in yellows and bronzes to pinks and burgundy, and while most are unitone, a few have multi-colors or varying shades and tones of a color. Mums have come a long way, in origin, looks, habits, and types.

In the fall of 1911, the American British author and novelist of literary realism and literary modernism, Henry James, once wrote to his friend Isabella Stewart Gardner (an avid plant collector and gardener): 

An autumn gale is blowing & spattering about me here as I write and the wind sounds like great guns in my old chimneys. But my lawn is as lustrous as your finest emerald… & I have just been out to look at the private chrysanthemum show in my greenhouse—sighing with baffled pride that it can’t be public. 

Of course, Chrysanthemums are out in the public now. They’re all over people’s home gardens and the public parks. Mums are standouts in Fall, blooming beautifully while the rest of the garden has started to sleep or get ready to hibernate for the coming wintry months.

Just as they did hundreds of years ago, Chrysanthemums continue to enchant gardeners each autumn. Your mom, whether a gardener or not, would love to get Chrysanthemum on her birthday this November.