Flowers in the City
Vibrant colours shining in the drab concrete city, shouting "I am here, I'm alive, I'm a conscious being in the urban cage" on behalf of the urban gardener restricted to just a balcony. There's a hooligan aspect to the uncontrolled vivacity of some of the free-growing plants before the first pruning, also the colour contrast and the shape contrast, the tangled vines and exuberant flowers contrast with the starkly rectilinear concrete architecture following the models of Le Corbusier.
Marseille's nineteenth century architecture, following Haussmman's models for the grand rues, is less brutal than but in the end is similarly stifling to individuality and creativity, representing as it does here in Marseille, the political aspirations and commercial successes of colonial France.
Peoples' choice of flowers is also interesting: the unconditionally exuberant trumpet vines (orange). The blue/purple flowers of convolvulus, that would be called Bindweed in the UK and dreaded by gardeners for its invasive and tenacious nature, is valued here for its rampant colonisation of almost any habitat!
The apparently gregarious Lauriers (in white, pink and crimson pink) whose abundance as regimented municipal plantings undermines their native hooliganism.
Lavender planted in a recycled dustbin suggesting a more timid resident yearning in the direction of traditional Provence rather than tribal exhibitionism.
The flowers seek the sun and reward us with colour; their neighbours, the grey satellite dishes, seek much the same aspect but their colours appear on a screen indoors, an abstraction courtesy of technology.
