The Inverse of Death

I visited an American acquaintance in Richmond back in '66 - one of the few of my American acquaintances who was still alive then. Out back, his wife kept a greenhouse and grew some of the most vividly coloured flowers I've seen outside the jungle. When it was built, just after the war, glaziers were charging outlandishly ridiculous prices, and you certainly couldn't pay them in Confederate dollars. He found a storehouse full of daguerreotype glass plates - photographs of the war that no one wanted to be reminded of. He build his greenhouse with these plates - images of death in negative. There was something about that idea - the sun slowly fading those bodies of boys in ditches and trenches and filtering through to hothouse flowers - that has always stuck with me. It's poetic, I guess, if you go for that sort of thing.

Not sure I would wear one of those flowers, though.