Our Favorite Feng Shui Flowers
Photo by Gérôme Bruneau on Unsplash
Flowers are a great way to shift the qi of your space, and we often recommend them as feng shui adjustments. Professor Lin Yun, who brought BTB feng shui to the West, taught our teachers that flowers are very helpful in unsticking things that may be stuck. Fragrant flowers are especially effective in creating energetic shifts; just think of the way a scent can evoke powerful memories and feelings.
Overall, flowers represent joy and beauty. As feng shui practitioners, beauty is something that we try to cultivate. We aren’t necessarily looking at a space from a design perspective, but we do often use feng shui techniques intentionally and creatively to create beauty when we can. Flowers offer an easy way to do this since they are naturally so beautiful.
Plants vs Flowers
You’ve probably also heard us talk about working with plants in feng shui, but cut flowers have different applications. Plants are continually growing and thriving, but a flower that has been cut from a plant is no longer growing. It’s already in a state of fading and decay.
This is one of the reasons we’ve heard from many people that they’re resistant to buying cut flowers. However, the fleeting nature of flowers offers us an opportunity to embrace impermanence. Flowers aren’t meant to last forever; once they’ve attracted pollinators, they become a seed that will eventually grow and bloom again. This can be a powerful lesson, because when we want things to last forever, we really start to create difficulty and suffering for ourselves.
Feng shui is a practice that can help us embrace being with the flow of life. “Feng shui” means “wind” and “water”, and both of these things are always moving. Without movement, there would be no wind, and water would be stagnant and unhealthy. Fresh flowers can be a reminder of the constant change we experience as living beings.
How to Work with Flowers in Feng Shui
Any freshly cut flowers can bring a feng shui boost to your home. If fresh flowers aren’t available, you can also connect to the flower you’re feeling drawn to by exploring floral teas or essential oils, flower essences, or even artwork that includes flowers. In most cases, we wouldn’t recommend fake flowers that are trying to imitate live ones.
You can work with any type of flower that resonates with you, and you can also consider the symbolism of certain blooms when choosing which flowers to work with. In this post, we’re going to dive deeper into some of the flowers that Professor Lin Yun talked about and what they represent in feng shui.
Our Favorite Flowers for Love and Romance
One of our favorite flowers for love and romance is the classic rose. Roses have gorgeous buds that open into layers of soft, silky petals, and they also have stems lined with thorns. This is a reminder that even in difficult times there is still beauty. When you get your partner roses, you are of course getting them a beautiful bouquet, but you’re also letting them know that all of the challenges you may encounter together are worth it, because they’re just thorns on the way to a beautiful bloom.
Orchids are another flower that’s connected to love and romance in feng shui. You may be more familiar with orchids as a potted plant, but you can also find them as cut flowers. As feng shui practitioners, we often recommend an orchid when someone wants to invite in a charming, graceful partner. Orchids are also considered a flower of perfection because of their varied and elegant blooms, and Confucius said that the orchid is symbolic of the perfect human. Additionally, orchids can represent fertility because of the shapes of the flower and bulb.
Our Favorite Flowers for Strength and Longevity
Sunflowers represent power, strength, and loyalty. Not only do sunflowers look like the sun, but their full-time job is to seek sunlight and absorb its energy. Their connection to loyalty comes from the fact that these blooms are dedicated followers of the sun, always turning to face it throughout the day. Bringing freshly cut sunflowers into your home is a great way to bring in the powerful yang energy of the sun.
Plum blossom is one of the first flowers that appears in the spring, bringing hope after a long, cold winter. These beautiful, fleeting blossoms are revered in Asian culture. The element connected to winter is water, which has the qualities of cold and silence. When plum trees start to bloom as winter comes to a close, their flowers remind us of spring and new beginnings.
Another important flower in Asian culture is the chrysanthemum. Chrysanthemums are connected to longevity because they last a long time in the garden and as cut flowers. They are also connected to success, abundance and wellbeing. Chrysanthemum tea is associated with health and considered a cooling flower, so it can be a great choice to help cool the body during the hot summer months.
Our Favorite Flowers for Luck and Good Fortune
Peonies represent prosperity, luck, honor, and elegance. Simply looking at a peony can help you understand its connection to opulence and abundance: each tiny peony bud grows exponentially to become a full, layered, lush bloom. In China, the peony is known as the king of flowers, and it is also associated with beauty, femininity, and love. If you are lucky enough to bring a bouquet of fresh peonies into your home, you know that it can make you feel like royalty! Along with chrysanthemum and plum blossom, peonies are often depicted in Asian art.
Narcissus is another symbol of good fate and good fortune. Similar to the plum blossom, it’s one of the first flowers to bloom in the spring. Seeing these early spring blooms is an indication that the seasons are really starting to shift, which explains narcissus’ connection to hope and new growth. These flowers are traditionally grown for Lunar New Year as a symbol of good luck. Narcissus can be cultivated in the garden or brought into your home to offer a promise of spring and new beginnings.
We hope this post helps you give yourself permission to indulge in fresh flowers as often as you can, because there is a lot to learn from them! You don’t have to spend a lot of money on them, either — even a single flower from your front yard can be meaningful.