The Tree of Life at Holy Cross Priory

One of the main features of the Requiem Mass at Holy Cross was a large sculpture installed in the church for the occasion. It was installed by Neill Strain, a renowned floral designer from London.

The white rose was seen everywhere in Leicester during this week.

It is a heraldic symbol goes back to Edmund of Langley, the first Duke of York, in the 14th Century. The Yorkist rose is white, reflecting the Christian liturgical symbolism of light, innocence, purity, joy, and glory. Richard III was the last Yorkist king of England.

Planta Genista

Richard's family name was Plantagenet, which in Medieval Latin is Planta Genista, the common broom plant. The family dated from 1126 with Geoffrey V of Anjou, another of my ancestors, and was held by the English ruling family from 1154 to 1485, ending with Richard III. The Plantagenets were the most successful ruling house in England, passing the crown through 14 kings.

The Tree of Life sculpture was quite impressive. It was composed of 2,000 Avalanche roses on branches, fastened into little glass vials full of water. There were little genista flowers intermingled with the roses surrounding the trunk at the bottom of the sculpture, almost in a rectangular grave shape.

When I first saw the Tree, I was reminded of a feeling of coldness, with the glass vials resembling icicles. But looking more closely at it, I could see the individual roses blooming all over it, giving it an ethereal appearance, delicate and brittle yet alive.

I thought of several things looking at the Tree:

• Richard's new grave that we had come to create and celebrate  
• Robert Herrick's garden blooming over Richard's original grave years after the Greyfriars Monastery was gone
• Songs and stories of beautiful flowering plants rising up out of graves as a reference to the Resurrection of Christ, life coming from death
• And, oddly enough, the White Tree of Gondor in Return of the King by J.R.R. Tolkien

Maybe that last allusion isn't totally strange and unexpected. Although it had been dead for many years, Aragorn and Gandalf find a sapling of the White Tree and plant it in the Court of the Fountain, where it grows and blooms to bring hope and courage to Middle Earth. In the movie version, the blooming is even more dramatic as the dead tree comes back to life and blooms, signaling the return of the King and peace again to the residents of Gondor. 

In this case a King has also been returned to us--a real, historical man who has become legendary to the many students of history who have searched for him for so long.

I also see hope and courage in this sculptural Tree.

Every day we learn more about Richard as a man and King and find that he was not like the character out of Shakespeare but a man of courage and conviction.

Other of life's mysteries, lost in time for centuries, can be rediscovered and change how we think about our past and our present. We just need to keep digging.