Poosani: Flower of love and wellness

WHILE Chennai is slowly warming up to the idea of girl-date bouquets and baby's breath tied with handwritten notes, Tamil culture has long lived in an intimate and almost obsessive relationship with flowers.

- NIDHARSHANA RAJU

Here, flowers are not occasional gestures but daily companions, woven into hair, pinned behind ears, strung into garlands, and carried with love. Their colours announce mood, their fragrances linger long after they wither, and their aesthetics complete an ensemble in ways no ornament can.

Yet this obsession runs deeper than the adornment. Flowers in Tamil society have also long carried meanings of class, caste, and sanctity. Some blooms are elevated, deemed worthy only of the gods, while others are considered too ordinary or too “impure” to be worn at all. Then there exist flowers that are neither garlanded nor used for worship. They linger instead on the margins of use and symbolism.

In these margins exists the poosani poo or the pumpkin flower—a large, trumpet-shaped yellow flower—blossoming barely a foot or two above the ground in Margazhi— the month devoted to the gods.

Historian, Meenakshi Devaraj, says that the use of the pumpkin flowers in kolams during Margazhi and Thai isn't an ancient practice. “It is just a local practice that came up in the pre-modern era. In many parts of Tamil Nadu, especially Coimbatore and Tiruppur, women pluck these flowers and decorate their kolams outside their homes along with cow dung cakes.”