I'm sure Laraine has much more to say on this (and more articulately too!) but this topic from this week's list intrigued me.

Laraine and I saw the painting linked below at the Tate Gallery in London last summer, and I bought a print of it which I have hanging in my classroom (my students think it's "freaky")

The painting is obviously based on Gertrude's report of Ophelia's death in Act IV, Scene 7

There is a willow grows aslant a brook,
That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream;
There with fantastic garlands did she come
Of crow-flowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples
That liberal shepherds give a grosser name,
But our cold maids do dead men's fingers call them:
There, on the pendent boughs her coronet weeds
Clambering to hang, an envious sliver broke;
When down her weedy trophies and herself
Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide;
And, mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up:
Which time she chanted snatches of old tunes;
As one incapable of her own distress,
Or like a creature native and indued
Unto that element: but long it could not be
Till that her garments, heavy with their drink,
Pull'd the poor wretch from her melodious lay
To muddy death.

Millais quite carefully detailed all the flowers mentioned by name in this speech in his painting.

I also think it's interesting that these flowers can all be seen as pretty wild flowers, or they can be considered invasive weeds. I was surprised to see long purples growing wild all over the place by train tracks, etc. in England last summer.

I looked around a bit to see what was the 'grosser name' for the long purples and found several. There are a few nicknames for it that are indeed grosser and which probably shouldn't be mentioned here. It is also nicknamed the 'rampant widow'. It can be a kind of orchid (I think?) which in art is associated both with sexuality and death. (Google Flowers in Art; orchids for something interesting on this)

There is other flower imagery associated with Ophelia and her situation.

In Act I, scene 3, Laertes warns Ophelia that Hamlet's favour (towards her) is:

A violet in the youth of primy nature,
Forward, not permanent, sweet, not lasting,
The perfume and suppliance of a minute; No more.

Interestingly, in Act V, scene 1, Laertes speaks of the same flower as Ophelia is laid in her grave:

Lay her i' the earth:
And from her fair and unpolluted flesh
May violets spring!

Do the violets have another suggested meaning, or is Laertes meaning to suggest of Ophelia that she did not have the chance to live a long time, that she was "sweet, not lasting"? Shakespeare uses violets in this manner elsewhere, such as in Sonnet 12:

When I behold the violet past prime,
And sable curls all silver'd o'er with white;
When lofty trees I see barren of leaves
Which erst from heat did canopy the herd,
And summer's green all girded up in sheaves
Borne on the bier with white and bristly beard,
Then of thy beauty do I question make,
That thou among the wastes of time must go,
Since sweets and beauties do themselves forsake
And die as fast as they see others grow;

...something that is beautiful but ephemeral, that reaches its peak of beauty and perfection early and then must relinquish it or let it give way? Perhaps the imagery is meant to suggest that although it is tragic that someone so young and beautiful as Ophelia has come to an untimely end, in the end all that is young and beautiful is headed in that direction anyhow? And that perhaps that even at such a young age, her life had already attained the peak of its existence?