Flowers unfold. As buds, their inner parts are hidden, secret, until they come to their full bloom and reach their peak of potential. Supernatural uses many, many visual motifs to reinforce its narrative. Flowers are one of them.
Let me take you way, way back to the beginning.
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Way back in season 1, I believe it was sadelyrate who pointed out the associate between Mary and roses.
They were first introduced subtly in Home. First on the wallpaper of Sari’s room, where it was later revealed that Mary had been residing in the closet.
In Home, we learned that Mary’s death was even more complicated than we had known before. But that just introduced more of a mystery. Why had she hung around after her death? Why did she tell Sam that she was sorry?
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Once we reached What Is and What Shall Never Be, roses were found everywhere in the Winchester family home. Mary is the only family member still living there.
Everywhere Mary went, pink and red flowers followed.
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Their last appearance associated with Mary was in In The Beginning.
All the pink and red flowers around Mary disappeared once it was revealed just how she came to be linked to the mytharc through the Yellow-Eyed Demon. ( After that, she started showing up in blue with white flowers or white with blue flowers. White=death, blue=sacrifice.)
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Mary isn’t the only character with whom flowers were associated. Mary’s flowers may have been pink and red, but bowtrunckle pointed out that blue roses were associated with Ava.
When we first meet Ava here in Hunted, she seemed one thing, but then she disappeared without a trace. Where she had gone and why were a mystery. When we met her again, she was something else entirely.
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bowtrunckle then pointed out that Sam and the other children were associated with flowers the color of Azazel’s eyes
Once the narrative started focusing on the mystery of Azazel’s children, yellow flowers showed up around Sam. Note the bedspread in The Kids Are All Right. It’s yellow damask. Damask is a fabric weave which is strongly associated with roses.
Note also that this is the episode in which Ruby truly entered Sam’s life and started Sam on the path that would ultimately end with him opening the Cage. At this point, orange and red flowers entered the mix. Red on Supernatural is usually associated with danger and demons. Orange in Supernatural is usually associated with temptation or something akin to what happens to you when you look to long into the abyss, going along with the theme that when you hunt monsters you run the danger of becoming monstrous yourself. But that’s a meta for another day.
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They appeared in front of Dean at his first visit to a crossroads in Crossroad Blues.
There they hinted that something was yet to be revealed regarding the fate that would bring Dean directly into the mytharc associated with Sam and the YED’s children.
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Red, blue, and yellow roses are associated with Mary, Ava, and Sam, respectively. The commonality between all of these three characters is that something was hidden, secret, yet to come to full bloom. Secrets surrounded Mary. How did she know the Yellow Eyed Demon? Just what was she? Much about her was hidden and not revealed until the 4th season. Ava had a hidden potential, too. Who knew that that sweet and quirky secretary from Peoria would develop into a manipulative, cold-blooded murderer. Sam, too, had his hidden aspect, that deep mystery that ran through the first five seasons of what had Azazel done to Sam and why.
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At first flowers followed along behind characters. Then they started appearing along the key points of the mysteries associated with the primary mytharc of the narrative.
For example, in the early scenes in Croatoan, where they appeared before the reveal of the virus and Sam’s immunity.
A red rosebush made an incongruous appearance in the window behind both Sam and Dean in Lazarus Rising, where both brothers had something they were hiding.
They appeared in Changing Channels. Once Dr. Sexy morphed into The Trickster and we learned his agenda related to the main mytharc, we didn’t see them again.
The flower color combinations were a hint, too, of The Trickster’s true nature. They’re blue and yellow, a color combination associated with angels (perhaps first introduced by Bowtrunckle?). But, that, too, is another meta for another day.
Flowers appeared in Jump the Shark prior to the reveal that Adam and his mother were long dead. Later, Adam too entered the mytharc by virtue of being John’s son.
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Once season 5 ended Kripke’s grand mytharc, flowers still make their appearance and signal that things aren’t quite what they seem, that something is yet to be revealed.
For example, they appear in the last scene when Dean and Sam part ways in Exile on Main Street, presaging that reveal that was Soulless Sam in season 6.
Blue and yellow (angelic) and orange (temptation to a long slow fall) flowers appear around Castiel once the story of Season 6 hints at just what’s been going on in heaven. At the very point in The Man Who Would Be King that Castiel expresses grave doubts, their presence hints at more happening than meets the eye.
Even Crowley gets in on the act. Here he is in First Born putting the first step of his hidden agenda into play, tempting Dean to follow him to Cain.
White (death) and red (demons, danger) flowers litter the mansion in Ask Jeeves, an episode all about fakers and liars and the things that they hide.
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Even now, flowers hint at more to come:
Here we have Claire in Things We Left Behind and her tattoo. The red (demons, danger) rose, on the same arm as Dean’s Mark, and first presented in an episode in which Claire is clearly placed in parallel to Dean lay down some pretty strong hints that there is much more to be revealed about the role that she will play.
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And here I shall leave you with the now infamous scene from Things We Left Behind in which Dean and Sam tell a tall tale in which the shadow of their father looms large.
I can only wonder what next is to be revealed about John Winchester and the effects of his parenting.
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Hearseeno 