Lavender as a Symbol of Ancestry and Legacy in Sky Full of Elephants

What Lavender Is in the Story: A Sensory Thread Through Memory and Loss

Lavender first appears as a literal plant in Sidney’s family garden. In Chapter 2, Sidney’s mother has planted lavender bushes in rows, a deliberate act of remembrance. The garden is a living monument to her maternal line: her grandmother planted lavender, and her grandmother before her, all the way back to the first Irishwoman who brought the plant to American shores and sold it in bushels to support her family. For Sidney’s mother, the garden is a daily reminder of the struggle and endurance of her forebears. The scent of lavender also becomes a sensory marker of the catastrophic event that opens the novel—as Sidney’s family walks into the lake, the air smells “sweetly of lavender, but also of smoke.” That juxtaposition of sweetness and destruction sets the tone for how lavender will function throughout the book: as a link to heritage that is both beautiful and painful.

Lavender recurs in Charlie’s dream in Chapter 3. He wakes from a dream “of lavender” that feels less like a dream and more like a melancholy ferry across the night. The dream arrives right after he receives a phone call from a young woman who may be his daughter, and it seems to pull him toward her. Charlie does not consciously connect the lavender to Sidney at first, but the image lingers as he maps his route to Wisconsin. The dream is a premonition of connection, a sensory echo of the garden Sidney’s mother tended.

The most explicit transformation of lavender occurs in Chapter 30, when Sidney, sleeping in a field with her peers, wakes to see her mother picking lavender. But when her mother turns, she becomes a dark-skinned woman in rags, and the lavender becomes cotton. The vision expands to include other women and children, and a cattle bell clangs in the distance. Sidney understands that the lavender of her mother’s garden is a sanitized version of a deeper, more painful ancestry—one that includes enslavement. The shift from lavender to cotton is a shift from a romanticized European heritage to the brutal reality of African American roots.

Finally, in Chapter 40, Sidney, now driving west, stops at a Walmart and picks up “air fresheners that smelled like lavender.” This is a mundane, commercial echo of the plant. She chooses it almost unconsciously, as if carrying a piece of her mother’s garden with her. The air freshener is a cheap, mass-produced substitute for the living plant, but it still carries the scent that ties her to her family and to the visions she has experienced.

How the Meaning of Lavender Changes Across the Novel

Lavender begins as a symbol of personal, matrilineal heritage. In Sidney’s mother’s telling, the plant connects her to a specific line of Irish women who used it to build a life in America. This is a story of resilience and self-sufficiency—the first woman “brought lavender, planted it, and sold it in bushels as her only source of income.” The garden is a deliberate act of memory, a way to honor the struggle of those who came before.

But the meaning shifts when Sidney encounters the vision in the field. The lavender that her mother picks becomes cotton, and the woman who picks it is not Irish but African, dressed in rags, surrounded by other enslaved people. This transformation reveals that the lavender garden, as her mother understood it, was incomplete. It celebrated a European ancestor while obscuring the African ancestors who were also part of Sidney’s lineage. The lavender-to-cotton shift forces Sidney to confront the “unsolvable conflict” of her mixed heritage—the Irish and the African strands that both flow through her blood.

By the time Sidney picks up the lavender air freshener, the symbol has become something she can carry with her, but it is also diminished. The air freshener is a mass-produced object, a faint echo of the living plant. Yet it still holds emotional weight: Sidney chooses it deliberately, as if to keep her mother’s memory close. The scent is a portable reminder of home, even as she drives toward an uncertain future.

Character Connections: Sidney, Charlie, and the Mothers

For Sidney, lavender is initially a background detail of her childhood—the garden her mother tended, the smell that lingers after her family drowns. But the vision in the field transforms her understanding of what that garden meant. She realizes that her mother’s lavender was a way of claiming a heritage that was only partially true. The vision forces Sidney to acknowledge the African ancestors her mother’s story omitted. This is a crucial step in her identity redefinition after the collapse of racial hierarchy. She must reconcile the two sides of her ancestry—the Irish immigrant and the enslaved African—to understand who she is.

For Charlie, lavender appears as a dream, a sensory premonition that draws him toward Sidney. He does not know why the dream feels significant, but it sets him on a journey that becomes a reckoning with his own past. Charlie’s connection to lavender is indirect—he never sees the garden—but the dream links him to Sidney’s world. It is a reminder that he is part of a lineage he has been cut off from, both by prison and by his absence from Sidney’s life. The dream is a call to fatherhood as a reckoning with the past.

Sidney’s mother, though unnamed in the outline, is the originator of the lavender garden. Her act of planting it is an act of resistance against forgetting. She tells Sidney “countless times” about the first Irishwoman, making the garden a pedagogical tool. But her story is incomplete, and the vision in the field corrects it. The mother’s lavender is a partial truth, and Sidney must move beyond it to find a fuller understanding of her roots.

Thematic Connections: Ancestry, Legacy, and the Recovery of Knowledge

Lavender is a concrete symbol of ancestry and legacy. It is a plant that is passed down through generations, a living link to the past. But the novel complicates this legacy by showing that ancestry is not a single, clean line. Sidney’s mother’s lavender celebrates one ancestor while ignoring others. The vision in the field forces Sidney to see the full picture, including the trauma of enslavement. This aligns with the theme of the recovery of pre-colonial African knowledge, as Sidney must look beyond the European narrative her mother inherited to find the African roots that were suppressed.

Lavender also connects to the theme of alternative social orders and the rejection of inherited systems. The garden is a microcosm of a family’s attempt to create meaning outside of dominant culture. But the novel suggests that such attempts can be incomplete if they ignore the full complexity of history. Sidney’s journey is partly about moving beyond the inherited story of her mother’s lavender to a more honest reckoning with her ancestry.

Finally, lavender ties into the theme of the ethics of engineered collective healing. The machine that Hosea builds is designed to release centuries of grief, and lavender appears in the context of that grief—the smell of the garden mixes with smoke on the day of the event, and Sidney’s vision of cotton is a direct encounter with ancestral trauma. Lavender is a sensory reminder that healing cannot happen without confronting the past.

Study Questions and Answers

1. How does lavender function as a symbol of both personal and collective memory in the novel?

Lavender first represents Sidney’s personal family memory—her mother’s garden, the Irish ancestor who sold it. But as the novel progresses, it expands to encompass collective African American memory. In the vision in Chapter 30, lavender becomes cotton, linking Sidney’s personal heritage to the larger history of enslavement. The scent that lingers after the event—mixing with smoke—becomes a sensory trigger for the collective trauma of the event itself. Thus, lavender moves from a private symbol to a public one, connecting individual experience to shared history.

2. What does the transformation of lavender into cotton in Sidney’s vision reveal about her understanding of her ancestry?

The transformation reveals that Sidney’s mother’s story of the lavender garden was incomplete. It celebrated a European ancestor while omitting the African ancestors who were also part of Sidney’s lineage. The vision forces Sidney to confront the “unsolvable conflict” of her mixed heritage—the Irish and the African strands that both flow through her blood. It is a moment of reckoning that challenges the sanitized version of her family history and pushes her toward a more honest understanding of her roots.

3. How does Charlie’s dream of lavender connect him to Sidney and to his own past?

Charlie’s dream of lavender occurs immediately after he receives a phone call from a young woman who may be his daughter. The dream is a sensory premonition that draws him toward her, even though he does not consciously connect it to Sidney. It also connects him to his own past, as he reflects on the letter from prison and the daughter he never knew. The dream acts as a bridge between Charlie and Sidney, suggesting that even though he has been absent, he is still part of a lineage that includes her.

4. Why does Sidney choose lavender air fresheners in the Walmart, and what does this choice signify?

Sidney chooses the air fresheners almost unconsciously, as if carrying a piece of her mother’s garden with her. The air freshener is a mass-produced, commercial substitute for the living plant, but it still carries the scent that ties her to her family and to the visions she has experienced. The choice signifies that Sidney is carrying her heritage with her, even as she drives toward an uncertain future. It is a way of keeping her mother’s memory close, even as she moves beyond the incomplete story that garden represented.