July Birth Flower: Larkspur and Water Lily

Larkspur sounds less like a flower and more like a tragic Victorian condition. So for July, we sculpted the water lily instead — a serene perfectionist that manages to look effortlessly ethereal while rising out of literal mud, which is honestly the exact level of composure I aspire to every summer.

What is the July birth flower?

July has two birth flowers: the larkspur, July's first flower, standing for positivity and an open heart, and the water lily, its second — the one Chive makes in ceramic.

July couldn't settle on just one birth flower, which makes sense given that anyone born in July is usually too busy sweating through their clothing to agree on anything. Instead, tradition handed us two options: the larkspur, a neurotic stalk, and the water lily, an aquatic diva that refuses to live in normal dirt. It is a classic July dilemma: do you want the towering poison hazard that falls over if you sneeze, or the floating perfectionist sitting on top of pond scum?

Larkspur — July's first birth flower

The larkspur (Delphinium) is July's first birth flower — tall spikes in blue, purple, pink, and white, a member of the buttercup family, and seriously toxic to livestock.

Larkspur belongs to the buttercup family, though it behaves more like a desperate theater major demanding constant, exhausting attention. It shoots up over your head — an absurd height for a flower — and instantly wilts if you miss a single watering. But its true charm lies in its biology: larkspur is packed with toxic alkaloids, compounds capable of paralyzing cattle. It is the only birthday bloom on the market that doubles as a biological weapon. Giving someone a bouquet of larkspur is basically saying, "Happy Birthday, I love you, and if a cow wanders into your kitchen, it's dead."

Water lily — July's second birth flower

The water lily (Nymphaea) is July's second birth flower and the one Chive makes in ceramic — a floating aquatic flower that opens by day, closes at dusk, and stands for purity and rebirth.

The water lily, or Nymphaea, is for people who look at the frantic drama of everyday life and think, No thank you, I'll be under this log. Anchored deep in the pitch-black, oxygen-deprived mud at the bottom of ponds, it floats serenely on the surface, opening its petals each morning for the sun and closing them tightly at dusk like a polite curtain. It doesn't scream for help, and it certainly doesn't poison livestock. It simply stays put, marinating in mud, which incidentally is also my exact strategy for surviving family gatherings.

July birth flower meaning

July birth flower meanings: positivity, lightheartedness, and an open heart for the larkspur; purity, majesty, and rebirth for the water lily.

Leave it to the Victorians — a people famously accused of covering piano legs to prevent lustful thoughts — to assign crippling emotional baggage to plants. According to floriography, larkspur signifies an "open heart" and "lightheartedness," which feels like a massive PR cover-up for a weed that slaughters farm animals. The water lily stands for purity, majesty, and rebirth. It is the ultimate passive-aggressive flex: floating immaculate over rotting debris while radiating a level of spiritual composure that makes everyone else feel slightly filthy.

What is a water lily?

A water lily is a floating aquatic flowering plant (family Nymphaeaceae) with thick, waxy, notched leaves resting on the surface — each flower lasts three to five days, opening by day and closing at night.

Botanically, a water lily is an evolutionary masterpiece. The famous self-cleaning leaf trick — microscopic bumps, dirt rolling right off — actually belongs to its overachieving cousin, the lotus; the water lily settles for thick, waxy, water-shedding leaves and an air of total unbotheredness. It lives in literal sludge and emerges looking spotless anyway. The catch? Real water lily flowers last three to five days before collapsing into a gray, gelatinous slime that smells like swamp gas. Sculpted clay water lilies, however, are fired in a kiln at 2,200°F until the clay vitrifies into stone, capturing that pristine, unbothered posture forever while completely skipping the phase where they melt into pond rot.

The July Birth Flower at Chive

This is our favorite flower to make as ceramicists, and it's not close. Think about it: the water lily is one of the only flowers we sculpt that isn't perfectly symmetrical, that doesn't follow any tidy Fibonacci logic, that doesn't insist on looking the same twice. It can be any size. It can be any color. It gets to just be a shape we felt like making that day, which is an enormous relief after months of flowers that demand precise petal counts and mathematically correct spirals. There's a reason this is the best-selling flower we make. Give people something that isn't trying to be perfect, and it turns out they recognize themselves in it immediately.

We make the July birth flower in ceramic — the water lily, shaped by hand, petal by petal, without molds, in the form its month decided. It hangs from a keyhole in the back or sits on a shelf, ships gift-ready in a gift box, and holds July's whole assignment — the composure, the rebirth — without asking for a pond.

We've made a lot of flowers here that follow rules — petal counts that have to land a certain way, spirals that have to spiral correctly, symmetry that has to actually be symmetrical or the whole piece looks wrong. The water lily doesn't ask any of that of us. It can look slightly different every single time and nobody notices, because the whole point of the flower is that it's just floating there, unbothered, doing its own thing. That's probably why it outsells everything else we make. People don't want more perfection in their life. They want the thing that's already fine exactly as it is.