But though poets, and particularly German poets, ranged widely through the fields in their search for blossoms which by their beauty or by their healing virtues were fit to symbolize the Virgin, the early artists painted very few. In those mystical Enclosed Gardens which so charmed the Germans of the fifteenth century, only a few plants appear. The lily, which is often the lily of the valley, the rose, the violet, and the strawberry, are the most usual. Later the iris, the royal lily, was added, and sometimes the seven-blossomed columbine. Occasionally in Italy the jasmine and the daisy are also found in the vase beside her, but all other flowers of the garden and field, the tulip, anemone, ranunculus, primrose, daffodil, dahlia, etc., were rigidly excluded. It will be noticed that, with the exception of the rose, all the flowers of the Virgin are white or blue, her own colours. An exception, which is unique, is the golden sunflower springing from her halo on a twelfth-century window in the Church of St Rémi at Reims, and even that is not exclusively hers, since Saint John, on the other side, bears the same flower. White and blue are the two colours which are held most sacred in the Christian Church. White, symbol of the Supreme Being and of the Eternal Truth, is used in the ornaments for the feast of Our Lord and of the Virgin, for it announces loving-kindness, virginity and charity.[247] Blue is the symbol of chastity, innocence and candour. Only one yellow flower is used symbolically, and that only in scenes from the Passion, by artists of the early Flemish and German schools. It is the dandelion, and its significance is, apparently, bitterness of grief. The white lily, which symbolizes purity, is found chiefly in pictures of the Annunciation, but it has been introduced in many other scenes from the life of the Virgin. In the first exhibited painting by Rossetti, entitled ‘The Girlhood of Mary Virgin,’[248] the Virgin, in grey robes, is seated at a curiously-shaped frame embroidering a white lily upon a ground of red material. The flower she is copying grows in a vase beside her and an angel with rose-coloured wings waters it. St Anne stands near, and in the background Joachim trims a trellised vine upon which the Holy Dove is perched. In the ‘_Ecce Ancilla Domini_’[249] of Rossetti, this same strip of embroidery, now finished, hangs beside the bed. The older artists paint no lily in the early scenes of the Virgin’s life; it first appears at the Annunciation, where it was used so repeatedly that it became in itself the symbol of the miraculous birth of Our Lord. Giotto brings it forward in the ‘Visitation.’[250] Elizabeth, hurrying from the house to meet the Virgin, passes beneath a portico on which blooms a large vase of lilies.