What's That Flower Doing in My Garden?

Although I know little about flowers, being something of an urban cement dweller, I do love them.I have never tended a garden, although my mother and both my sons do quite well. And I love to walk through flower gardens and for years have a magnificent bouquet delivered to my office every week.So why am I writing about flowers? Just to praise them?Bees, of course, have a critical symbiotic relationship with flowers. They need the nectar for nutrition and the many supporting flowers produce vegetables that humans ingest and rely on. So the necessity for pollinating flowers joins with the necessity for the existence of bees. Colony collapse disorder, causing massive bee hive death, is now rising to more than twice the normal rate. Since honey bees perform some level of pollination of nearly 75% of all plant species directly used for human food worldwide, the loss of bees impacts human nutrition. Bees are very choosy about which flowers they favor and flowering plants adapt methods to keep bees attracted, a remarkable interplay between flora and fauna.But why do I love flowers? Yes, they are a form of eye candy. Yes some of them have gorgeous scents. Yes they beautify a garden or a dinner table or a woman's hair, chest, wrist, or a man's lapel buttonhole. My love of flowers relates to how I come upon them and how they come to me..

"Independently, in their own sphere of existence and influence, flowers achieve a kind of emblematic landscape."

.My passion for flowers dates back to the time, having just completed residency training, I opened my office and began seeing patients, I soon felt visually suffocated there. The two windows gave onto an ugly inner courtyard, a stark view of gray brick walls and blank windows. So I began visiting a nearby flower shop. Every week I would assemble a grouping of flowers. I drew on the inspiration from some years back, where at my hair cutter's little shop I could not help admiring the spectacular flower arrangements.These changed radically every time I returned there. The flowers were displayed in unusual containers: narrow glass vases; odd crockery rectangles; even stones. And the flowers were wildly dispersed, placed around bent, shaped leaves and small branches laid along  complimentary, geometrically acute angles. This I soon discovered was the work of an extraordinary artist, a practitioner of the ancient Japanese art of Ikebana flower arrangement.But I realize that my response is engineered by the culture around me, a culture that has woven a multifarious cult of the cut flower.Within these various cults the flower exercises almost divine power. For a birthday celebration honoring my older son, that Ikebana expert announced that the occasion demanded a profusion of red flowers, signaling his maleness. About four dozen very long stem roses appeared clustered in an enormous blue vase.Hyacinth is the flower most associated with spring, the time of rebirth,  its ancient symbolic meaning. It is the flower featured in the Persian new year celebration held at the spring equinox.The lily is the potent Easter flower. Said to represent amiability, purity, love, unity, transience, and femininity, the lily is favored at births, weddings, funerals and, of course, at Easter.The rose, in the West, is the flower of romance.The poinsettia, a gift from the Aztecs via later Mexican Christian heritage, has become the universal flower of Christmas.The penchant for combining flowers in all manner of arrangements has generated the idea of the bouquet. Some are small, some expansively displayed in huge varietal arrays, some created for home or hospital, some grandly elaborated for great corporate foyers or vast public lobbies.Some are woven together to be worn as adornment, an ancient—probably even pre-historic—practice much like the styling of hair.Head hair, unlike body hair, grows ceaselessly on humans. This allows for the possibilities of proliferative hair creations. Various objects and jewels, and especially flowers, are used—always have been used—to fashion elaborate coiffures on every continent, in every human era.Flowers in one's hair enhance and exemplify not just beauty, but also social status, privilege, public honor, marital eligibility, and simple ornamentation.Independently, in their own sphere of existence and influence, flowers achieve a kind of emblematic landscape. They come to express both the startling freshness of youthful beauty as well as its innate fragility, its fatal fate, it's very brief doomed life.Take a flower home with you tonight.