A Step by Step Guide to Enjoying Flowers

First Blush

Everyone seems to enjoy flowers right from the start.  Flowers help us celebrate our most precious moments. They communicate our love on special occasions.  And lessen our sorrow during times of sadness.  This universal appeal is not an accident.  Flowers were designed to attract and please, although not specifically we human beings.  Flowers  evolved to attract anyone that passes by through beauty, trickery, and bribery.  And for this hospitality the flower expects its guest to take a gift of pollen and carry it to the next welcoming flower.  This hospitality ritual is the dance of life for flowers.

The love of flowers is universal among people. We are simply responding to nature’s design and joining the many who ensure there will always be flowers.

Understanding

Next some of us take a closer look.  Now the flower begins to engage our analyzing brain.  We begin to see all sorts of “stuff” that was not apparent at first.  We find enchanting color combinations, landing platforms with guide “lights”, tentacles with shoe pads, gold dust, glistening hairs, and seemingly infinite arrangements of similar but different parts.

Once fascinated, we need to understand.  So we turn to books. We find that all flowers belong to a particular family that derives from common parents somewhere back in the evolutionary chain of events.  And that there are lots of names for flowers but only one official in Latin.  Special words are used to describe flowers and unique libraries exist to record all that is known.  And there are over 250,000 flowers with more yet to be discovered!

Further learning teaches us that all life forms depend on plants as the major source of energy.  They alone possess the magic formula that transforms sunlight, with help from water and carbon dioxide, into food. We could not live without them.

Our mind begins to fill with seemingly endless knowledge.  We could go on learning forever.  What fun!

Joy

The final phase is the most precious. It incorporates but transcends all the previous stages.  You return to the wonder of the beginning stage.  You see all that you discovered in the digging stage, but you do not analyze.  You simply see the whole and enjoy its beauty.

Your curiosity rekindles as you note, without trying, a unique color, a dazzling design, an intricate pattern, or a flow of petals.  Complexity is revealed and enjoyed without effort.  And you are happy.  You smile.