Flowers! (answer to discussion question)

Last year on the job delivering pizza, I could always tell how friendly people were likely to be based on their yards. A perfect, mowed-two-hours-ago-by-landscapers elicited little more than an automatic smile. At a ramshackle, browning, unkempt property I was lucky to even get a small tip. At a garden however, it was all smiles and sunny personalities, a good tip and maybe even an offer of a glass of water.
Flowers are one of the few common things found in nature that are intended to be looked at. Their beauty is essential to their survival. The bright colors and strong fragrance snare the senses of animals, may they be insects, hummingbirds, bats or humans needed by the plant for pollination. I think that flowers posses a special, unique kind of beauty. Of course, there are many beautiful things in the world, but few of them are alive. It’s like how you could never truly capture the true beauty of a flower in a painting, just as you couldn’t capture the true feelings evoked by a beautiful woman in a photograph. There is a stirring in us that can only arise in the presence of something alive and beautiful.
I believe that people who grow flowers are especially keen to that stirring. In my opinion, one of the things that reveals beauty in character is someone’s ability to appreciate and elicit beautiful things. As long as there is appreciation for beauty in humans, there is hope. Hope for the preservation of nature, for peace and for positive human interaction with the world and each other. I remember walking past an apartment complex in a woebegone neighborhood in a city in New Jersey, when all of the sudden my eye flew to something…window boxes! Two of them side by side, overflowing with begonias, petunias and vinca vines. It made the whole atmosphere change. Hope was breathed into an otherwise desolate landscape.
In nature, most things that are immobile are plain in color, trying to blend in with the rest of the landscape of browns and greens. Not flowers. Flowers are there, out in the open, unashamed and unafraid to stand out. I think that people should follow the flowers’ bold example.