The Pointlessness of Flowers

This would probably be a most unromantic posting for Valentine Day: Flowers - what is the point? "I thought of myself as a young farmer now and had no time for anything so frivolous as a flower." - Pollan (2002).

“Humans, like bees, are drawn instinctively to flowers. It’s obvious what good it does bees to be born liking flowers, but what conceivable benefit could such a predilection offer people?”

It is possible to be indifferent to flowers: Do you know that Africans seldom grow domesticated flowers, and flowers imagery seldom shows up in African art or religion. Apparently when Africans speak or write about flowers, it is usually with an eye to the promise of fruit rather than the thing itself. Jack Goody, an English anthropologist, offers two possible explanations for the absence of flowers in Africa, one economic, the other ecological.
The economic explanation is that people can’t afford to pay attention to flowers until they have enough to eat; a well-developed culture of flowers is a luxury that most African historically has not been able to support. The other explanation is that the ecology of Arica doesn’t offer a lot of flowers, or at least not a lot of the showy ones. Relatively few of the world’s domesticated flowers have come from Africa… what flowers one does encounter on the savanna, for example, tend to bloom briefly and then vanish for the duration of the dry season. However, as Goody points out, Africans quickly adopted a culture of flowers wherever others introduced it.

To judge from my own experience, boys of a certain age couldn’t care less about flowers. For me, fruits and vegetables were the only things to grow, even those vegetables you couldn’t pay me to eat. I approached gardening as a form of alchemy, transforming seeds and soil and water and sunlight into things of value…

To me then (even now), beauty was the breath-catching sight of a glossy bell pepper hanging like a Christmas ornament, or a watermelon nested in a tangle of vines.

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Flowers were all right if you had the space, but what was the point?

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The flowers I welcomed into my garden were precisely the ones that had a point, that foretold the fruit to come: the pretty white-and-yellow button of a strawberry blossom (right photo) that soon would swell and redden, the ungainly yellow trumpet that heralded the zucchini’s coming.

The other kind, flowers for flowers’ sake, seemed to me the flimsiest of things, barely a step up from leaves, which I also deemed of little value; neither achieved the sheer existential heft of a tomato or cucumber. Where do I have the time for anything so frivolous as a flower?

photo: the cool, scentless, and somewhat aloof tulip
The only time I liked tulips was right before they opened, when the flower still formed a closed capsule that resembled some sort of marvelous, weighted fruit. But the day the petals flexed, the mystery drained out of them, leaving behind what to me seemed a weak, papery insubstantiality.

But then, I was ten. What did I know about beauty?

source: Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire