In a world where natural beauty comes in solid colors — the plains green, the deserts brown, the tundra white, the sky blue — flowers are a necessary and outstanding flair. They are so beautiful in fact that humans are not the only ones to appreciate them, the bumble bee being attracted by their unique color.
And yet, being colorblind, and in a now vividly colorful world, I still find flowers to be just as beautiful and unique. If not its distinct color, what makes flowers so beautiful?
From a physical point of view, they are incredibly aesthetically pleasing. Beauty tends to be scientifically inexplicable, but they are beautiful in the same way that computer generated fractals are. The profound order and grace that comes in the simple spiral of a rose or kimono of a tulip is recognizable and appreciable. Being of a patterned nature makes flowers pleasing to look at, and for things that are recognizable, we can attach meaning to.
When something has implicit meaning, it can be used as a powerful communication device. A bee needs a flower to survive, as does the flower need the bee, but humans need the flower to convey sensations and concepts that can’t be described in words. A rose for love and passion, a sunflower for respect and adoration, a daisy for innocence and purity, each being feelings that are most elegantly described with a flower.
Having meaning does not mean having beauty, but having sentiment almost certainly does, and flowers beg for our sentiments. Within a flower lies the inherent question of “what does this mean to you?” which in itself is not a beautiful question, although its answer is. In that manner, flowers bring focus and direction to those who lost it, with its metaphysical beauty.
Its beauty is hardly limited to physical characteristics, but has scientific beauty as well. Be it by scent, color, or size, countless insects and animals, pollinators, are attracted to flowers. They require the flowers for life, as do the flowers require them, for the nectar they provide is nourishing, while the ability to pollinate improves the species’s chance of survival. What appears almost artificial to the human eye is an alluring, beautiful, and tasty morsel to those pollinators, a natural beauty that was designed to appear unnatural.
If such beauty is unnatural, how then can it be so universal? There’s a famous saying that goes “to each, their own,” and yet the subjective statement that “flowers are beautiful” seems to be one size fits all.
I like to think that flowers are ultimately beautiful because they are so unique, because they stand out so much, not only to the bees and the pollinators, not only to the gardener who nurtured them from seeds, but to nature itself. For the same reason that jewelry is a prized accessory — small pieces of metal and expensive shiny rocks that emanate a refined beauty — so too are flowers beautiful, for they dot the landscape in a way that is purposeful but random, yet satisfying.
Flowers are a symbol, and as much as they represent love and kindness and forgiveness they can represent other things, but to me, they represent life.
Flowers lead, sadly, short lives, yet oddly inspirational ones, especially for being an immobile plant with no apparent similarities to a human other than the capacity to live. All parts of their short lives have been religiously idolized in literature, poetry, music, from the origin of a seed, its first roots, its first bloom, and as it begins to wilt. Life is almost best summarized in that way, for we strive to grow, to set our own roots into the world, to bloom and be happy and beautiful, and to wilt away satisfied.
And yet, flowers are beautiful still in the moment, and as one walks through a garden, the appreciation of beauty is the appreciation of life itself, for rain or shine, the flower remains, if not steadfast, unique, alive, and thus, beautiful. For, like us, they sprout, they bloom, they wilt. For, like us, they live their lives as a unique being, unnaturally natural. For, like us, they are diverse, in the shape of a mathematicians favorite fractal, or the size of a butterfly’s wing.
For, like us, flowers are beautiful in ways that cannot be described simply with words, but can be felt with a profound certainty.
When I see a flower, I do not think about what it means to me, or how it makes me feel, or even think at all, for there is beauty in experience When I look away, life goes on.
Hey Eron,
I don’t think I’ve ever put this much thought into a meaning of a flower, even in an English class. The way you talked about the flower, and about bees, and the relationship between the two was poetic, it reminds me of a mediation I’ve done before called the orange meditation. It’s basically thinking really in depth about an orange or a clementine, about the farm, and how it grew as a plant, and the farmer, and the soil, and the rocks that broke down into the soil, etc etc. I also really liked how you talked about what beauty might be to a bee, that’s something I’ve never thought about before.
That which is beautiful must also be true and good. How might a flower be either of those? What you describe is a poetic view on love, as expressed through the flower. It’s a lens we often use, and more often then not, unwittingly. Most think it’s a sweltering of emotion that usurps reason but it is because of reason that the emotions are allowed to swelter in the first place. Flowers and fruit were some of the first places we noticed the golden ratio. It can’t be denied that even without human reasoning to determine whether something is beautiful or not, a fundamental constant of nature has deemed it so that a flower’s beauty is immutable. It’s beauty is not subjective, but objective.
Your perspective on the beauty of flowers was very inspiring, knowing that you’re colorblind. Like most people, I have grown up absorbing the vivid colors of nature as if it’s the most natural thing ever. I would never be able to imagine looking at life through a different colored lens, to be deprived of that sensory imaging.
But perhaps, it could be a blessing in disguise. Because you are unable to see the color of nature, you were able to appreciate different aspects of the flowers, ones that I glance over because I am too focused on the color. The title Quintessential Beauty is such a great way to express the wide-reaching influence of flowers, ones that influence not just our physical senses, but also have a practical application in our world as an organism in our ecosystem.