On flowers

Preface

 This is the first in my "botany" series of short-essays. It was written as an introduction to a lesson on flowers as part of the Introduction to Botany lab I was the instructor for at UNBSJ back in 2011. Enjoy!

On flowers –

 A favourite joke of botanists when teaching about flowers is to poke fun at our human tendency to convey so much meaning by the passing of plant reproductive organs from one person to the next.  And yet, despite the dozens of students who have giggled along with them at the apparent silliness of the whole thing, we still grow, pick, buy, and sell flowers on a regular basis.  We give or receive flowers when we are sick, when we accomplish something important, when we are in love – in a way, the passing of flowers represents a language unto itself, one that has been used since before the time of the ancient Greeks – but why do we give flowers? 

There’s no question that many flowers are beautiful; they have evolved as the perfect organs of attraction.  Vibrant purples, pinks, oranges, yellows, and reds show up against a sea of green leaves like little bulls-eyes on a target for insect and avian pollinators.  The sweet fragrances dance through the air to tickle our noses just as surely as they do the chemoreceptive antennae of a honey-bee.  Not all are so attractive mind-you; some are barely different from the stem of the plant, while others smell like rotting flesh (don’t worry, we couldn’t find any of those flowers).  But in general, I think we are so attracted to flowers because they are plant reproductive parts.  They are sexual, by definition, and as we all know from the media we are exposed to on a daily basis, sex sells.  This combination of inherent sexuality with vibrance, fragrance (which share commonalities with pheromones of humans in some cases), and soft textures has made flowers the perfect metaphor for human sexuality – such metaphors have become the subject of songs, of poems, and of art in general.  For example, in Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, he wrote:

Yet mark'd I where the bolt of Cupid fell:
It fell upon a little western flower,
Before milk-white, now purple with love's wound,
And maidens call it love-in-idleness.

Now, the flower’s purpose in being attractive is, of course, to benefit the process of pollination – an exchange of genetic information that increases the fitness of subsequent generations.  In a way, the human attachment to flowers is itself serving the purpose of these flowers in ways far beyond their original intent – they are produced in vast quantities, shipped around the world, and bred in ways that could never happen naturally (witness the rose itself).  You have to wonder, are we using the flowers, or are the flowers using us?  How often do we find ourselves marked by Cupid’s bolt, so that no sooner than we can say “environmentally deplorable intensive agriculture”, we are handing over $40 for a dozen roses?  Or in an effort to make a hospital room of our loved one less stifling, we purchase a delightful bouquet of lilies and asters?  Would we be spending so much of our hard-earned money if there was no benefit to doing so?  Well, the flowers may very well be taking advantage of our susceptibility to sex in advertising in a way that furthers their own populations, but I would argue that we use flowers to increase our own fitness as well. 

            I like flowers; I walk a little slower when I pass by a garden filled with Alyssum in the summer because it’s such a pleasant surprise, and I have accumulated many photos over the years of wildflowers with morning dew-drops, colourful pollinators, and stunning backdrops.  There is something soothing in the act of admiring a flower - there is probably even a direct neural-physiological response to such positive stimuli, such as the release of dopamine.  When I give flowers to someone else, it’s because I want those same feelings to be shared by the recipient.  From a psychological perspective, this may be a form of environmental manipulation, with an unarticulated goal – to have the pleasant feelings reciprocated in some way.  The hoped-for result may be favour over your peers or colleagues in a formal setting (e.g., being noticed in a positive way by those who have the power to promote you), or a future reciprocation of love or romance (perhaps even a chance to reproduce).  Either way, we are increasing our own fitness from an evolutionary perspective.  A gift of flowers may not be a signed contract, but the potential is certainly there for the giver to benefit as much as the recipient.  From an evolutionary perspective, both humans and flowers are benefiting from this relationship.

            What do you think?