A Song to Flowers

There is a kind of attention that flowers ask of us. Not the urgent kind. Not the kind that scans for information. The slower kind — the kind that requires staying still long enough for the world to come back into focus.

I have been thinking lately about what we lose when we stop noticing. Not in some grand ecological sense, though that too. I mean smaller losses. The white peony that opens on Tuesday in the corner of a neighbour's garden and is gone by Friday. The poppy that flares at noon and is finished before dinner. These things happen whether we look or not. The question is only whether we participated.

On their own schedule

A flower is not in a hurry to be admired. This is, I think, the most important thing it has to teach. It opens on its own time, indifferent to whether anyone is there to see. The audience, if there is one, is the wind, the bees, the slow weight of an afternoon. We are not required. We are, at most, invited.

I think this is why flowers feel like a corrective. So much of what we look at has been arranged for us — designed to catch the eye, optimised to hold it. A flower has none of that intention. It is doing its own work, on its own clock, and we are allowed to watch only because watching costs it nothing.

The volunteer

There was a summer when I made a habit of walking the same loop every morning before sitting down to work. The route ran past a low wall where a single rose bush had volunteered itself — no one had planted it, no one tended it, and yet every June it returned. I had a private game of guessing which buds would open that day. I lost more often than I won. Flowers are bad at being predictable.

But the game taught me to look at the bush the way you'd look at someone you love. With patience for whatever they decided to be that morning. With no requirement that today resemble yesterday. After a while I stopped guessing and just looked.

The leaving

The hardest part of looking at flowers is making peace with their leaving. Cut flowers in a vase keep us company for a week, sometimes two, and then they go quiet in the way that flowers do — petals curling, water clouding, stems beginning to lean. You can pretend not to notice. Or you can be there for it.

The latter is harder. The latter is also, I have come to think, the point. To love a flower well is to know in advance that it will leave you, and to be there for both halves of the visit — the part that arrives and the part that goes. We are not very good at this with anything. Flowers are a small place to practice.

A song, then

A song to flowers, then. Not for the famous ones — the orchids and the tulips and the cherry blossoms, the ones with festivals and Instagram seasons. For the ones that bloom briefly in places no one is watching. For the dandelion in the sidewalk crack. For the wildflower whose name you never learned. For the one you saw out the window of a moving car and could not, in that moment, do anything for except keep moving.

The flower does not mind. The flower is on its own time. The song is not really for them. It is for us — a small reminder that beauty does not need our permission to exist, and that paying attention is the closest we get to gratitude.