For the first two-thirds of my life so far, I didn’t really see the point in flowers. Which sounds silly when I write it down; I did realize that they have a biological purpose. I guess I mean that I didn’t care much about them one way or the other. In the tiny gardens I had in my 20s and early 30s, I grew almost exclusively edible things: vegetables, berries, herbs. My exceptions to this flowers-aren’t-worth-the-time mindset were blooms that I could eat or use as medicinal herbs, such as nasturtiums, calendula, camomile, and lavender. (Daffodils were also an exception, because for some reason I had always loved them so much that they were excused from my extraordinary practicality.) Overall, if someone gave me flowers, it seemed nice, I suppose, but I would rarely or never spend money to buy flowers just for decoration. For the kids’ great-grandmothers, of course, and I knew their favourite types; for myself, no way.
I can’t remember when my priorities began to shift. Maybe when I lived in the Cayman Islands and there were bougainvillea and lantana and hibiscus all around (and maybe because I missed Canada’s spring daffodils so much, even though they’re non-native). But sometime in the past decade, for whatever reason, I’ve slowly begun to appreciate flowers for their actual beauty. In the past few years I’ve even begun to buy them sometimes, especially when I see local bouquets at the farmer’s market or bunches of daffodils at roadside stands in the early spring, the first bursts of colour after a long, grey winter.
I’ve been growing calendula since about 2010. I think a friend gave me some seeds around that time, and it was the first I had heard of it. But it turned out to love the terrible soil in our tiny townhouse garden, and it rapidly flung its seeds around and filled up the whole plot. It achieved a tie with daffodils for my favourite-flower status, and I learned to make salve from its petals. In fact, I was so homesick for calendula during the years we lived in Cayman that I took the precious seeds I had saved from our garden before we moved away and sowed a bunch of them in the little corner I was allowed to plant things in at our temporary summer suite back in Canada. Unfortunately, our landlord took it upon herself to weed the plot while we were out one day, and when the kids and I returned home and I saw the little green bodies of all my tiny calendula seedlings lying wilted on the dirt, I cried as they had never seen me cry before. ‘Did someone die?’ the older one asked her dad seriously when she heard me sobbing facedown on the bed.
As a musician and writer, I’d probably be the last person to say that beauty has no purpose. At the same time, I took it for granted in the past that I simply wasn’t drawn to visual beauty such as flowers like I was to audible beauty such as Chopin created or beauty in language such as Rilke wrote.
But their colours and shapes! I’ve finally realized that the visual colours and forms of flowers have almost as much to say to me as the colours and forms of sounds or words. Last year I grew dahlias for the first time after realizing how much I loved them. This year I added snapdragons, and there are some volunteer foxgloves and a lovely pinkish-purple thing I don’t know the name of in our new backyard. And this spring and summer I’ve been given a surprising number of bouquets for one reason and another. It feels like every time I do a performance or a poetry reading, or when I had my birthday, or sometimes for no reason at all, I have been continually presented with flowers.
I’m listening. I’m thankful. Definitely not complaining.
