Celebrate Flowers! – It’s May!

          April Showers Bring…May Flowers ! Stand up if you are against flowers. No one? Of course not. May is the month we associate with flowers and a big thank you goes out to the month of April, but in Florida, I think it only rained once. We use flowers in interesting ways. They are used to decorate both weddings and funerals. We give them to sick people. They brighten up a room and enhance a dinner table. People have probably been picking flowers for as long as there have been flowers.

        Recently I read The Scent of Scandal which documents a true crisis over an illegal orchid. This scandal almost brought down the botanical garden in my hometown. Illegal orchid? Yes. Traveling botanists cannot just pick an orchid and bring it home. There are international laws protecting native plants. The book was interesting. I learned that there is an orchid cult which is cutthroat, dark and deceitful. Good grief! I have met collectors and I have met hoarders. But orchids? A flower? Nature? There is something indecent about it. Hording belongs with materialism and not nature.

       I learned that serious orchid collectors can be strange and well . . . crazy. There is a point when a person crosses the line from gardening to—nuts. How does this happen? An educated guess would be that it has to do with obsession but honestly, I don’t know. The book gave no solid explanations, but if your name is Rose, Lily, Heather, Violet, or Daisy, my advice is beware. The obsessed collectors are out there and who knows, they may come after you.

         By typing ‘Flowers’ into a Google Search, I was able to do some ‘scholarly’ research and found one possible answer to the why and how of this floral travesty. Like the monthly birth stone, our human need to analyze and categorize has led to the assignment of a flower for each month. It is possible to go online and find a personality trait associated with each flower. One example is the flowering Anemone. Never heard of it? Possibly because it means ‘fading hope.’ Orchids on the other hand, are associated with such alluring adjectives as ‘refinement’ and ‘femininity.’ We may be on to something here. No one is hording, stealing and black marking the hopeless anemone. It is possible, in fact, I would call it an ‘undeniable truth’ that the orchid flower itself was responsible for its scandalous theft due to its irresistible allure. (Where was I when the orchid thieves needed a defense lawyer?) The Botanical Garden that had the orchid crisis petitioned for a zoning change to build a restaurant. It would be a Sky Garden with a parking garage to accommodate the crowd who will flock to enjoy an expensive meal with a beautiful view. Always one to do some soul searching, I wonder if I would I eat there. Probably, I like posh, and my ethical standards diminish every year.If you enjoy gardening and like flowers, I encourage you to look up the flower assigned to your birth month. My birth flower is Lily of the Valley. It means ‘increased happiness.’ Definitely better than fading hope.