The Power of Flowers

Just after Mother’s Day, one of our duck egg customers stopped by to pick up some eggs. 

And while we were chatting, she said, “I didn’t want my husband to buy me roses for Mother’s Day. They’ll just die in a week anyway.”

Whoa. I’ve never known anyone who’d turn down a bouquet of roses!

But she got me thinking more about why flowers are important.

So to start, I thought about old Anaxagoras.

Remember what he said about the purpose of life? To be held by beauty.

But a bouquet of roses won’t last more than a week or so.

How can we be held by that?

Cultivating, cutting, and arranging flowers is sort of like making Tibetan sand mandalas, whose creation and completion lead to their destruction.

Shakespeare understood this.

Remember that line in Othello:
“When I have plucked thy Rose, I cannot give it vital growth again / It needs must wither”?

So, there’s nothing especially practical about giving flowers. 

You can’t really do anything with them, except admire their ephemeral beauty.

Why, then, do we give each other flowers?

There must be something to this because even our very small children instinctively know to give flowers.

When the first dandelion popped this Spring, our little ones were out in the orchard picking them to give me.

I remember them standing in front me, clutching little bunches in their hands behind their backs.

They carefully watched my face, as they anticipated the reveal for a brief moment, before saying, “Mom, we picked these for you!” 

When my face lit up, they squirmed and giggled with delight.

I carefully placed them in a little jar on a windowsill. 

After a few days, we had dozens of tiny cups and jars all over the house with little flower arrangements from the garden.

It never occurred to our children that their little arrangements had no practical purpose. 

Their only aim was to bring joy to their mother, who they know loves flowers. 

And, of course, they did! 

But giving flowers to a loved one isn’t just what’s trending now — it’s as old as our human story. 

Archaeologists, the world over, collect flower-laden artifacts going back to antiquity.

The Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar famously built the Hanging Gardens — one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, to comfort his homesick bride. 

History records this gorgeous, verdant palace-garden as a terraced, man-made mountain with an irrigation system and overhanging vines and trees from all over the known world. 

Built so a husband could esteem his wife. 

Today, husbands follow in Nebuchadnezzar’s footsteps when they stop for a bouquet.

Just because.

But just what is it about flowers that speak joy to the human spirit? 

After all, they just die in a week anyway.

Well, back in 2005, Professor of Psychology, Jeannette Haviland-Jones from Rutgers University, studied the effects of giving flowers. 

Participants in the study were given one of three gifts as a thank-you.

One of them was a bouquet of flowers.

All the participants who were given a bouquet of flowers responded with a “true smile” — one that involves the eyes, cheeks, and mouth.

This completely perplexed Dr. Haviland-Jones, who, in an interview after the study she said, “In the emotions lab, you never get a 100 percent response unless you’re dropping a snake on people, which gives you a nice 100 percent fear response. But, happy? No.”

So flowers have an incredible power to lift our spirits — giving them universally touches a part of the human spirit in ways that other things just don’t.

Of course, our dear friend is right. Roses will just die in a week.

Or, as Robert Frost would say, “Nothing gold can stay.”

But where Frost might draw a connection between impermanence and sadness, it turns out, that giving flowers has long-term benefits to our happiness!

You see, in the Havland-Jones study, days later, the people who received flowers were still enjoying all the flower feels! Why is this?

Well, we think at least part of the reason we love flowers so much is precisely because they’re so fleeting — just like us.

Perhaps flowers remind us to cherish the fleeting moments of our lives and to embrace the ordinary beauty of the present — which we all know might be swept away by an extraordinary tragedy pretty quickly.

So, give flowers to the people you love for an important life event or simply just because.