Flowers & Friends

Flowers are wonderful, but if a gardener spends time trying, at any certain frequency, to make a flower grow that gardener will quickly become frustrated. Likewise a plant is lovely to look at and it is delightful to watch it grow over time, but one cannot make a plant grow any more than one can make a flower grow. Roots also, important as they are, cannot be coerced.

To be sure, even a novice gardener has plants which produce flowers, and an accomplished gardener has at his or her disposal a full array of tools and wisdom to enhance and ensure growth and bloom. At the end of the day though, all a gardener can do is remove obstacles to growth and provide food, water and sunlight to the plant as it grows.

Sometimes the more fragile, beautiful, or fragrant (read: valuable) a flower, the more likely the plant will have thorns or some other mechanism of protection. A creature attempting to harm the plant will suffer pain -- while the gardener, in wisdom and care, can prune and trim the plant at will and only occasionally be pricked by a thorn.

In my ponderings one recent morning I came to this realization about life and relationships:

Depth of trust is the flower,
relationship is the plant,
and the roots are love.

If one's main intent is to help the plant thrive, and one accomplishes this by providing food and water to the roots, and diligently, carefully caring for the plant itself, then flowers will come as a natural overflow of the health of the plant.

But if one focuses solely on trying to produce flowers, neglecting the roots and the plant, then any blooms produced will be inferior, short lived, and less fragrant.

~ Keith