Flowers Everywhere!

There is a place in Canada called The Butchart Gardens. Maybe you’ve been there. It is one bloom, one pruning snip away from perfection!

The 55-acre garden, founded more than 100 years ago by the Butchart family, is an explosion of color, shapes, and forms tended by 500 full-time gardeners. To say that it is neat or pristine is high on the understatement list. It is magnificent.

But the garden does serve as a reminder to those of us who like gardening perfection, or any other perfection necessity, for that matter. And the same reminder to someone who finds perfection boring, too neat, too manicured, rather artificial. Flowers, whether in Butchart Gardens or thriving in the meadow near my nephew’s farm, are beautiful and a pleasure to see. Flowers like to be flowers wherever they are. But sometimes the context determines their value, worth, or loveliness. I like the flowers in Butchart Gardens very much, but the perfect setting gets a bit tedious after awhile. I love the wild flowers in the field, even though they insist on being disorganized and random. And then I realize I’m responding more to the environment than the flowery display. If everything has to strive for perfection, then I think randomness is a blight on the earth. If everything must be absolutely free to “do its own thing” then perfection is an impossible curse.

The point (Yea!): Creation is highly varied for a reason. It was made that way so that all things could express their beauty and could contribute to the whole. We are not defined by our context: rich, poor; educated, not educated; politically this or politically that. We are fundamentally the same; flowers growing in lots of places and in lots of ways. We are all flowers.

Butchart boosters and rural wanderers are looking at the same expressions of values and worth. Let’s stop living in the land of contextual truth. Too many other things grow in that land, things like hate, prejudice and self-inflicted pain. Life’s too short. The flowers are too beautiful to be trampled under angry boots on the feet of people who can’t see beyond themselves.