A gardener is always happy to see the flowers on blueberry bushes, tomato vines, and squash plants that will grow into good things to eat. It’s a joy, but mainly a practical consideration.

Up here on my deck where I will see them all the time, I’ve planted flowers whose whole point is to be beautiful. They are attractive to bees, hummingbirds, and butterflies, yes, but more modest flowers would please those pollinators just as well.

There’s evidence that people have valued flowers for more than producing food, for thousands of years. Traces of flowers have been found in paleolithic tombs. There are very few drawings of flowers in cave art, but once we get to the age of agriculture flowers are everywhere: in murals, reliefs, jewelry designs, pottery, and then in our oldest, most sacred texts. “I am the Rose of Sharon and the Lily of the Valley” says one Testament; “Behold the lilies of the field,” says the other, “not Solomon in all his glory was arrayed as one of these.”

They’re not talking about useful date palms or parables of vineyards here. They’re talking about beauty, specifically useless beauty, in the expectation that readers will agree. Did early hunter-gatherers have no time to stop, while searching for food, to pay attention to the inedible? It takes time, as Georgia O’Keefe said, to see something small like a flower. Or maybe they did see, love, and gather them, but being flowers no trace of them stayed behind.

Why do we see beauty anywhere, in flowers or anywhere else?

 The Theory of Art

“All art is quite useless.”
Oscar Wilde

Outside the march of progress,
it lifts you from your feet,
a burst of unpurposed joy
that cures no cancer,
builds no instrument,
leads you only to yourself,
forgetting the artist,
ink, paper, paint, clay,
free of their practical callings,
like dolphins pulsing from the sea,
not to save you from drowning,
not to show you the way,
just dancing,
because the elements are there.

I love the way Maria Newman set this poem of mine to music. You can listen to it here.