Flowers - a world aflame with desire

While ‘digging’ for some uplifting quotations about flowers, I was astonished to discover the full significance of flowers in the spiritual world (not to mention the material world). I am a gardener of sorts. I am a practitioner of what I call ‘extreme gardening’: I have transported truckloads of soil in a day; I have transformed an asphalt wasteland of driveway into a cedar hedge-lined garden oasis; I have planted 6 trees and innumerable shrubs and plants around my house. But I was not aware of the full extent of the moral significance of the flower, or that there is a vast knowledge out there of the healing properties of flower essences and aromas.
I think we all love flowers in a natural, subconscious way: how often have we been overcome by the scent of a flower and felt the weight of stress fall away from our shoulders, felt ourselves being whisked away to peaceful childhood memories of innocence and happiness? But quotations like this one, opened my eyes further:

A flower's fragrance declares to all the world that it is fertile, available, and desirable, its sex organs oozing with nectar. Its smell reminds us in vestigial ways of fertility, vigour, life-force, all the optimism, expectancy, and passionate bloom of youth. We inhale its ardent aroma and, no matter what our ages, we feel young and nubile in a world aflame with desire. Diane Ackerman

And this:

Who can estimate the elevating and refining influences and moral value of flowers with all their graceful forms, bewitching shades and combinations of colours and exquisitely varied perfumes? These silent influences are unconsciously felt even by those who do not appreciate them consciously and thus with better and still better fruits, nuts, grains, vegetables and flowers, will the earth be transformed, man's thought refined, and turned from the base destructive forces into nobler production. One which will lift him to high planes of action toward the happy day when the Creator of all this beautiful work is more acknowledged and loved, and where man shall offer his brother man, not bullets and bayonets, but richer grains, better fruit and fairer flowers from the bounty of this earth. Father George Schoener

These quotations and others can be found at the worthy Michael P. Garafalo’s site: Flowers – Quotes and poems for gardeners

I have also provided in the links some healing flower essence sites that I came across.

So, I don’t know about you, but I am now filled with a ‘growing’ desire to install some full spectrum lamps in my dimly lit living room. I will not go without flowers any longer. Of course, first I will have to clean that desk…

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Photo by Claudia Meyer