Flowers- Delightful and Delicate

The innocuous dash of the water-speckled flowers is the symbol of beauty and intoxicating fragrance. Inundated with the exquisite array of colours, textures, shapes and fragrances, flowers are ephemeral, completely allusive and symbolic objects.

Sauntering the garden lawns, the soft, tender and aromatic flowers are a treat to anyone’s eyes and senses. The blooms spread vibrant and positive vibes among people who throng gardens and florists to buy flowers and decorate their homes to add that vibrancy, colour, tenderness and joy to their interiors.

Flowers are much more than just pieces of decoration lying in some corner of the house.. Flowers are the perfect gifts we can give someone. Gifts are personal expressions of our feelings for each other and flowers say it the best, no matter what the occasion is. Women, in particular, love flowers and enjoy being showered with them. As Iris Murdoch said in her novel, A Fairy Honourable Defeat: People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.

Flowers are not bright and colourful just for tingling our senses, but for the process of reproduction. The bright flowers attract pollinators like bees, butterflies and wasps. Flowers attract pollinators and the process is the feature we find most fascinating. Butterflies, wasps and bees are drawn towards the size, colour and the scent of the blooms. It is the pollinators, which help flowers in reproducing by consuming nectar and distributing pollen, which they picked from the plant.

Different insects have an affinity towards different colours. While blues and violet colours catch the fancy of bees, the pinks and yellows are the colours that attract the butterflies. The striations are the lines on metals, which serve as a path for the pollinators

How flowers get their colour is a question that has always been lingering around. It is the anthocyanins, the plant pigments that give colour to flowers by reflecting the light that falls on them. Some of the common pigments are flavonols, which gives the shades of red and blue and chlorophylls gives shade of greens. The carotenoids are responsible for the yellow and orange colour.

An array of flowers is a sight to behold, and it is something that can cheer up even the most distressed of souls. Concluding in the words of Henry Beecher in his Life Thoughts:

Flowers are the sweetest things God ever made, and forgot to put a soul into.

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