Flowers...It's An F-Word

I want to talk about the “F” word… that’s right… Flowers.  In my world, flowers fall under the “f-word” category.  Being that I am a human female and the majority of the human female population loves flowers, this makes me a bit of an enigma. The fact is I’m not completely flower adverse, I’m just more unaffected by them. 

 That being said, there are some flowers I do not like at all.  One such beast is a rose.  I can’t stand red roses and I can tolerate white ones but only if they are dispersed throughout a bouquet of other white flowers. 

 

I am adverse to all yellow flowers, with the exception of those giant sunflowers that can grow to tower six feet tall.  I like to stand next to them and pretend I’ve been shrunken down to a teeny-tiny size.

The only flowers I truly love are white daisies, but not in a vase in my home.  I like them growing wild.

 

Wild flowers that grow freely in the mountains, adding splashes of color across the hillside are pretty, but I have no desire to pluck them and shove them into a vase in my home.  In fact, I despise flowers in my home.  I don’t like the smell of any flowers and all they do is sit there in a vase filled with water that is slowly stagnating, eventually to spew their petals and leaves all over my countertop or table.  That equals more clean-up work for me, and I’m not seeking out more things to clean.  What’s more is that they remind me of illness and death.  Maybe that’s because the only time I ever give or receive flowers is usually when someone is hurting or mourning.

My mother and my aunt both have lovely flower gardens and they work their butts off to make them beautiful.  They’re always outside digging, weed pulling, potting, watering, testing chemical levels, etc.  It’s exhausting.  I acknowledge the serene beauty of all of the colorful flowers, but is it worth the blood, sweat and tears that goes into it? It is worth the back pain and stiff knees the next day from so much bending?   To them, it is most certainly worth it; and as I see them labor with love for their flowers, I think to myself, there must be a gardening gene of which I lack.  For I cannot see the benefit of doting over a plant I can’t even eat!

Flowers… for some, they are fabulous…for me, they’re just another “f-word.” ~