My backyard tomatoes are flourishing between the apricots and roses. Plenty of sunlight, fertilizer and water (not too much, though), and I don't have to hear Barb complaining about having to buy the lousy ones at the store. But it will be quite awhile before any payoff presents itself.
The neighbor's climbing rose drapes onto our side of the fence. Pastel pinks mixed with darker rouge and white display a trinitarian theme, like many other things in nature. The flowers are about 3/4" across and have a slight fragrance.
Far from pragmatic utilitarianism alone, flowers connect us to the dimension of all things beautiful. They reflect the beauty of God's holiness that the Scriptures speak of, albeit in a diminutive sense (Psalm 29:1,2). The ability to appreciate and value beauty is another in a long list of evolutionary impossibilities. It is God-given.
"Beauty is but the sensible image of the Infinite." - George Bancroft
"Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything that is beautiful; for beauty is God's handwriting, a wayside sacrament. Welcome it in every fair face, in every fair sky, in every fair flower, and thank God for it as a cup of blessing." - R.W. Emerson
"Every rose is an autograph from the hand of God on his world about us. He has inscribed his thoughts in these marvelous hieroglyphics which sense and science have, these many thousand years, been seeking to understand." - Theodore Parker
