GARDEN flowers gladden the heart but they are dependent on man. They have to be watered, fed and groomed.
On top of the list of blooms that make up bouquets for the living and the dead are roses, lilies, orchids and sun-like chrysanthemums (once reserved for the Japanese emperor). Garden blooms sit in the best places of celebration—the long table at a feast or the altar at church service.
They are the flowers of consequence, those that know why they are “confidently beautiful.” However, on a much lower rung are equally beautiful flowers that have independent spirits and work with Nature. But many people are not aware of them.
Actually, many hothouse models once were weeds that found a purpose when man used them to express love, joy or sympathy. Therefore, weeds demand our respect, too. The distant ancestor of Golden Celebration rose was a single-petaled goddess of the field, which evolved about 70 million years ago and was a weed thriving before the Dinosaurs disappeared.
I call weed flowers trivial beauties, not confidently beautiful, because they don’t know what they have or if they have a suspicion they are jewels on earth’s breast, they still don’t have the confidence of beauty queens of the garden. They are trivial because they seem to be unimportant, except for medicinal uses (mangagaw or snake week is said to be good for dengue fever). However, I still have to hear of someone actually raising mangagaw and sinaw-sinaw (Peperomia pellucida) for their flowers.
Weeds are obnoxious to farmers and clipped gardens. Not me. For years I have stopped by roadsides to admire weed flowers and even today, I don’t pull out flowering weeds in my front yard. They make me look up the sky to thank God that even these little ones he dresses using his creative hand. The day I wrote this column, Veronika Hipolito, SunStar Cebu lifestyle designer, helped me search the name of a weed flower that has been a part of my childhood.
Van Gogh cosmos is a name I assigned to a roadside plant that blooms in single stems, with tiny white flowers and golden hearts. It’s so trivial Veron and I had an awful time looking for its name. She found bidens pilosa, but I insisted it was not the flower I liked. Pilosa has rounded petals, while the flower of my childhood has serrated ones.
After dogged googling, I found tridax procumbens or coat bottons. At last my mystery flower had been identified. I named it after Dutch Post-Impressionist painter Vincent Van Gogh because I’m sure he would have gathered a dozen of these had he seen them—the same number of flowers in his painting “Sunflowers”—to record their existence. I added cosmos because I thought the flower looked a bit like cosmos plants.
Trivial flowers have a reason to be in the cosmos, and so do I even if very often I feel I am trivial and of no consequence. I just have to look up the sky and remember that the hand that dresses procumbens is the same hand that leads me beside still waters, and I too have a reason to be.