Timofey Dudarenko

If you go to a flower shop tomorrow and ask for a rose, you will most likely be offered a range of flowers from Ecuadorian and Kenyan plantations. You will take it home, put it in water, and admire its brief blooming, yet you will not notice any fragrance. Why is that?

Before being put on the commercial wholesale market, each flower variety undergoes a strict cultivation process, during which it loses the ability to produce scent, as flowers do not require pollination in an artificial environment. Plants have a broad sensory spectrum: they emit scent to be pollinated; they are bright to attract insects or to signal that they are inedible; they have thorns to protect themselves from herbivores. All mechanisms of plant aposematism are appropriated and dictated by humans to make flowers more pleasing. The aesthetic function—one that was never native to flowers—becomes primary.

People often seek to impose meaning and status onto what already constitutes an integral system. Generalisation and categorisation are among the most destructive tendencies in human history. Throughout the 19th century, during the so-called period of Orchidelirium, orchids were deemed a symbol of luxury. European collectors went to any lengths, burning down forests in South America and wiping out entire species of orchids, to find the most “unique” flowers. They brought the orchids back home and tried to plant them in unsuitable environments, fruitlessly. 

In the last few decades, anthropology has undergone a “plant turn” (Natasha Myers, Conversations on Plant Sensing) which redefined and broadened the concepts of intelligence and communication in plants. They are recognized as organisms capable of cognition, even though until now they seemed passive, quiet.

It is natural and necessary for flowers to emit scent, to have thorns, to be bright. According to the principles of sensory ethnography, which are followed in Eduardo Kohn’s How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human, admiring and appreciating nature involves the full spectrum of human senses. When you look at a tree, it is not only beautiful as a visual object. Its scent, its texture, the sound of its leaves—all of it constitutes the tree’s selfhood. Engaging with nature through whole-body sensing and admiration does not impose a sensory hierarchy. We can appreciate a rose just as it is, without tearing off its thorns or breeding out its scent.

Among contemporary florists, there is a movement that focuses on recognising and using local seasonal flowers. Many aromatic and medicinal plants are rediscovered as objects of native reflection. Using and highlighting them in floral arrangements as well as in cultural research adds to the decentralisation of conceptual narratives about nature and fosters a mindful attitude towards all that grows.

Flowers’ most striking features are their dynamism, selfhood, inevitable change, and temporality. Flowers of late spring and early summer are mostly bulbous plants. They have the most rapid and transformative blooming, they wilt quickly and never stay the same. All that blooms in spring is a triumph of the most essential mechanism of all things living—the ability to change.

A mindful approach to plants calls for using living material as a method, rather than an instrument. There is no need to dictate the opening of buds or the lines of flowers. On the contrary, the main goal is to celebrate each curve and every note of scent in tulip, allium, poppy, and gloriosa.