My Pride of Barbados

--> My Pride of Barbados

(To my future wife)

Flowers. Only God knows how the world would have been without them. Perhaps colorless. Therefore the Great Artist seeing how unbeautiful the earth would have looked like in the absence of these plants, decided to add them as a finishing stroke in his canvas. So God said: "Let there be flowers." And there were flowers. And God looked and saw that they were very good.

Very good? Very good! Because flowers are beautiful things, they have delighted all creation. Birds and insects won't leave them alone. Some have died sucking their nectar. Wild animals gaze at these masterpieces of creation. And humans have put them to better uses as gifts and objects of decoration in selected places.

But God was not choosy when he decorated the earth with these plants. Flowers can be found everywhere: on volcanic peaks (the Tower of jewels in Canary islands); in the Alps and Pyrenees (the Carline thistles); in the wild (the English iris); on mountain tops (the mountain houseleek or the better name, live-forever); in tropical forests (the Bromeliads); in the deserts (the primroses and lilacs of Death Valley, California); on the sea (the lotus). And in whatever clime you find them, they are a beauty to behold.

Because of this, women have enhanced their beauty by wearing a garland of flowers on their heads or around their necks