I like to buy fresh cut flowers once a week, arrange them in a vase and place them on the credenza in my dining room. It gives me a lot of pleasure to have them in the same room where I eat. Flowers are beautiful. They’re temporal. They’re life.

I will enjoy noticing flowers when I’m walking in my neighborhood. Unlike my friends Laura or Holly, I probably could not name more than the varieties most commonly bundled at the grocery chain’s flower department, but I like looking at them all the same.

When I walk by someone’s yard, I will marvel at how much work a home gardener will put in, selecting a color palate for their flower boxes or small yards and then prune and weed and water and watch until their seedlings grow. I will be equally amazed to look at wildflowers growing, undisturbed, alongside of railroad tracks; popping up and swaying in the breeze despite not being tended to.

I guess you could say I’m a flower girl.

When I am feeling blue or want an extra dose of natural beauty, I may make an excursion to a greenhouse or a garden. During the winter, I’ll visit the iron and glass conservatory near the Lincoln Park Zoo and wallow in the hundreds of potted mums on display. In June, it feels like a cosmic necessity that I drive twenty miles north to the Chicago Botanical Gardens for the roses. They’re in full bloom and have not yet wilted from too much summer heat.

I went to the Garden with a friend the other day. I must have driven her crazy, stopping so often to take pictures. I insisted on getting a map and then completely ignored it, deciding instead to follow my instincts and just wander down different paths.

Why do I like flowers so much?  Why do they make me feel so happy?

They make me grateful for all my senses. Their colors can be so vivid, their fragrances so strong. They can have oddly prickly parts, but mostly they tease you with their indescribable softness. I don’t generally taste flowers or listen to their words, but in a garden I can imagine their conversations. My mind can play games around what their colors might taste like at the peak of their season.

Flowers are not self-conscious. I love this. A flower will never refuse to open because there’s a really beautiful flower already turning its best side to the sun fifty feet away.

Flowers accept the ebb and flow of life. They adapt to the conditions of the soil they live in and surrender to the elements that surround them.

Flowers remind me of people at their best. Each flower, like each person, is unique. Yet somehow, when looking into the individual folds and shades of a flower, I will also think about how I can see every flower in the one right in front of me. They’re made out of the same stuff and experience life pretty much the same way.

Being in a garden, or holding a flower, is such a great opportunity to appreciate individuality and community, what’s unique and what’s commonly shared, and that’s no small thing.