My Love of Flowers

Truth shall be told: my love of flowers - for each particular petal - is such, that no thirst after scientific knowledge could ever prevail upon me to tear the beautiful objects in pieces.

I love to see the bud burst into maturity; I love to make the deepening tints with which the beams of heaven paint the expanded flower; nay, with a melancholy sort of pleasure, I love to watch that progress towards decay, so endearingly bespeaking a fellowship in man’s transient glory; which, even at its height, is but
as ‘the flower of grass.’

I love to gaze upon these vegetable gems - to marvel and adore, that such relics of paradise are yet permitted to brighten a path where the iniquity of rebellious sinners has sown the thorn and the thistle, under the blighting curse of an offended God.

Next after the blessed Bible, a flower-garden is to me the most eloquent of books - a volume teeming with instruction, consolation, and reproof.

. . .

Oh! what a day that will be, when every noxious thing is uprooted, and cast forth from the fair garden of this renovated earth! The figure is of constant recurrence in Scripture. ‘Instead of the thorn shall come up the fir-tree; and instead of the brier shall come up the myrtle-tree.’ ‘The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad because of them; and the desert shall rejoice and blossom as the rose.’

Before that day of the Church’s triumph and blessedness I shall be gathered among the clods of the valley; and the bright offspring of the soil, which now soothe and cheer my heart, will be blossoming over my head, and telling forth to others the same precious truths that they declare to me.

It is not supposed to be that such a book has been spread before man for six thousand years in characters illegible to those who glanced upon it. Isaac’s meditations in the field at eventide may have partaken of the same nature, as the gorgeous blossoms of Eden unfolded their glowing tints around him. David, from considering the starry heavens, may have turned his regards to the flowers of the earth, and read their declaration of the glory of God in terms no less emphatic than the voiceless testimony of the skies.

The skill that hung those elegant pendents on their slender stalks, and arranged a drapery of foliage around them, had a meaning in the act. I will not reject the comfort, nor disregard the instruction that they seem designed to yield me.

What my gracious Lord and Saviour has invited me to consider, I will not overlook; what He tells me that Solomon in all his glory could not equal, I will not refuse to admire; and what He represents as being clothed by the hand of God, as a symbol of His providential care over me, I will not fail to recognize as among the sweetest tokens of His Love.

— From ‘Chapters on Flowers’ by Charlotte Elizabeth, p. 1-2 & 324-326