You have a kitchen garden, full of plants that will provide for you. Tomatoes, beans, squash, strawberries. They’re all wonderful, living things to rest your eyes on. Exquisite. This kitchen garden makes you feel more self reliant and it makes you feel great, spiritful — good measure, pressed down, and shaken together, and running over. It grounds you, keeps you in touch with mother nature and with the present and with eternity. With cosmos but also with the dirt under your feet. It’s all you desire.
But then it’s not all you desire. Because you’re still thinking I want some flowers, some pretty flowers. The flowers you want aren’t edible flowers, but they’re nice-looking flowers. And they smell nice. But you’re serious about your kitchen garden, you’re thinking how can I justify growing a plant just because it’s a nice plant to look at, a plant that doesn’t feed me, or feed my children, my family? Still you’re smitten with these beautiful flowers, and so you muscle through your own objections, and you plant those flowers, quite a lot of them, and you take care of them, tend to them, and they’re just as pretty as you had hoped, maybe more.
And here’s what happens: not only do you like your new flowers, and they make you feel happier, thrice and four times blessed, your spirit soars … not only this … but the bees, they like your flowers, too! So bees come to see them. And they drink their nectar and stay and stay and drink some more. And after hanging around those flowers for a while, bacchanalian, the bees fly on over to your tomato plants, and bean plants, and squash, to drink their nectar, too. And they fly from tomato flower to tomato flower and pollinate your tomatoes, and then from bean flower to bean flower and pollinate your beans, and then your squash, your strawberries, your whole kitchen garden. They were attracted to your flowers, the ones that you planted just because you thought they were beautiful, and now they’re putting their little bee shoulders to the wheel in your kitchen garden.
Life is not without its facets. And besieged by the wonderful lusciousness of your garden, you realize that beauty is indeed functional.
