Flowers and Weeds

Delicate flowers

I can’t precisely recall the first time someone called me a delicate flower, but I suspect it was either

1. When I refused to taste a hunk of tripe that smelled like a wet dog and looked like a tapeworm, which a dim sum companion was waving in my face, or

2. When I told friends that I didn’t like camping because you have to pee outside. (At the risk of sharing too much information, I should note that now that I’m a hiker, I have gotten over this particular aversion and pee outside when absolutely necessary. But I still think tripe is disgusting.)

But the other day on a hike, I had an epiphany. Take a look at this picture.

I photographed these flowers at about 2500 meters, or 8200 feet, where the air is thin and conditions are harsh. Notice how these brave little flowers poke their heads up among the rocks and snow. Right before I took this photo, they were nourishing a fuzzy, plump bumblebee. So here’s my epiphany: Flowers aren’t delicate! Just because they’re small and pretty doesn’t mean they aren’t tough!

These flowers, also at 2500 meters, spend their entire lives in the shadow of an enormous mountain and never get direct sunlight. I don’t know how they do it!

Just look at how these flowers stretch toward the sun! You go, flowers!

My mom, because she is petite and pretty and never raises her voice, might come off as delicate, and she is indeed sweet and mild. But like the mountain flowers, she is tenacious and strong. She spent her career teaching special education, and she was especially good with kids who had emotional and behavioral disturbances. One of her classes was made up entirely of teenaged boys, all six-footers (or taller!). Instead of being disciplinary problems, as their labeling would suggest, those boys worked their hardest to succeed because of my mom. Her secret? Listening to them, having high expectations for them, and showing she cared about them.

You know who else might seem like a delicate flower but is incredibly strong? Mr. Rogers. Hardly a muscle-bound fighter, Mr. Rogers was a bantam weight: for his entire adult life he weighed only 143 pounds. And yet without ever raising his voice, he obtained $20 million from a recalcitrant Senate to fund educational television for children.

Egged on by sports and superhero movies, we tend to view strength in brute physical terms only.¹ But why not open our eyes to kinder, milder, and often more effective expressions of strength?

Hothouse flowers

A particularly reviled subset of “delicate flowers” is the hothouse flower. When we call someone a hothouse flower, we mean that they have been too sheltered, too coddled, too pampered, with the result that they are unable to function in the “real world.” But in fact hothouse flowers do just fine in the environments to which they belong. It’s not their fault that we transplant them to alien circumstances and expect them to thrive.

Sometimes people we call hothouse flowers² actually have a good reason for their persnickety demands. According to a fascinating Freakonomics podcast, one reason the band Van Halen had a reputation for being spoiled celebrities was because they required that the M & Ms in their dressing room all be one color. But in fact they made this demand because their equipment could be dangerous, and they wanted to be sure it had been installed properly. The M & Ms provided a quick indicator of whether the staff at the performing venue had read and followed the whole contract—or whether the band would have to re-check everything before performing.

The Victorian art critic John Ruskin was such a hothouse flower that he needed his mother to move in down the street from him when he went to Oxford. When he got married he was so horrified and disgusted by the sight of his wife’s naked body that their unconsummated marriage had to be annulled.³ And yet Ruskin introduced and advocated for J. M. W. Turner and the Pre-Raphaelites, at the time considered disturbing radicals but now valued as great artists.

Even Einstein could be considered a hothouse flower. In spite of his genius he did poorly at traditional schools, and he must have been a trial to live with given that he forced his wife Mileva to sign a contract that she would never speak to him unless he specifically requested it. We should all be grateful that Mileva acceded to these demands, though; her forbearance was a factor in Einstein’s annus mirabilis, during which he wrote four scientific papers, including his paper on special relativity, that changed the world.

Some people might need a bit more nurturing, but if we simply give them what they need, they reward us richly. So why not support the hothouse flowers among us?

Weeds

Then there are weeds—plants that no one seems to want but that are adaptable enough to thrive anywhere. We may dislike weeds because they’re not as pretty as flowers, but when we attempt to eradicate them, we miss out on their benefits and risk poisoning the soil and our bodies.

These weeds flourish in a wheat field behind my house. I’m so glad the farmer didn’t poison them!

I think you all know what this weed is. I took this photo in a church (!) garden that features “helpful plants.”

One of my heroes, Samuel Johnson, was a weed. Johnson (1709–84) was poor and from the sticks. He was an outsider when he arrived in London and faced contempt and exclusion because he didn’t belong to the right class. He nonetheless became the greatest literary and cultural figure of the eighteenth century, an era we now call the Age of Johnson. Johnson’s outsider status gave him great empathy for other human beings. A fervent opponent of slavery, Johnson took in Francis Barber, a freed slave, and left him a generous pension in his will. (Slavery was one reason he objected to American independence; in his words, "How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?") At a time when most men considered women to be mere ornaments, Johnson had intense intellectual friendships with many women. Poor for much of his life, he housed and supported other poor people as soon as he had a bit of money. He battled mental illness (probably Tourette Syndrome and almost certainly depression) and yet accomplished extraordinary things, including writing the first dictionary of the English language. Ugly, uncouth, melancholy, and occasionally rude, Johnson nonetheless had great humor and charisma and enjoyed the love and respect of nearly everyone he knew.

It is becoming unfortunately too common to characterize immigrants as weeds invading our supposedly pure fields, and yet we all benefit from immigrants, who perform important jobs that most Americans won’t do. For a personal example, my grandma suffered from dementia, and the kind ladies from Eritrea who worked at her nursing home comforted and cared for her. When my grandma stopped wanting to eat, these workers noticed that my grandma loved chocolate, and so they would sit with her and hand-feed her chocolate, showing her compassion and giving her a bit of pleasure in her final days.

Instead of excluding people who don’t immediately strike us as desirable, why not welcome them and see what they give us in return?

How about you, readers? Are you, or people you know, flowers—tougher than appearances suggest—or weeds—resilient, useful, and possessing a certain unconventional charm? Please share your stories in the comments!

The tidbit

Did you know that mint is a weed? It grows so rampantly that once it establishes itself in your yard, you can pull it out occasionally and it will bounce right back. When I lived in Chicago and wanted to make Yogurt-Mint Sauce (recipe below), I would hie myself over to a neighbor’s yard, where I knew it grew, confident that he wouldn’t miss it if I grabbed a few handfuls.

1. Throw a packed 1/2c each mint and cilantro leaves into a food processor and add in a small clove of garlic and a knob of ginger the size of your big toe,⁴ peeled and diced. Pulse about 10 times until the ingredients are chopped but not liquified.

2. Stir the herb mixture into 1c full-fat yogurt. Add in the juice of one lemon, about 1tsp salt (or to taste), and a few grinds of black pepper.

3. Serve as a dip, sandwich spread, or variation on raita.

1. A critic I like, Jason Pargin, notes that the disturbing message of superhero movies is that we can solve all our problems by hitting people.

2. Attentive readers will note that all my examples of hothouse flowers are men. I did this on purpose to make the point that, contra stereotypes about divas and “high-maintenance” women, men can be fussy too.

3. The generally accepted explanation is that Ruskin was either horrified by menstruation or disgusted by his wife’s pubic hair—as an art critic, he was used to seeing naked Greek statues, but not natural female bodies.

4. Sorry for the gross image, but this really is an accurate measure of the amount of ginger you should use.