Individual preferences aside,we - as a species - are on the whole predisposed to like the look of flowers. We grow them, show them off, paint them, photograph them and replicate their images in fabrics and paintings. We even name people after them.
Why?
Evidently there is something pretty about flowers, but what is the root cause of their attraction?
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It’s not about us. Flowers are designed to be pretty for insects; the fact that they appeal to us is a coincidental accident of that fact - whatever works for bugs works for us too.
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It’s subconsciously sexual. Flowers indicate fertility, kind of literally. On some really murky level, when we see flowers we think ‘heh - fucking, nice…’ This explains why only girls are named after flowers; ‘Rose’, ‘Daisy’ etc. are all subconscious nods towards sexual fertility.
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Flowers, much like other ‘beautiful nature’ tropes, indicate that the local geographic area is fertile and rich in nutrients/fruit/whatever and is therefore a good place to stick around. Our ancestors might not have known the gritty details, but it would have been good enough to know that a place with flowers is a better place to stick around than a place without them.
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Flowers aren’t ‘meant’ to be pretty - nature hasn’t made them how they are to us for any evolutionary advantage, and we haven’t evolved to like them for any particular reason either. Rather, they have evolved that way for their own reasons, and we simply admire them as examples of nature being exquisite for its own sake.
None of these theories totally work for me…
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Our minds are too different to those of bumble-bees - we don’t have anything else in common, why on earth would attraction to floral aesthetics be the only one? Plus, bugs see things totally differently to us anyway; what we would consider to be a beautiful chrysanthemum would look like a hellish hallucinatory nightmare when viewed through the eyes of a horsefly.
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My 3-year-old daughter thinks that flowers are pretty - she doesn’t know about sex yet. ‘Flowers=fertility’ is a fairly advanced concept requiring scientific education and metaphoric interpretation which not everyone would get; it’s more universal than that, and I’m pretty sure that people were appreciating flowers before they knew that this was nature’s version of a floral tramp-stamp.
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(evolutionary psychology is always a stretch, and in any case - just because a place has flowers doesn’t mean that it is habitable). The weeds at the front of my house have flowers - the flowers themselves are pretty, the weeds they grow out of aren’t. Yes, I suppose that flowers indicate that the ground is hydrated and nourished enough to support them (and therefore other things which might be helpfully consumed by humans) - but people don’t eat flowers, a few exceptions notwithstanding.
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Humans have paid homage to the image of flowers much more than most other tropes of nature. We are impressed by all sorts of biological phenomena, but when it comes to flowers we take it to the next level as a species; not many people wear fabrics decorated with images of DNA, for instance. Little old ladies don’t wear dresses with ‘sunset over the Andes’ patterns on them, and girls aren’t named ‘solar eclipse’ or ‘aurora borealis’ very often.
I’m leaving this one open to the floor… thanks in advance