As I sit for the first time today I want to share with you these kind words written by Paul Harvey. I came across this article in 2002 in a floral magazine and it hangs on the wall in my design room when I need a little nudge of encouragement.
Beautiful Flower People
Florist are nice people; I've never known an exception. The flower merchant loves beauty--and sharing it. Most flower shops are family businesses, independant, interdependant. How do you know the roses you order for a friend a thousand miles away will not arrive wilted? You know because florist are bound, one to the others, by computers and phone lines and fax machines and an understood obligation of self-discipline. So there has never been any government regulation of this industry, never any need for it.
If your florist's motives were mercenary, she could market what she knows to a dozen tabloids and a hundred gossip columnists. Flowers are the key to the doghouse.
Your florist knows: who's courting whom, who's sick, who's leaving, who's arriving, who's dying, who's dead and who gave at the office. She knows where all the grief is, all the penitence and much of the sin. Yet, there is an incumbent silence among these professional merchants of beauty and it is never betrayed.
Mostly flowers bring happiness, to the giver and to the recipient. Even the man or woman who delivers the flowers shares the fringe benefit of dispensing happiness. He or She is greated at the door with delight. Flowers make people bloom.
And, whether a flower merchant is decorating a sick room or a banquet room, her artistry combines with nature's splendor to create masterworks. No artist with brush and palette ever came close.
One time I addressed a national floral convention. In conjunction with that convention there was competition among floral designers for the most imaginative, the most magnificent, the most exquisite bouquets and centerpieces.
Breathtaking! However perishable, each for its moment in time made the world more beautiful. But the blended components of that graceful bouquet were bought on faith and watered with sweat. So some bodies will work a seven-day week--unless there's a holiday in it--then they work eight.
Sterilizing backroom buckets is a tedious, tiring, dirty chore that no maicure could survive. Yet, the hands that are calloused, knife cut and thorn scarred, tenderly groom each dollar rose to be worth ten and sell for three.
Way back there when flowers first began, as part of that same master plan, there was provision for their enhancement--that a chosen few might enjoy a degree of immortality.
And the providers of that enhancement are very nice people. I've never known an exception.
