On a Wildflower

While hiking today, I passed a small purple wildflower, much like the image above.

The non-intellectual side of me reacts to it as a miracle of nature: such color and symmetry. If I were religious, I’d invoke the term “God’s handiwork.”

But I think of the wildflower more as one of science’s yet unsolved mysteries, like when people thought that the flies in a sealed jar of meat were created by God. Then the microscope was invented, which revealed that the meat contained maggot eggs.

As science, especially genomics, advances, “God’s handiwork” will have a more earthly explanation, even one well beyond evolution, which feels like a mere step toward full understanding.

Wildflowers are nice but their blooms are generally small, short-blooming, and/or less attractive compared with hybrids. I have greater appreciation for hybrids and especially hybridizers, people who work for decades in quiet anonymity and usually little money trying to develop better flowers and plants. I hybridize roses and have developed cultivars that have that beautiful hybrid-tea form (See below) in quantity and that rebloom until frost on compact, disease-resistant plants that can be grown to enjoyment without spraying in a mere windowbox.

Of course, all but perhaps poets would argue that food crops are more important than flowers. And of course, hybridizers have produced man-made “miracles” in food crops, for example, tomatoes that are more productive, disease-resistant, and yes, tastier than are most vaunted heirlooms. For example, backyard growers should try Celebrity Plus, Big Beef, or the cherry tomato, Orange Paruche.

Oh and we’re entering cherry and peach season. Next time you bite into one and go, “Wow,” thank a hybridizer.

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