Flower from the Tropical Greenhouse at the L.A. Arboretum

The sentiment is from Ralph Waldo Emerson, as is the following: “Flowers … are a proud assertion that a ray of beauty overvalues all the utilities of the world.”

When I was a child, I was always surprised that my parents expended so much effort surrounding their house with elegant (and hard to care for) tree roses and other flowers. Perhaps I was slightly jaundiced in my opinion because my brother and I had to keep the blossoms and leaves free of voracious Japanese Beetles.

Now that my parents are gone, I begin to appreciate how they felt. One of the things that I noticed was that they could always tell if a Hungarian family lived in a particular house based on the flowers they planted. I guess it’s partially a genetic thing. Although Martine and I do not raise flowers—after all, we live in an apartment—we go out of our way to visit Huntington Gardens, Descanso Gardens, the Los Angeles Arboretum, and other places where one could walk in floral beauty.

It seems that the Japanese Beetles never made it out to California. Perhaps the intervening deserts and mountains deterred them. One result is that the flower gardens out here in Southern California are particularly beautiful.

The orchid illustrated above is from the L.A. Arboretum’s tropical greenhouse, which contains a treasure of such exotic blossoms.