~Ralph Waldo Emerson
What is it about flowers? We have always been strangely attracted to them. Stone drawings of flowers were found in ancient Egyptian graves as far back as 120,000 years ago. At first, this attraction seems primarily aesthetic. Flowers are a multi-sensory experience with smell, texture, and color. They invite us to get close to smell them, to move our bodies to find them, to water them, to pick them, to carry them in our hands or hair, and to share them.
However, scientists also think that from an evolutionary perspective, flowers use the strategy of activating humans to grow and propagate them, just as they activate insects with pollen. Flowers evoke positive emotions, because they predict food-growing possibilities, locate ripe fruit, and show where humans may thrive. Flower shapes and colors produce a strong visual impact and vision activates visual as well as sensory-motor and affective brain circuits. Experience of flowers includes smell, movement, and touch which stimulate autobiographical memory, and recall of long term memory and associations through former experiences. Thus, flowers become connected to events, romance, celebrations and rituals - even around death. All the above may be incentives for