The secret miracle of flowers

By Lee Eung-tae

Spring is already well advanced. Flowers are in full bloom everywhere along the streets, beside the roads and on the hills.

The garden festival in the southern city of Suncheon is a haven for tourists. While gazing at the emerald petals lined brightly in the shining flower beds, most holiday makers, including honeymooners, most likely rushed to the place in great anticipation.

Obviously, there is more involved than the simple pleasure of looking at flowers. For some people there is the evocation of past memories. For others, a deep sense of purity instilled by the viewing could perhaps inspire a whole community.

However, it would be more moving to see the flowers of one’s own seeding in full bloom. Reportedly, an effective therapy for patients with psychological disorders is to encourage them to grow plants for themselves. While engaged in the cultivation of flowers through their own efforts, they can to an extent experience the healing effect of recovering from their pain.

The practice of growing flowers may also purify the souls of teenagers, thereby offering them enormous inspiration. As most of the young adolescents are inundated with information from the Internet as well as busily studying, they are strangers to achieving something with their own hands. In fact, through the act of digging, seeding and watering flowers in collaboration with friends, teenagers will benefit from an invaluable hands-on experience which will remain in their memories forever.

Our school campus has some empty patches of land in-between the school buildings. As most school activities are focused on enhancing students’ academic capability, other considerations such as decorating a school campus have been somewhat disregarded, so the empty places become ugly eyesores full of weeds.

However, I believe that a minor effort can make a great difference. After an open-ended discussion with teachers and student representatives as to how we could use the empty places, it was decided to grow flowers. To encourage all the students to participate in the project, we divided the empty spaces into smaller patches and allotted them to each class. All the practices of gardening were left to each class’s discretion. So in the run up to the planting day, all the classes were busy preparing beautiful gardens.

The students were full of excitement at the thought that they would plant flowers for themselves. As most students have never planted flowers, choosing their favorite flowers through internet surfing, buying the seedlings and digging the soil for planting had to be a novel hands-on experience. During lunch breaks, representatives of classes went downtown to buy the seeds and seedlings of the flowers they had chosen to plant.

Most classes bought pretty and colorful seedlings, such as tulips and pansies, from the florist. After class, students and homeroom teachers together started to plant their flowers. In their own patches, they dug holes, planted seedlings and covered them with their own hands which up to then had usually been employed in writing and surfing the internet. After the hustle and bustle of the planting, our teenage female students were all smiles about what they had done.

Since then, observing their gardens has become one of their great school pleasures. Without any arranged rule, students are regularly watering flowers. They may well feel a sense of achievement while appreciating in full bloom the flowers which once used to be mere seedlings. The empty patches, once ugly eyesores for everyone, became a favorite haunt of students.

On a drizzly day, a couple of students holding an umbrella can be seen outside, observing the flowers they personally planted. Some students gaze at the flower gardens from their seats. As they look at the flowers, I am sure that all of our teenagers will feel the same sense of purifying innocence that the poet William Wordsworth felt in his rainbow.

Those teenagers, I am sure, will grow up to be warm and hospitable ladies who can share love with others. The memory of planting flowers through their own efforts will pervade their souls forever, thereby becoming the seed of love to warm everyone.

The writer is an English teacher in Gimhae Girls' High School in South Gyeongsang Province. His email address is eungtae@gmail.com.