IN THE lawn of the building where I work
is a large bed of peonies. It is a gorgeous sight when all
the plants are in full bloom. Peonies are among my
most-loved flower friends, both for their own beauty and for
their association with happy experiences. They are in the
pigeonhole next to roses in my memory storehouse. A friend
recently told me of the astonishment of a man from another
country when he first saw peonies in this land and was
amazed at their size and color. I am not amazed at his
amazement.
I have watched this bed on the lawn for
many years as I have passed by headed for the time clock. I
have noticed two things about them: they never fail to bloom
at the same time every spring; also there seldom fails to
come a beating wind and rainstorm every year that crushes
them down into the muddy bed and destroys them. In not many
springs in the past twenty or thirty have the peonies
bloomed out their full time without this beating storm.
But it is not just sorrow at the
destruction of beauty that makes me remember those yearly
storms. It is the significance of the condition in which it
leaves the flowers. The same wind and water pushing through
the flowering orchard will rain the petals down like snow.
But unless the storm is followed by an unseasonable freeze,
the fruit will go on and mature. The fragile petals have
already served their purpose: to advertise to all the
wandering bees where the pollen and the nectar are to be
found. The wind severs their hold on the tree, and they fall
to a momentary death on the ground; in a few hours they have
passed back into the soil, to yield up their chemical
constituents as food for the future life of other plants.
Even in death they serve.
But not so the peonies. They sway on
their yielding stems and beat their massive heads against
the wet soil or one another until they are black and broken
and altogether unlovely. But they cling to their stems, and
the day after the storm the flower plot which was a place of
delight has become a place of disgust. No purpose of either
beauty or use is served by peony flowers in their death. It
is death with them—decay, putrefaction. With the fruit
petals it is a transformation into another form of service.
The peony flowers produce no seeds—they
would not even if they had not been overtaken by calamity.
If left to spend their natural course on the plants, they
would have become sodden masses of decay sullenly clutching
at a beauty that had vanished. They are beautiful when they
are young and gay.
The seedlessness of the peonies is the
reason for the difference. The roses and the apple blossoms
fall away in an unselfish abnegation to make way for the
fruit. To paraphrase the profoundest truth of Christian
experience (Philippians 1:21) for the flowers: To them to
live is service, and to die is greater service. But not so
with the peonies. Theynever served any purpose but display
of their own beauty, and that betrayed them; in passing
away, they became hideous, and they left no fruit. Whenever
horticulturists have bred flowers simply for size and
doubleness and display, until the abnormal flowers have
completely lost their original purpose of fruit bearing, the
same putrefying "death" of the flowers is witnessed. But
flowers which, no matter how beautiful they may be, yet
preserve their function of fruit bearing are beautiful even
as they pass away. Young women who aim only at physical
beauty and pleasure might take notice.
