Do Beautiful Flowers Have a Purpose?

Walking through a busy and rather tired shopping centre this morning, I had just gotten off a rather mood lowering call. I moved through the dimly lit thoroughfare which took me from the run-down bargain basement stores to the food market area and there, right there, crowded as of in animated, busy conversation were bunches and bunches of confetti coloured fresh flowers. 
Instantly, I smiled. 
Straight away, I felt that all too familiar little surge of delight. Flowers. 
They sort of do that to you. 

An interesting study 'An Environmental Approach to Positive Emotion: Flowers', Jeannette Havilland-Jones 2005, found that when a person is given or experiences flowers in a communal space, they exhibit more signs of happiness and positive emotions than other stimuli. 

Why is that when really most cultivated flowers serve no real fundamental purpose other than to look pretty? I really am firmly in the camp of those who believe that the beauty of Flowers is a co-evolution response. Flowers need pollinators such as bees., other insects and animals to procreate but they need us to propagate. Humans can not only help spread plants faster but they can assist with great jumps on the evolutionary ladder as well. 

If you are a plant and produce flowers which smell attractive to humans and blossoms which stun them into desire then you are gaining to be wanted and not just in ones or twos. Humans will plant lots of you and work out ways to make you stronger, bigger, even more beautiful so that you may survive and prosper. 

Humans have been forager for most of their time on Earth and I found so much sense in Steven Pinkers discussion in his book,   'How The Mind Works' on this topic. If humans take notice of flowers, where they grow, when they grow and what they belong to, if they are Botanists in other words, then they will know when food in the way of fruits and vegetables can be expected. The emotional response we have to flowers is pleasurable. That little surge of positivity I felt in Marketplace may be this forager response to seeing flowers. I feel good, I'll remember these flowers and where I saw them. 
So what about flowers which do not provide food? 

We know that so many plants provide us with medicine, with materials for shelter, for tools and perhaps these too are indications for us, ones that we have simply forgotten. Maybe there are other attributes that we are only now slowly learning (or relearning) in such things as flower essences, aromatherapy, vibrational medicine but perhaps we simply have not gotten to the point where many plants have developed what we need or more importantly what the plant needs from us.

Maybe their beauty is drawing us in so that the co-evolution may being! 

May you always be a blessing to Nature! 
Cheralyn