The Disquieting Threat of Hazardous Blooms

I avoid florists, not the people, who generally speaking, are polite and quite unremarkable. I write of those floral gangsters; the vainglorious gladioli, eugenically forced greenhouse geraniums with their large shar-pei heads. Garish claustrophobic hosts pressing in. My center inwardly trembles when confronted with Pelargonium posses all the heavy menacing smells of the over-cultivated. Charles Darwin, thought these latter-day angiosperms as, “an abominable mystery.” They are life-forms born of missing links, genetically modified to eat oxygen out of human brains. Dogs and cows are immune to their deleterious charms, but we who are drawn to color and form, sniff them out, as if they are the hard drugs we were once cautioned never to reach for. O you Peony, you Day Lily, you seemingly innocuous bunches of Mums, I see you, you smug mobs, and I cringe away rather than buy my sweetheart yet another monstrous spray.