The most sincere flower: artificial flower

Is love sending a bunch of paper roses? Compared with flowers that wither and wither after a short period of splendor, perhaps a bouquet of bright artificial flowers can retain love more lastingly. The author of this article is a fan of artificial flowers, because in her opinion, the act of "kidnapping" flowers from their homeland and selling them in other places will make the flowers lose their color and lose their spirits, while a carefully crafted bunch of artificial flowers condenses the producer's full enthusiasm. Love.

When I profess my affection for fake flowers, I often feel as though I’m confessing a character flaw. They have, to say the least, a bad reputation. As decoration, they are considered tacky; as gifts, tactless. They are widely regarded as creepy and depressing—the association is with the debauched fakeries you’ll find on the lapels of birthday-party clowns and the sad sacks of nylon collecting dust in the waiting rooms of our laziest dentists.

I understand why people prefer fresh flowers—we imagine they’re individuals like us, delicate, one of a kind and all the more precious for the fact that their time on earth is limited. But real flowers aren’t quite as rare as they seem, nor quite as personal as we’d like them to be. Their authenticity —the essence of their appeal—is often illusory.

I’ve been having this debate for years with my mother, a hard-liner on the question of soil-grown flowers versus simulacra. Once, when I praised some handmades at a store, she told me that she found my worldview joyless and bleak. “That’s not how I raised you,” she said, and walked away as though she couldn’t even bear to see me standing next to them. Later, she summarized her position: “Why don’t you just put fake lettuce in your salad? I’m sure your dinner guests will appreciate it.” I have stopped trying to argue with her, and instead I’ve turned to sleazy methods of persuasion: I recently sent her a photo of some silk peonies and lured her into praising them before revealing their dark secret.

Regardless of what my mother says, I don’t believe that organic authenticity is really what we prize most in a flower. Take the Rafflesia arnoldii : It may grow in the wild, just as God intended, but it looks like a scary open wound and smells like a decaying rat. The artificial flower, on the other hand, may not have originated in the field, but it has long found a stately perch. Imitations were once prized by nobles, from the palaces of imperial China to Versailles, where Louis XIV’s courtiers are believed to have sought silken blossoms for the tops of their bed canopies. From these royal lineages to the more democratic-spirited creations of today’s artisans, handmade blossoms remain a proud tradition.

Maybe there’s a good reason so many people buy Eco Flowers. Maybe people are seeing beyond the supposed authenticity of an orchid, kidnapped from its true home, so that you can impulse-buy it at Ikea, only to watch it “bloom” on your dinner table in the dead of a New England winter. The people who ship soil-grown flowers from across the globe—which are the bulk of a roughly $31 billion floral industry—are the ones selling a falsehood; what authentic connection to nature could possibly arise from such a convoluted arrangement? And how sad that a flower, so alienated from its true home, is supposed to communicate feelings of genuine connection.
Handcrafted flowers, by contrast, make no pretenses. They are the sincerest of flowers, precisely because they are made—with intention, craft, ingenuity and quirky imperfection. Born in the heart and shaped by the singular hand of the gift giver, these artful flowers are the ones that most resemble love itself.