Rector’s Note: Flower Power-7.17.25

This morning, as I was walking the dog with Jess, I looked longingly at the two raised beds that neighbors have planted with wild flowers in the bit of open space that serves as the public commons on our street. West Gorgas Garden! announced the handmade sign above. I wanted to spend the morning right in that spot, as the delicate collection of tiny blooms tugged on my mood, not unlike the pull of the dog on the leash.

Turns out my soul was reflecting something that people have always known, and that science has more recently confirmed – looking at flowers elevates our moods in lasting ways. I’ve noticed this on social media like BlueSky, where people are posting pictures of flowers as a way to help cope with the doomscroll of news that dominates the space.

In 2005, Rutgers professor of psychology Jeannette Haviland-Jones and her geneticist spouse, Terry McGuire, ran a joint study to research the effects of flowers on people. Compared to the gift of a candle or a fruit basket, the gift of a floral bouquet elicited what’s called the Duchenne smile – the true “happy smile” that lifts the corners of the mouth and shines out the eyes. It’s a way that researchers measure a happiness response; flowers elicited it every single time in Haviland-Jones’ study.

“When I saw that every person who got the flowers responded with the Duchenne smile, I thought, No, this doesn’t happen,” Haviland-Jones told the university’s Rutgers Magazine at the time. “In the emotions lab, you never get a 100 percent response unless you’re dropping a snake on people, which gives you a nice 100 percent fear response. But, happy? No.”

And she found that the feelings of happiness were still present three days later, compared to the other gifts. McGuire, a genetics professor, said the findings suggest that people and flowers have co-evolved, with flowers benefiting from people’s appreciative selection and repropagation over millennia.

All of which is to say that flowers have power in any season, and perhaps that is why so many people are drawn to their gardens, especially right now. My neighbor relies on the beautiful patch of flowers that she has planted around her corner townhouse to ease her ongoing grief after losing her son three years ago. The quiet riot of vibrant blooms reminds me of the size of her sorrow, and the powerful medicine that she has surrounded herself with to get through her days. Flowers indicate a will to live, one of their many gifts back to us.

This note is mostly a reminder to myself to dedicate a bit more time in my daily walks in the presence of the blossoms my neighbors have planted in their front yards. Perhaps, like me, you are struggling with moods brought low by loss, or the state of our world right now, or other challenges. “Take some time to smell the roses” seems like an unbearably trite response right now, but at the same time, I’ll do about anything to find ways to subvert the ugliness in the world with beauty and joy. Therapy helps too, and practicing the fiddle, and playing board games with my spouse, and walking the dog.

“Consider how the wild flowers grow,” Jesus says in Luke 12:27–31. “They do not labor or spin. Yet I tell you, not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today, and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, how much more will he clothe you—you of little faith! And do not set your heart on what you will eat or drink; do not worry about it. For the pagan world runs after all such things, and your Father knows that you need them. But seek his kingdom, and these things will be given to you as well.”

This is old wisdom, this appreciation of flowers and their divinely ordained co-evolution with us. Tended by God and gardeners, they reach out to us with color and shape and scent to bid us to seek God’s reign over earthly ones. Pause. Breathe. Soften. Unclench, they say in their quiet way. Set your worry aside.

And if I find myself responding with a Duchenne smile, I’ll know their medicine is working.