Flowers have always fascinated me, for some strange reason. No, not for their colour, beauty or fragrance, but for their more earthly uses.

After referring to Pete Seeger's song "Where have all the flowers gone?" last week, I kept wondering what really would happen if flowers indeed were to vanish.

Well, we Chinese need not be alarmed, for unlike certain other Asian communities, we don't offer flowers in temples. We don't use flower garlands to welcome VIP guests. Nor do our maidens use them to add beauty to their flowing locks. In short, flowers (as found in nature, that is) are not part and parcel of our daily lives.

We mastered the art of making flowers with paper long before the plastic ones replaced the real thing in our living rooms, offices, showrooms and restaurants.

I accept flowers and many parts of the plants and trees they grow on are eaten as food, mixed with beverages or used as medicine jasmine and chrysanthemum tea, for instance.

I know, too, chrysanthemum can cure a cold, or that lotus flowers are used against sunstroke, insomnia and vomiting blood. Lotus roots are edible, as are its seeds, and they have medicinal properties too.

The list of traditional Chinese medicine can go on: Plum flowers are cooling agents, and good as antidotes for coughs and diarrhoea. Some orchids are known to cure lung disease and coughs. Azalea can regulate women's menstrual cycles. Narcissus and Chinese rose can heal bruises.

But can't all these diseases be cured, and much faster too, with Western medicine? And will we be all that poorer without lotus roots and seeds and chrysanthemum and jasmine tea? Not exactly.

Of course, there would be no bees and hence, no honey. We have sugar, don't we?

Moreover, very few people today use flowers as metaphors. Do we use "lotus" to refer to a person who has achieved success despite their poor background? Are the elderly presented with chrysanthemums to wish them a life of longevity? And isn't one of the greatest of Chinese virtues, modesty, dying with the lilacs in our midst?

To be honest, narcissus has come to represent the character of the same name from Greek mythology, rather than what the Chinese take it for virtue and elegance.

But there's more to flowers than just metaphors. They don't blossom on paddies, plants and trees, and we don't get rice, vegetables and fruit. How about that? We have been having fun playing with many of nature's laws for decades, even centuries, but thankfully we are yet to alter the edict of the flower. Call it flower power, if you will.

And nature's laws conform to Newton's third law of motion. Or, is it the other way round? We love to hate the ecologists who warn us of impending dangers. We treat them as the Iagos, instead of the Cassios, of the modern world. And what do we Othellos do? We still suspect the Cassios of trying to steal Desdemona (or the good things in life) from us. Shakespeare's was an epic tragedy, ours would be.

Or is it that we are resigned to our fate say, Marlowe's Faust (or Goethe's Faustus)? Have we mortgaged out lives to Mephistopheles just to enjoy a few years the way we want to? But who is this modern-day Satan? Is it called comfort? Or, is it luxury? Perhaps both.

Well the world may not end, as the Brutuses accuse the "alarmist" ecologists of warning. But it certainly would be a less hospitable place for homo sapiens, as it would be for the rest of the fauna and all of the flora.

And like Woody Guthrie wrote and sang in his "Talking Columbia Blues" more than seven decades ago:

Everything from fertilizers to sewing machines,

And atomic bedrooms and plastic-,

Everything's gonna be plastic.

Email: zouhr@chinadaily.com.hk

(China Daily 11/24/2006 page4)