Flowers are attractive to humans despite giving us no reward - no fruit, no nectar. Their utility is reproduction: colorful petals attract pollinators to carry gametes so plants can reproduce.
So why did flowers become the symbol of love and affection, the gifted object, and not something else? There are so many objects that convey love more intuitively than flowers. The most obvious are food-related - think of handing food to your dog, a banana to a monkey.
Give a group of people - an isolated tribe with no cultural reference to flowers - the task of inventing a “symbol of love” from the nature around them, and each would come up with something, mostly to do with food:
- think milk for a toddler - nourishment, care
- think of a father hunting all day to feed his family - a hunting instrument could serve the purpose
- a more observant one might reference the dove or the swan - monogamous pair bonds for life
- a nest, a home, a cave could serve
But flowers, with all cultural, religious and mythological references removed, can hardly be justified as a symbol of love.
Back to the first grave
Let me take you back two hundred thousand years, to early mankind.
The funeral is possibly one of the oldest ceremonies we have - long before marriage. At first, like other animals, people would leave their dead behind and move on. Without the technology to know who was dead or not, we left what we thought was a dead body - and sometimes found out later that he was alive.
A mother didn’t want to let go of her son. She had seen a neighbor’s son come back after being left for dead, so she stayed beside her recently passed son. A day passed and the scavengers began to gather. She knew that if the vultures got to the body, it was over. What would you do in her place?
Dig a hole.
At first, people dug holes to bury the corpse where scavengers couldn’t reach it. But some scavengers could still smell the flesh and dig it up, take it from under the turab, the ground. What would you do in their place?
Exactly - you put stones on top, and the bigger the stone, the better. That would be the very first grave, and pretty much until today we do the same: we dig a hole, we bury the body.
This tradition spread from clan to kin. Then, somewhere in a camp, people began complaining of the smell coming from a grave - bacterial decomposition produces a terrible odor. Someone knew how to solve it: he went to the forest and gathered herbs and flowers with strong scents and laid them on the grave. That was the very first use of flowers on a grave - to cover the cadaverine odor, the odor of death.1
The clever idea spread; it was useful. People began bringing flowers and herbs to the grave daily - partly to check on the buried, partly to cover the smell. And pretty much until today, people visit their dead frequently, with flowers.
Years and generations later, children with no reference for how it started saw flowers beside their mother’s or grandmother’s grave, saw people keep bringing flowers - and began associating flowers with love and care.2
And eventually we used them at weddings - a wedding being a little bit of a funeral of one life and the start of another.
Now it's your turn to Root
Confetti to Funeral :) a hint:
flowchart LR A[Daisies] --> B[Flowers with spines] --> C[Petals] --> D[Rice] --> E[Birdseed] --> F[Confetti]