Why People Find Flowers Romantic

The relationship between humans and flowers is special. Credible flower shops in Makati are aware that humans have always been strangely attracted to flowers even when they provide no physical sustenance and when resources are low. Humans have also put embodied and physical effort into growing flowers for their aesthetic qualities. Stone drawings of flowers were found in ancient Egyptian graves 120,000 years ago, were celebrated in festivals in Roman times, and, in China, were created in silk. As stated, this attraction is not on a survival level, as while flowers can provide some basic medicinal uses and serve as a sign of the fertility of the land, the main motivation for growing flowers seems to be aesthetic.

However, this goes beyond perceptual levels, as flowers are a multi-sensory experience that includes smell, texture, and color (and an embodied experience, in that one has to actively search for flowers with his/her body, to tend them, and to bend over them to smell them). The experience is also relational in that flowers from flower shops are dependent on man’s care; they have to be handled gently, watered, and nurtured. On all of these levels, the human interaction and the relationship with flowers seems to be an interesting example of embodied aesthetics. This perspective of the relationship between humans and flowers, and thus the incentive to grow them, is not well explored in the literature. Indeed, embodied phenomenology assumes that our live bodies interacting with the environment are at the basis of our phenomenological experience of the world.

Flowers are an apt example of being aware of the environment around us and of how we engage with the world through skilled interaction through our bodies—by using all of our senses. This happens through moving our bodies within space rather than only by contemplating the environment. Flowers, as described above, demand us to get close to smell them, to move towards them, to find them in nature, to water them, to pick them, and to carry them in our hands. All of this embodied interaction makes them excellent examples and receptors for the experience of embodied aesthetics. Tending to and enjoying flower deliveries thus enables us to interact. This behavior clearly creates positive emotions, as there is no survival-level incentive to engage with flowers. An exploration of this basic relationship to flowers may help us to understand how embodied aesthetics ‘works’ to enhance positive emotions in an ancient and enduring context of growing flowers.

As stated, aesthetic and embodied experiences include within them overt perceptual processes, but also, additional components that will be outlined below. Firstly, from an evolutionary perspective, the flower as a species uses, among others, the strategy of activating humans to grow and to propagate it, just as it activates insects with pollen. The plant thus uses its aesthetic characteristics to attract humans. In turn, for humans, flowers may evoke positive emotions, because they can help predict food-growing possibilities and/or may be used as medicines. They essentially show where man can live healthily. In addition, colors of flowers may be helpful in finding ripe fruit against a green background.

However, as stated above, when man grows ornamental flowers, this evolutionary motivation is lessened. People have always actively invested resources in growing ornamental flowers for delivery since ancient times. Secondly, flowers have a strong visual component. Vision is a multimodal process that entails the activation, not only of the visual areas of the brain, but also of sensory-motor, viscera-motor, and affective cerebral circuits. On this level, flowers activate multiple parts of the brain creating a stimulating, perceptual experience.

The repeated, compositional elements of flowers such as color, shape, and pattern that are repeated within the petal arrangement and within a group of similar flowers growing in proximity are helpful in providing the right amount of familiarity and innovation to calm but also to activate the brain.

Thus, flowers help us to actively organize perceptual experience. This visual stimulation, together with the ease of recognition and the familiarity engendered by symmetry in flower shapes, may stimulate the brain and be associated with improved mood due to a feeling of being able to make sense of the world. This combined element of familiarity and surprise is a basic component of aesthetic experience that is able to move us emotionally, activating both sadness and happiness. Thirdly, on a sensory level, this aesthetic perceptual pleasure in flower deliveries goes beyond vision to include smell, movement, and sensory stimuli. Flowers evoke a multisensory experience, as shown in watching flowers sway in the wind and their use in perfume. Fourthly, these sensory stimuli also stimulate autobiographical memory, creating a web of positive associations around flowers through former experiences with them or components of them. For example, color, smell, and shape connect to autobiographic memories and stimulate the recall and accessibility of long term memory. Autobiographical memory is important for this understanding of flowers, as flowers trigger a sensory aesthetic experience that connects to previous autobiographical memories of interactions with them.

These cultural levels cut through the strong sensory association with previous positive experiences as learned associations of flowers and shops. This may be the reason flowers are connected to positive social events, such as romance and celebrations within the context of specific cultural constructions of meanings. Fifthly, from this, flowers as embodied aesthetics become socially embedded. They enhance pleasant stimulation of the brain that is then connected to positive social experiences. This can be a central incentive of humans to culture flowers. In one study, positive emotions were maintained for three days after receiving flower deliveries and made people likely to smile and create more social contact when given flowers.

Flowers are thus connected to a positive, emotional environment for optimal psychological—and from this, physical—health. We tend flowers as we tend loved ones. The aesthetic experience becomes socially embedded and relational. People become happier when given a large bunch of flower deliveries by a loved one as opposed to when given money. The embodied sensory level of flowers seems to be connected to the positive element of relationship, from romantic and sexual, as well as to general positive, social interactions. From this, we can surmise that the aesthetic experience of flowers leads to the embodied and socially embedded experience of feeling connected positively to the world.

Finally, on the level of the connection between embodied aesthetics and resilience, resilience can be enhanced through focusing on positive thoughts and emotions. This may be a hint as to the real motivation behind cultivating flowers—to create a positive experience of the world. Indeed, art therapy and nature therapy utilize visual elements such as mandalas and positive images from nature to create a ‘safe place’ to regulate emotions. These embodied aesthetic experiences have healing qualities in themselves in that they reconnect to positive, social experiences through stimulating the mind, senses, and body to interact positively with others.

We saw that aesthetic experiences enable the regulation of physiological and emotional over and under excitation of the organism. This is expressed in theories of creative processes such as art-making or observing, enabling a mind-set of ‘flow’ and deep concentration, as well as regulated communication with others. Art-making and observing has been defined as an integrative activity that integrates left and right brain functions, and, as such, creates new neurological pathways between emotional and cognitive areas of the brain, enabling flexibility of thought, as opposed to the rigid, repetitive, or fragmented thinking when under stress or after trauma. These ideas are transferred to nature in nature therapy and horticulture therapy, both utilizing the outside to create this embodied positive interaction with the environment through immersion in the outside and in growing plants.