A Dwelling Place for Flowers

The Earth, brimming with water and air, is the “dwelling place” of all of us living things. On land or in water alike, every living thing lives with all its might, adapting to the environment it has been given.

Human beings, too, were born on this planet, and at some point met the plants that take root in the soil. The history of how flowers and people have been bound up with each other is endless, but it seems to me that most of the flower culture born into this world was conceived not from the idea of putting plants first, but for the sake of people.

For much of a plant’s stay after it has been cut from the earth, people entrust it to a vase. Yet it troubles me that, in so many cases, the variation among those vases amounts to nothing more than changes of texture and form.

I am filled with the wish that we must—as fellow inhabitants of this planet—come to imagine a “home for flowers”: one that enters more fully into their feelings and considers the functions and surroundings in which they themselves would feel at ease…