The question of floral beauty drives genuine botanical curiosity

Evidence

Why do they stand beside each other when they could grow alone? Why this particular pair? There are plenty of pinks and whites and blues dotting the fields, so is it only happenstance that the magnificence of purple and gold end up side by side? Einstein himself said that “God doesn’t play dice with the universe.” What is the source of this pattern? Why is the world so beautiful? It could so easily be otherwise: flowers could be ugly to us and still fulfill their own purpose. But they’re not. It seemed like a good question to me. … But my adviser said, “It’s not science,” not what botany was about. I wanted to know why certain stems bent easily for baskets and some would break, why the biggest berries grew in the shade and why they made us medicines, which plants are edible, why those little pink orchids only grow under pines. “Not science,” he said, and he ought to know, sitting in his laboratory, a learned professor of botany. “And if you want to study beauty, you should go to art school.” He reminded me of my deliberations over choosing a college, when I had vacillated between training as a botanist or as a poet. Since everyone told me I couldn’t do both, I’d chosen plants. He told me that science was not about beauty, not about the embrace between plants and humans. — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 147

Categorization

• XREF: Her ‘why is it beautiful’ question, dismissed as unscientific, is precisely the mode of attention the Soundscape course’s listening method calls for — attending to the more-than-human without utilitarian filter. — connects to: Curiosity is a forward-driving force generated by the gap between known and unknown; The plant species one notices reveals that person’s ecological education — Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac: With Other…, 165

Broader Connections

• Curiosity is a forward-driving force generated by the gap between known and unknown #expands (0.75)
• The plant species one notices reveals that person’s ecological education #expands (0.72) — Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, 165