06/09/2026
Here’s our Sunday Girl, Revd Ann Gibbs. This week her Reflection is called Wild Flowers. The photo is my own and includes toadflax from my garden (at the back of the bunch) – this was taken in June and the toadflax is still going!
“The earth laughs in flowers." (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
I have planted various flowers in the Rectory garden since moving in and most have grown and bloomed quite successfully. However, this year one has stood out and it isn’t one that I planted! No, this one decided to plant itself in an old pot that still had some earth in it and it has flourished there. The reason it has been so outstanding in my opinion is that it has been an absolute magnet for wildlife, especially the bees, and it has continued to bloom throughout the drought. It is the humble purple toadflax which is common in the hedgerows about here, a wild flower that has brought me great pleasure over the last few months.
There is something wonderfully reassuring about a wild flower. It does not need a carefully prepared flowerbed, rich soil or someone to tend it. It appears in hedgerows, cracks in walls, roadside verges and rough corners of fields – often in the least likely places.
“Wildflowers are the loveliest of all because they grow in uncultivated soil, in those hard, rugged places where no one expects them to flourish.” (Micheline Ryckman)
There is something of resilience here. Wild flowers seem to convey the message that beauty is possible even in difficult circumstances. They bend in the wind, survive poor soil and return year after year. They do not make a fuss about it; they simply grow. And perhaps that is part of their humility. A wild flower doesn’t worry about being the biggest, brightest or most impressive flower in the field. “A flower does not think of competing with the flower next to it. It just blooms.” (Koshin Ogui)
Last week at our Hedgerow Service we read an extract from St Thérèse of Lisieux in which she observed, “If all flowers wanted to be roses, nature would lose her springtime beauty and the fields would no longer be decked out with little wildflowers.” We need roses, of course, but we also need daisies, buttercups, poppies, clover, foxgloves – and toadflax. Each has its own beauty and its own purpose. As Heinrich Heine beautifully describes them, “Wild flowers are the lovely little bells of the bees.”
Perhaps we can find a lesson in this for us. We can spend so much of life comparing ourselves with others – wishing we were more successful, more talented, more noticed, more like someone else. Yet the wild flower does none of this. It simply becomes what it was created to be. Possibly, if we pause long enough to notice, a single flower can become something more than just a flower. “If we could see the miracle of a single flower clearly our whole life would change.” (The Buddha)
When I see a wild flower growing in an unlikely place, I do like to stop and look. It reminds me that resilience need not be loud, humility need not mean weakness, and beauty does not have to be grand to be precious. Sometimes the smallest flowers have the greatest lessons to teach us: put down roots, withstand the weather, do not compete, and simply bloom. Year after year they return to bring us joy and hope and the reminder that there is always the possibility of regrowth.
“All the flowers of all the tomorrows are in the seeds of today.” ( Native American proverb)
