This Springtime, you may be, as I am, struck with the raucous beauty of flowers. One’s first Spring in a home is always an intriguing moment– you learn what flowers you have in your yard simply by watching what grows up from the dirt. We’ve been pleasantly surprised to find several varieties of tulips, some grape hyacinth, a few different irises, and something that we speculate to be some sort of lily all growing in the various beds surrounding our little house. Now, instead of hunching over my bowl of cereal in the darkened kitchen each morning, I take it out on the deck and spend breakfast watching the flowers yawning open to the sun.
These flowers are a gift left to me by those who lived here before I did. They remind me of a passage from Willa Cather’s My Antonia:
All the years that have passed have not dimmed my memory of that first glorious autumn. The new country lay open before me: there were no fences in those days, and I could choose my own way over the grass uplands, trusting the pony to get me home again. Sometimes I followed the sunflower-bordered roads. Fuchs told me that the sunflowers were introduced into that country by the Mormons; that at the time of the persecution, when they left Missouri and struck out into the wilderness to find a place where they could worship God in their own way, the members of the first exploring party, crossing the plains to Utah, scattered sunflower seed as they went. The next summer, when the long trains of wagons came through with all the women and children, they had the sunflower trail to follow. I believe that botanists do not confirm Fuchs’s story, but insist that the sunflower was native to those plains. Nevertheless, that legend has stuck in my mind, and sunflower-bordered roads always seem to me the roads to freedom.
The idea of a flower being left as a gift or a sign by a loving benefactor is not unique to this anecdote. Witness this Indian folk legend, which is also full of themes that resonate with Mormon lore:
Many, many suns ago, the Indians lived in great numbers in these valleys of the mountains. They grew corn and berries in rich abundance. As they increased in yield, the Indians became jealous of one another and tried to see who could gather the most food for winter living, when the snows were deep and cold. Then they warred. The game stick was replaced by the tomahawk. Many Indians were killed. The Great Spirit was displeased. He dried up the corn and berries. The children were left without food. The sky became dark with great clouds for many moons; the earth refused to yield; the sands blew over all the land. The Indians sorrowed and prayed to the Great Spirit. One day the sun shone bright up on the hills, and the people saw a little plant growing everywhere, even in the canyons and far above to the very peaks. The Great Spirit had heard the prayers of the people. When the Indians tasted the root, they knew the Great Spirit had saved them from death. Ever after, they refused to fight where the Sego Lily grew. They called it the ‘Little Life Plant of the Hills’.
Levi Edgar Young, The Founding of Utah
Most of you probably know the use to which our own people have put these pretty little flowers:
Between 1840 and 1851 food became very scarce in Utah due to a crop-devouring plague of crickets, and that the families were put on rations, and during this time they learned to dig for and to eat the soft, bulbous root of the sego lily. The memory of this use, quite as much as the natural beauty of the flower, caused it to be selected in after years by the Legislature as the floral emblem of the State.
Letter by Kate C. Snow, President of the Daughters of the Utah Pioneers.
What that letter doesn’t state is that many of the Mormon settlers also ascribed the sego lily’s abundance to divine providence, praising him for the forethought and generosity that scattered those seeds so many years earlier.
And here is the profound, sophisticated message that ties all of these thoughts together, to life, and to the gospel: Flowers are beautiful, and we should not be surprised when they signal the Divine. Springtime is a gift that lifts our heads from the dark of life to the brilliant light above. And finally, we can all do better at adding beauty and sustenance to the lives of others– even those we will never know– by dropping seeds of perennial radiance where we tread.