Flowers are sort of like people.

I'm not a botanist or a horticuluralist, but I do like flowers. I know nothing about them but have always enjoyed watching them come up in the spring -- a miracle! -- and appreciate them just for their unexpected beauty. When I was a kid in Texas, the tulips came up near my birthday, in April, but even before that, all kinds of flowers had lifted their beautiful heads from the dirt to announce that spring was here!

Lady Bird Johnson, wife of LBJ, sponsored a program to grow wildflowers along the highways of Texas, where I grew up. She had an eye for this particular gift nature gives us every spring, no matter where we live. The state flower of Texas, for the record, is the bluebonnet.

As I've gotten older, I've begun to realize that I like certain flowers more than others and am wondering why -- and whether it has something to do with me, the kind of person I am. And also how and why certain flowers differ from others.

One of my first observations, from when I was a kid, is that some flowers smell good and others don't. Why is that? Tulips, my childhood favorite, have no aroma. They are pretty, in all hues, but cool. You look, you cut and arrange, but you don't smell. And once cut, they die pretty fast in a vase (or in your garden). All their energy has gone into their looks. In adulthood, I found another flower like that, the poppy, whose unique orange color and wispy petals wowed me early on. But, again, no aroma. And another one, from a trip to California: the Birds of Paradise.

What kind of insect pollinates flowers like this? Are there insects attracted only to color? I can't imagine a bee hyper-ventilating over a tulip.

But then I thought: I've known women like that. All looks, cool like the tulip or sultry but aloof, and kind of Oriental, like the poppy, or absolutely gorgeous but way-out-of-reach like the Bird of Paradise. Beautiful in their own ways but not particularly inviting. Look but don't touch types.

I've noticed, too, that some flowers grow in groups while others don't. I don't think that I've ever seen daisies growing except in a patch: lots of them in a small space. The same could be said for others I can't name. They never appear except with large numbers of their own kind. To stretch my metaphor, are these like the girls -- or boys -- who only thrive when teamed-up somehow, who need lots of friends, a wide social network?

Sunflowers are an odd example of how this can go either way. There are more than a few excellent photos of them growing in numbers you can't calculate, whole acres of them. But do they really desire the company of their fellows, or is it just the way we plant them? After all, a sunflower can grow to six feet high or higher, all by itself, brooding in the sunlight, with a flower head so huge it droops over. A magnificent being that needs no company. So are we breeding them, as we do chickens and pigs, to please us -- tightly squeezed and too big -- when they would rather be on their own, growing tall and singular? I think they can go either way.

The state flower of Colorado is the columbine, which has no aroma but sports two sets of five petals each, one inside the other-- my favorite variety being white set into purple, with a yellow center. They are often found in small groups, but maybe just as often growing alone, or with one other of their kind -- and always (at least in the woods) in the shade. Their growing season is short, and their delicate beauty always reminded me of a poem; I think of them as the Emily Dickinsons of the flower world.

Also, there are some flowers that grow at certain altitudes, where others can't. I live up high, and tropical flowers -- orchids and those colorful monsters in paintings of Georgia O'Keefe -- just don't make it up here. They are meant to thrive in a different climate. If you go up even higher, you find flowers that can make it through any winter and come back the next year, but they are very small, tightly grouped -- as if against the weather and the wind -- and don't smell like anything. Tundra flowers. Tiny. It's a wonder they can make it through the harshest winters; maybe, like mountain people the world over, they survive because they huddle together. And
you can't dig them up and transport them to your backyard. They live where they live.

I wonder who pollinates them?

In additon, there are flowers that come up every year and others that die off every year and have to be re-planted. Why is that? Are they like those of us who like to be re-born every year and beome someone else? What's up with annuals?

Maybe the biggest question is this: Why do some flowers not only look good but also smell good? I'm thinking of the rose and the iris, particularly. They are both absolutely beautiful flowers that also have an intoxicating aroma. There are others -- lilacs, but with smaller flowers all in a group along a branch -- but none so extravagant as the rose or iris. These two, so far as I can tell, are set apart from the other flowers I'm most familiar with. They combine beauty and a sweet smell. They're like the Marilyn Monroe of flowers: looks and personality combined.

And what does any of this have to do with us humans? In the case of roses, I'm reminded of the marriage of Joe Dimaggio and Marilyn Monroe. He was a famous baseball player known for being cool and aloof, but he fell, head over heels, for Marilyn. They married. It didn't work out, but he spent many years after her death delivering roses to her funeral plot.

Maybe when we choose our flowers, we're not just attracted to those that re-inforce our view of ourselves -- daisies or daffodils for those of us who like to be in groups -- but also to those not at all like us. The old rule: opposites attract. Maybe the most gregarious of us sometimes favor those solitary flowers, like the columbine, which lives its brief life away from public view, showing its beauty only to those willing to search for it.

If I had to choose a favorite, I might have to go with the rose, in all its infinite varieties. (There are, as you are probably aware, many clubs devoted to it.) It is not only beautiful and aromatic, but it also is guarded by very nasty thorns that can bring blood to your finger in an instant.

The iris says, in all its stately beauty, "Love me for my majestic beauty and my perfume, but I won't be around that long." The poppy and the tulip say pretty much the same: "I'm beautiful, but if you put me in a vase, I'll die."

But the rose says, "You can leave me in the garden, or you can cut me down and display me in on your dining room table or you can let me dry out and hang me from a doorway -- but just don't approach me unless you understand the dangers."

Joe couldn't resist it, and neither can the rest of us rose lovers.

So when it's time to send that special person in your life a flower, choose one that is you, or one that is who you want to be, or want to project. Or choose one that reminds you of that person -- and hope that he/she interprets it correctly. Good luck.

Still, for lots of us, botanists and just flower-lovers alike, it's hard to resist the wild ones that grow all by themselves on our highways and bi-ways, in great proliferation, like the bluebonnets in Texas. Unfortunately, most (maybe all) states discourage or even outlaw picking them.

But we all have one in common that we can do with what we want, a most maligned mongrel in our own yards every spring: the lowly dandelion. A very pretty yellow flower -- and it really is pretty -- the dandelion sprouts wherever we didn't have anything else planned (or even where we did).

In fact, they may be the familiar flowers that best embody our most admirable human traits: they're attractive, durable, self-sufficient, well-rooted, adaptable, comfortable alone or in groups, and they never give up. They remind me of what Henry Fonda said about his fellow Okies in the movie The Grapes of Wrath: "We're the people. We keep on coming." So do dandelions, God bless 'em.

And I'm told the spiky leaves, the greens, are edible. This from a weed. Go figure.