Coloring book for up-tight flower people

Today is the last day of tax season, a date closely watched at the Phactor household; now it's time to help Mrs. Phactor unwind from the stress and work load of tax season. Perhaps there are more of you out there, not necessarily just tax preparers, but other people with stressful lives, people who need some help to relax, to cope. Well, here's just the thing a great mandala coloring book. A lot of the images are floral because such designs are based upon floral forms which themselves are based upon similar fractal maths and they are traditionally representations of the universe. The idea is to lose yourself in the satisfaction of coloring in these designs, to lose your stress within their dimensions. Mandalas (Link for your listening pleasure) are common place decorations to be contemplated in Indian temples. What calmness will pervade your being. Be one with these little universes.

Fall Clematis on display

While a bit weedy, fall clematis is quite a nice plant, flowering prolifically in the fall, thus the name, when many other plants are in decline, and prolifically producting seeds that quite readily invade neighboring gardens if the plant isn't deadheaded after flowering. But handled correctly it can be quite handsome. In this case, vines that are cut back tend to produce dense upright masses of flowers that can be cut and stuffed into a stoneware bowl as a bouquet with very nice effect. They actually don't smell too bad either, although not the most lovely fragrance.

Appreciation of flowers

The Phactor was thinking how it’s rather a nice thing to like flowers, and how apparently this is not so new. This came to mind when I found some nice concrete examples of floral imagery, as illustrated by this bas relief from Central Park NYC. The second image is from the archeological ruins of Troy. Other than the wear and tear of millennia, they are quite similar, and I quite doubt that any bits of NYC will look so good so many years after getting sacked by the Greeks. (New Yorkers: Be careful what gifts you accept.)

We humans so love the way flowers look that we decorate our properties, celebrate special events, declare our affections with flowers, and decorate with them at births, marriages, and deaths. Our connection to flowers is so ingrained in our psyche that the failure to appreciate their aesthetics is a sign of clinical depression. (Oh, dear what if you don't like this?) Apparently the human appreciation of flowers is nothing new. Pollen from bundles of flowers found in Neanderthal graves shows that honoring people in death has not changed very much over the past 150,000 years.


So what kinds of flowers are they? Any ideas?