Domesticated Flowers Then and Now

There's not a single human culture on Earth that doesn't appreciate, cut, and use flowers to decorate their homes, bodies, and environments. From your local Tulsa florist to Delhi, India, domesticated flowers and humans are found together everywhere.

A Brief History of Domestic Flowers
Flowers evolved as a way to help plants
reproduce, and paleobotanists have discovered small, herb-like flowers that date back 120 million years. Scientists believe that flowers date back even further than that, probably to 250 million years ago. These original flowers were not the same as the domesticated, cut flowers you find at Tulsa florists today. At the dawn of agriculture, mankind realized that flowers seemed to play an essential part in growing their crops, and it was to help their crops grow that the first flower gardens were intentionally planted. A few thousand years later came the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the first large, royal garden planted just for the sake of beauty. By medieval times, every castle contained within it a garden that grew medicinal herbs and flowers. The herbs were for healing the body; the flowers, we can presume, helped to heal the mind. During the Middle Ages, flowers had already woven themselves into the human imagination as symbols of love, purity, renewal, and so forth. In 1260, a Dominican friar by the name of Albertus Magnus wrote the first description of a garden used only for flowers and pleasure. Meanwhile, on the other side of the globe, flowers worked their way into Asian culture. Over 2,500 years before the chrysanthemum appeared in the West, the Chinese were cultivating the flower. They named it “chu hua”, and it was the official flower for the month of October, as well as the badge of the Chinese army. The chrysanthemum is not the only common flower we owe to early Chinese botanists. As an example, one ancient Chinese emperor was so enamored with roses that he owned more than 600 books on the subject of roses and their cultivation.

Flowers Today

 Today there are about 270,000 varieties of domesticated flowers. Thanks to generations of gardeners and botanists who helped create these flowers, Tulsa flowers at a florist today include many blooms that are not native to Oklahoma or the US, from tulips to carnations. The ancient Romans could only dream of a bouquet that included flowers from multiple continents. Yet, our society has the luxury of any flower delivery Tulsa service being easily able to bring the entire world treasury of flowers to your doorstep.