I read today that the number of flowers worldwide has been reduced from about 1,000,000 to 400,000. They did this to eliminated duplicates. I didn’t pursue the article, so I don’t know if the same flower in different colors would be treated as a duplicate. And I don’t know what their system was for putting together the 400,000, but I must say that 400,000 next to 1,000,000 seems rather small. Then I considered how many days there are in a year, and how long it would take to write a quick post about each flower, and the answer struck me quite differently. It would take almost 1,100 years. Eleven centuries. A millennium plus one hundred at the rate of one per day. So, if I started today, ignoring the posts I’ve already done, I would be finished, good health and long life provided, in the year 3,118. But by then, the number would certainly have changed. Could flowers improve in that time, or could we destroy them? The lessons of walking to the market and back every day have been both bewildering and frightening. Are we indeed superior or more important than these natural blooms? Have we no responsibility toward them? Is there nothing we can do to insure their future? Yes, I get kind of mushy when I talk like this, but numbers can lead us astray. The world is infinitely more diverse than we believe. I feel like I could post every day for the rest of my life and not even begin to capture the diversity of my short daily walk.