What is Your Favorite Flower?

"For we are to God the aroma of Christ and through us spreads everywhere the knowledge of him." 2 Corinthians 2:14

Dad and Janne helped Tim and I get some basic landscaping planted last year for our new house. Considering our little plot of land was a tobacco farm three years ago, and we live in an area known as "the sand hills," landscaping can be be quite a challenge! But the little white blossom cherry trees, our sugar maple, and the gardenias have done beautifully.

My favorite vegetation is the frangipanier. Sorry, I have no idea what it's called in English; I only know the French name. It's a tree that grows in tropical climates, like SE Asia and the tropics, with sweet, fragrant, white blossoms with yellow centers. They smell so pungently sweet that we derive our English word frangrant from them; my nose can detect one of these trees from blocks away. (http://www.aujardin.info/plantes/frangipanier.php)

My most vivid memory of frangipanier is from a visit to Tuol Sleng in Phnom Penh (otherwise known as S-21). Tuol Sleng, where thousands of Cambodians were tortured by the Khmer Rouge in the 1970's, is now a dilapidated tourist site, left-for the most part-exactly as it was the day Pol Pot walked away from it. There are torture devices rusting in the interrogation cells, and walls of photographs of the prisoners who stayed there, women and infants included. Yet, in the midst of this mire of misdirected human history are dozens of frangipanier trees. I remember standing once on the second story of the prison, just outside of a tiny cell where rats still frequent, looking down at a young Cambodian girl-maybe three years old. She wore a yellow dress and was dancing on the grounds, skipping from tree to tree. She stopped to gather the fallen frangipanier blossoms, smelled them deeply like a patient sucks into a mask who is desperate for oxygen, carefully put them in her hair, and danced some more. Truly, a heavenly fragrance in the hands of a child can drive out all echoes of evil.

Gardenias aren't frangipanier, but they are of the same family, and gardenias grow successfully in America. Since they are of the same family, the scent is similar to that which I gather to wear in my hair whenever I'm in SE Asia when passing a blossoming frangipanier. Our front yard gardenia bushes are just beyond full bloom-when I think plants smell the sweetest, though they are starting to wither-and whenever I step outside I am reminded of my second home, my son's first home: Southeast Asia, and of how beautiful is the fragrance of Christ.