The Cry violet, or the Viola cryana. Its purple blooms drew the fingers of lovers and of botanists. It grew in the kinds of rocks we have that are made of skeletons of marine organisms, like mollusks, which are small tender muscles housed in curved shells. We said we needed the rocks for our own homes. They died.

The unnamed flowers in The Rolling Stones song “Dead Flowers.” They grew from the sadness and grief of the singers. They spilled out of Mick Jagger’s and Keith Richards’s mailboxes every morning. They were born singed and curled. They died before the guitars were first plucked.

The daisies, or the Bellis perennis, that sheath Brigitte Bardot’s chest in Plucking the Daisy. They began to die when they were first cut, kept dying as the costume designer sewed them into a bralette, and starved while touching her nipples and the cleft between her breasts. In dying, they taught me about some of my hungers.  

The Maui hau kuahiwi, or Hibiscadelphus wilderianus, of the family of mallows. The murderers came to the island on ships launched from colder seas. Soon, little was left of the lava or the rocks that lava cools into, and nothing was left of the flowers. In the future, there will be a way to conjure the ghosts of these flowers’ smells.

Aside from going to the lab where the scientists create the scents of some dead flowers, or the installations the artists made with the scientists so that many can stand together and feel time and space blossoming, there are other things we can do.

For example, we can imagine. We look at photographs—like “Tree with daffodils” and “Flying insect with flowers,” which we’re sending to you—and watercolor within and outside of their lines to see them in another color, with another shape of petal or an extra stamen. We can dream ourselves into the most plentiful rocks and soils.

The trouble is that the human imagination, we’ve learned, can kill more easily than it can resurrect.