While flowers may be the point, they would not exist without the work of the leaves. Courtesy photo/Rachel Lovejoy

As though it happened overnight, our world is green again. Dense lawns and rolling fields, lush treetops and thick shrubbery, all throw their own unique and individual values across the canvas as summer once again draws nigh. My flower beds have gone from tentative and hesitant to tall and bursting in just a matter of days, or so it seems.

Aside from the scarlet petunias I bought and put into a pot and the purple flowers on my chive plants, the garden is still predominantly green. A few Dutch irises have bloomed and faded, the daylilies are only now producing their budding stems, and the first few evening primroses are blooming. Of course the cow parsley continues to insinuate itself among the “real” plants, and this year, I see some wild yarrow making an appearance, too. Otherwise, the leaves and foliage of the plants still dominate, and they can provide a beauty and charm that is all their own.

While flower gardening is all about producing eye-catching blooms that add color to our world, none of it would be possible without the contribution that a plant’s leaves make to its very existence. The same could be said of roots and stems, the former being completely hidden from sight and the latter not that remarkable in most cases. But leaves? They are to a plant what our lungs and our stomachs are to us, and even their very design suggests as much to the interested observer. Unlike us, however, plants have the ability to make their own food, and it’s all done with the help of the sun.

Most leaves are proportionately sized to the type of plant they appear on. But each plant produces them in numbers that will be sufficient to produce the amount of energy it will need to grow and thrive. Some plants have just a few leaves while others seem to be made up of nothing but leaves. In the case of a few leaves, those are usually large and wide to provide enough surface for the sun to do its work of helping the plant make food. On plants with smaller leaves, they are usually more numerous, for much the same reason: more leaves means more for the sunlight to work with for purposes of photosynthesis, which is how plants manufacture their own food.

And that’s what leads to the reason that most leaves are green, due to the presence of large amounts of chlorophyll in their cells. This is where the sunlight comes in, as it is the force that triggers the production of sugars in the plant, enlisting the aid of the green chlorophyll cells, or chloroplasts. And the leaves, not getting the credit they deserve, are the crucial front-runners in the process. An interesting side note is that, not only do plants use the sun’s energy to produce their own food, but we also consume solar energy every time we eat something that grew on a plant.

Another fact that points to the importance of leaves is the huge industry that has arisen around the practice of keeping house plants. While many do indeed bloom if given enough sunlight, house plants are primarily grown for their foliage, not only to bring a bit of nature inside to enhance indoor décor but to filter and purify the air as well.

Yes, flowers are lovely, and they are indeed the point of any plant growing at all. But their beauty was never intended just for our benefit. If not for their loveliness and their stark contrast to the very vegetation that produced them, pollinators would not be attracted to them, and they would cease to exist. Which points to the close and crucial relationship that exists between flowers and the foliage that cradles them: neither could exist without the other. And that’s reason enough to celebrate them both.