Once upon a time there was a scientist who had a back garden with flowers of all kinds, intermingled with weeds, because, when his wife left him, no one was left to take care of the garden. The scientist found himself spending a lot of time in the garden, but only looking, not doing, not gardening. Among the other things that irritated him was the fact that he was unable to respond to the flowers. They simply looked at him out of their flowerness, and seemed to ask him questions that he could not fathom. This reminded him too much of his own troubles, and he found the garden increasingly irritating. Retreating to his laboratory, and burnishing his mind on the increasing array of results indicating the possibilities of transforming the genetic structure of plants, he decided that the only way he would be able to connect with the flowers was to bridge the gap between himself and them genetically, since he could not do this spiritually. Eventually, after a great deal of work, he was able to transfer some of his own genetic material to a promising batch of sunflower cells. He planted the sunflowers in the now hideously overgrown garden, and they grew up spottily, but grew, and one day he sat down in front of the sunflowers and waited. Nothing happened, the sunflowers nodded, and the sun in the sky arched overhead and sank into darkness. The scientist thought about all this for a while, and then, in light of this failure, he determined to go the other way, to breed a child with sunflower genetic material. In order to do this, he had to go and see his long lost wife. Since leaving him, her life had flourished, and she had a new garden, all of her own doing. On the day that he approached her with his idea, she was out in her garden, on her hands and knees, digging away. He rang the doorbell, but there was no answer. Peeking around the side of the house, he saw her bent down, working away, the sunlight everywhere around her, and he involuntarily heaved a great sigh. She heard him, and turned around, sunlight everywhere. "What brings you here?" she said. And he was just about to explain his proposed project, when he was startled to see a small child approaching the garden with a toy shovel. The child was wearing a white pinafore, bedecked with images of sunflowers. "This is Perdita," said his wife, "isn't she beautiful?" And she was. "Is she --?" asked the scientist. "Oh, no," said his wife, smiling, "I had her created genetically." For a moment, there was a mingling of relief, horror, and surprise in the scientist's mind. Then he realized that she had been joking, and a great wave of bitter darkness fell on him. He sat for a few moments, looking at Perdita. "Well," he said finally, "I should be going." His wife looked at him for a moment. "Take some flowers, I have lots." She turned away -- "Perdita, get out of that!!" The scientist got up, and went home. He went out into his tangled garden, and dug a great hole, sprinkling sunflower seeds everywhere. Then he went into his laboratory, and made up a poison, returned outside again, lay down in the hole, poured soil over himself as much as he could, and descended into death. In the spring, in the abandoned garden there arose new sunflowers, some genetically modified, some rooted in the decaying body of the scientist, and growing firm and strong. And when summer came, and the wind blew, the sunflowers spoke, as they do, one to the other, but now with the whisper of strange new voices mingled with the old. And one day, the wife came with Perdita, and she looked at the abandoned garden, and she found a space by the sunflowers, and sat down with her daughter. And the wind blew, and she said, "Have you learned anything finally?" And the wind blew, and a sunflower nodded and said, "True flowers will only speak to true human beings." She smiled and said, "Yes, an exchange of dignities. Anything else?" The wind blew and the sunflower nodded, and said: "When we lose true flowers we lose true human beings." There was a long silence, and the wind blew high above the garden, and the clouds moved over and past the sun, and in the late afternoon Perdita got up and danced a little, garlanded with plaited weeds and flowers. And eventually, her mother got up and danced with her.