A lovely bouquet of mineral flowers made of manganese carbonate was mined in Peru. We regularly return to this mineral because it has such a lovely variety of shapes and orangey pink hues, coloured by the manganese (seehttp://tinyurl.com/mkskvha , http://tinyurl.com/p5h4gpw and http://tinyurl.com/ozr72ue). This isn't the only mineral so sometimes crystalise in flower shapes, we shared a lovely rose shaped spray of deep blue azurite awhile back (http://tinyurl.com/okrwhtt) and a similar spray of desert rose (http://tinyurl.com/o443usl).
** An old tango--"Breathing in the scent of the rose" "As I breathe in the scent of the rose, I remember a shady garden, And the tender words, 'I love you', Which you said to me then.
** "...A rose was one of the few flowers, he said, that looked better picked than growing. A bowl of roses in a drawing-room had a depth of colour and scent they had not possessed in the open. There was something rather blowsy about roses in full bloom, something shallow and raucous, like women with untidy hair. In the house they became mysterious and subtle. He had roses in the house at Manderley for eight months in the year."
(Maximilian de Winter being quoted in Daphne du Maurier's "Rebecca")