Brassica Oleracea

Like many country chapels, we maintain the tradition of a flower rota. Individuals, usually, but not exclusively of the fairer sex, elect to provide a bunch of flowers for a given Sunday. Having a fondness for flowers, I inspect and sniff each weekly offering. A few Sundays back, a most attractive purple flower was included in the bunch. On closer examination, it transpired to be a cabbage. So lovely were the pink-purple leaves of brassica oleracea, that its beauty naturally complimented the more traditional floral offerings with which it shared the vase.

We often regard flowers as attractive, but otherwise useless except for making seeds and feeding bees. Conversely, vegetables are useful but not particularly lovely to the eye. These cabbages were certainly an exception, if such a juxtaposition be fair. Having spent the Lord’s Day being admired in the vase, the sick person to whom they were later delivered might have popped them in a pan and eaten them for tea. Beautiful and nourishing, a picture of God’s word, the Bible, if e’er there was one.

He would have fed them also with the finest of wheat;
And with honey from the rock I would have satisfied you. Ps 81:16 (NKJV).