Confidential Flowerpot Convention
A confidential flowerpot convention on Easter Monday could settle all disputes between the flowerpot cohabitants and holier-than-thou rabbit. Although a full-length manuscript of rabbit’s lectures in the flowerpot could not be located, he took an unequivocal stand on some quotations which had been circulating since Easter Sunday and finally apologized in an acceptable manner. In the end everybody agreed that Easter Holidays had been pleasant and restful. The weather had been splendid with long hours of brilliant sunshine so that, all in all, one had every reason to end Easter in a happy mood.
The stumbling block to the preceding annoyance seemed to have been rabbit’s profoundly unjust way of addressing the flowerpot community in his annual Easter Lectures which he had actually announced as strictly botanical – without any bias toward wild flowers or cultivars. But then holier-than-thou rabbit had opened his speech with: “Distinguished President Hyacinthus, my esteemed Ladies Bellis Perennis and highly respected Nemesia Strumosa ‘Kumquat’! Be greeted, thou splendid Tulipan in the neighboring flowerpot! Dear group of half-faded Pseudo-Narcissuses right here under my nose!”
Addressing the daffodils as “half-faded” and “Pseudo-Narcissuses” obviously had a degrading twist and amputated the correct term ‘Narcissus pseudonarcissus’ into a lemur-like botanical existence. Rabbit’s words were – of course – taken as an outright offense by the daffodils. This was even more so the case when in the further run of his speech holier-than-thou rabbit maintained that the daffodils had not even been grown in native grounds as e.g. Wales which, as they all knew, had the wild daffodil as its national emblem. No, the bulbs had been re-imported from the Falklands! He additionally pointed out that the Falklands had recently started cultivating the so-called Welsh Wild Daffodils or Triple W and selling the cultivars back to Wales. Rabbit’s cruel remarks caused a great deal of fuss and disquiet in the audience which ended in complete uproar when he claimed that according to Lady Wilkinson’s classification of weeds and wild flowers from 1858 the Falkland N.pseudonarcissus should be categorized as weed!
After some wavering back and forth, however, rabbit apologized for his rudeness and his botanical misjudgement calling it “an unintentional faux-pas”. He addressed N.pseudonarcissus as his “beloved golden daffodils”, recited Wordsworth with great momentum and appeared misty-eyed when the daffodils tossed their heads in forgiveness into his direction. He promised to post some lines from the Wordsworth poem and not to mention the Falklands ever again.