The Flowers I Never Grew Up With

On beauty, inheritance, and the quiet ways we learn to cultivate what life never gave us.

This is a story about sunflower seedlings, a small porch sanctuary, and the strange realization that healing sometimes looks like creating the conditions for something beautiful to keep returning.

This morning I was sitting on my front porch watching the squirrels and birds move through the yard like they owned the place, which, technically speaking, they kinda do, at least the front yard.

Over time, I have created what can only be described as a small bird and squirrel sanctuary. I put out food, they arrive with the confidence of tenants who have never once considered contributing to the home, and somehow we have all unconsciously agreed that this is now part of the daily rhythm of my life.

While I was watching them, I noticed a few small green shoots pushing through the ground.

I went over to look more closely and realized they were baby sunflower seedlings.

I only recognized them because this has happened before.

At my last house, I had a similar setup for the birds and squirrels, and every summer the yard would begin producing giant sunflowers. The seeds would fall, the animals would carry them, and before long, an entire ecosystem would appear.

The flowers would rise, drop their seeds, and begin the cycle again. There was something about seeing those seedlings this morning that made me pause. I have always had a strong affinity for flowers, but alas, I did not grow up with them.

There were no vases on the table, no gardens being tended, no fresh flowers bought simply because they made the room feel better. We did not have much, and beauty was never part of the architecture of our home.

Money came and went in our house, and so did the temperature of the room. When things were good, life softened. When they were bad, everything hardened. I learned early that survival had very little interest in aesthetics.

Flowers would have felt almost absurdly irrelevant in a home where everyone was trying to manage the weather of the adults. For a long time, I never thought about that absence. You rarely know what is missing from your life until someone else shows you what it looks like when it is present.

I have always had a strong affinity for flowers, but alas, I did not grow up with them.

I did not begin to understand the value of beautiful things until I became close to people who had made room for beauty in their own lives.

Through personal relationships, I began to notice the care people placed into their homes, their clothing, their surroundings, and the way they carried themselves. Beauty had texture and intention… it could make a space feel calmer, warmer, more alive.

A home could hold softness and flowers could be bought for no occasion. Beauty itself could be a form of care, and I had never thought about it that way.

People often assume taste is something innate, as though some of us simply arrive knowing what belongs in a room, and there is an epigenetic truth to that, but others are destined to spend the rest of our lives buying furniture that looks like it came free with our amazon firestick subscription.

A home could hold softness and flowers could be bought for no occasion. Beauty itself could be a form of care, and I had never thought about it that way.

A lot of taste is learned through proximity. Someone else shows us that a table can hold flowers, that clothing can become expression, that a room can have a mood, and that beauty does not always need to justify its existence.

Eventually, what was introduced from the outside becomes something we choose for ourselves… and that is exactly what happened to me, and somewhere along the way, flowers became part of my life.

I began planting them, buying them, photographing them, and noticing them in places I once would have walked past without a second thought. Then this morning, years later, I stepped into my yard and discovered that I had created an environment where beauty had begun reproducing itself.

I did not plant every seed… literally… the birds carried some, the squirrels buried others, the seasons did what seasons do.

Yet, I did create the conditions, and that thought makes me smile… and pause.

I had created an environment where beauty had begun reproducing itself.

Sometimes healing looks less like repairing the past and more like creating conditions where something beautiful can keep returning. We spend a lot of time trying to understand what happened to us, tracing old patterns, reopening memories, and searching for the precise moment something inside us changed, and there is massive value in that work, indeed.

There is also a quieter kind of healing that begins when we start placing different things into the world around us, almost as if we are teaching our environment a new language. We introduce safety into places that once held tension, consistency into spaces shaped by unpredictability, and beauty into corners where beauty once felt indulgent or unnecessary. Thus over time, we become caretakers of the very things we may never have been given, and something almost invisible begins to happen… the life around us starts reflecting the care we keep offering it.

A relationship can become part of that healing. So can a home, a business, or the daily architecture of a life. Whatever we return to with intention begins to take root, and whatever takes root eventually shapes the emotional landscape we live inside.

There is also a quieter kind of healing that begins when we start placing different things into the world around us, almost as if we are teaching our environment a new language.

The sunflower seedlings reminded me that every life is planting something, whether we are aware of it or not. Some seeds are placed deliberately, while others are carried farther than we could have imagined, taking root long after we have forgotten where they came from. There is something humbling in that, but there is also something deeply hopeful, because the things we inherit do not have to become the only things we pass forward.

We can introduce new material into the story. We can make room for softness, beauty, and a different way of living. We can build lives with flowers in them, and one day, without much ceremony, look down and realize that beauty has begun returning on its own.

About Deevo

Deevo Tindall is a founder, advisor, storyteller, photographer, and relentlessly curious human who spends his time exploring why people build what they build, why the obvious problem is rarely the real one, and how a better conversation can change the architecture of a business, a relationship, or a life. www.thebrandstoryteller.com