The consolation of botany, or the significance of the pause.

BOTANY AND CIVIC INSECURITY appear, at first glance, incompatible. Most plants are sedentary. Patience distinguishes those who study them. For Kant, flowers embodied the idea of an end in themselves: they exemplified the autonomy of the aesthetic. "Flowers are free beauties of nature," he wrote, classing flowers under the heading pulchritudo vap,a. He meant beauty that eludes utilitarian evaluation. Among the meanings of vaga are "rambling, roving, roaming, wandering, unfixed, unsettled and vagrant. " So it is that a sedentary entity, the flower, received from Kant an epithet signifying an uncertain, migratory or nomadic status. 1