About the Whole Flower, Bee, Playground, Child, Community Analogy
“A flower is simply a weed with a good marketing budget.” – Rory Sutherland
A weed gets no love, but a colorful flower gets bees. More bees, more pollination, more flowers. The landscape is enriched with beautiful weeds; eh … flowers.
But it’s not just flowers. These bees will pollinate and fertilize other plants that produce seeds, and the entire habitat continues to grow and thrive, supporting other animals. Life proliferates harmoniously.
Without these flowers, there would be no bee activity, and no pollination or fertilization of more than 70 crop species out of 100 that feed around 90% of the world’s population. No honey either. Our world and lives would become much harsher, bland, and devoid of many things.
Because of these well-marketed weeds, the bees get excited and that communicates joy and excitement to other bees that also visit the flowers and that’s how all of this works. Everything is positively affected exponentially.
To paraphrase Mr. Sutherland, a playground is a park with a good marketing budget. It makes the landscape more attractive, just like a flower to the weed. It’s not that much of a stretch, but the point is that a playground brings more kids, which excites other kids to visit and play.
This spreads joy, health, social skills, happiness, positivity, fitness, friendships, learned cooperation, risk taking, resiliency, and stress relief. Yes, children experience and hold more stress than we’d like to admit.
They get better sleep, it strengthens their immune system, and their brains are more prepared for learning. Beyond the children, there’s the community. A park with a playground increases property values, which means more property tax and therefore more funding for better maintenance, beautification, and growth and the ecosystem proliferates positively.
And it’s not just playgrounds in this respect: Shade structures, shelters, site furnishings, outdoor fitness equipment and so on, are like planting flowers, whereas they add something beautiful and useful to the landscape that attracts more “bees”. More “bees”, more “honey”, more growth and so on.
Let’s plant some flowers.