The Lowly Weed and the Royal Rose

“We are all basically common, you included,” said the chortlewort to the disdainful rose, “so don’t flatter yourself. You’re pampered is why you’re well-petal’d and pretty.”

            

“I beg your pardon,” said the rose, “I’m a Beauty, even a national one. ‘Pretty’ is a put-down word, and it shows you’re jealous.”

            

“Well, we have flowers and florets too,” said the weed, “but not so much of the show-off kind. Don’t you know you’re just a simple sport? Apart from odd, you’re fragile and frail, none of you can stand hard rain or hail, your stems are weak and you lack firm rhizomic foundation.”

            

“Oh,” said the rose, “did you stay up all night to get that wording and the sound just right? It’s what we’d expect from a reverse low snob coming out of the swarming undergrowth. You’re bedraggled and foul and noisome and noxious, and it would do the world good if you were dead. O, did I leave out obnoxious? I didn’t mean to, I want you to get the whole story, you loathsome revolting mourning glory. Did the spelling of that last go over your head? Enough! You fungoid mass, you ground-clutching loud-mouthed, total k-vetch, the lowest of the low class, assault-of-the-earth, demon-in-the-rough. I said, Enough!”

            

The chortlewort was so taken aback by this ongoing stream of vituperation, this fluent and whelming royal attack, that he turned instantly subdued, cast under a pall, no longer capable of apt reply.

            

Too bad. The weed is lowly, our wild botanical peasant, but he might have answered haughty Queen Rose in simple verse—

         

Moral:  Weeds are the flowers that people disdain

                    and flowers the weeds that they choose to maintain.