My birthday is on October 16th and I truly appreciated your post. "Who does not love the beauty and serenity of flowers" yes, and decorating with flowers is "a way to bring in the healing essence of nature" How eloquently put! Thank you for writing your post. Libra women love to received flowers as gifts but we also quite enthusiastically buy flowers for ourselves as well. Good point. I am also very fond of orchids and vanilla, I did not know that vanilla came from orchids, how interesting! On occasion I have bought large bouquets of orchids in variety for myself or close friends. They are always mesmerizingly beautiful. I just wrote a rather long post entitled "classy gifts".