I'm not sure what it was that Prince Charles had to say exactly, but it was probably something to do with talking to his plants, or something like that. It doesn't take much for him to receive a litany of abuse. I must say that I sympathise with him, however, and if it comes down to a choice between talking to a flower or Richard Dawkins there is no question as to the one that I would pick - and I don't mean pulling the focus of my conversation out of the earth in which it would be growing. 

It may be the fifth month of the calendar, May may be, but as every budding Beechgrove gardener knows, the weather is not yet to be trusted. Unless you’re prepared to protect them from frosts, don’t put your bedding plants out until June. The Chelsea Flower Show opens to the public tomorrow, but Gardening Scotland at Ingliston waits until the end of next week.

The exhibitors at Chelsea will spend £20 million, and as you may imagine, that’s just a small fraction of what gardeners across the country will spend in the next few months. As a nation, we love our gardens, whether private or civic. We love to beautify our surroundings, and happily choose to do it not just with stone and metal, but fragile life forms that we glimpse for no more than a few weeks of each year.

What is it that we see in flowers that makes them beautiful? The Qur’an says that in the things that grow from the coming together of seed and water, we see the signs of God. In the language of Islam, the paradise of the next life is known as the Garden, and from Shalimar to the Alhambra, muslims created wondrous gardens to give a hint of those pleasures in store for the deserving.

But as Prince Charles was reminded last week, to even talk of the life on earth that surrounds us as something sacred is to attract vitriol from the usual scientific materialists. Consistently confusing the words ‘how’ and ‘why’, they look for mechanisms and aspects of the world that can be quantified, and then insist that such descriptions serve as complete explanations for the universe and all its subtleties.

Yet love and beauty, honesty and justice, honour and courage,  areas of human experience that most people consider central in their lives, require a broader vision than the strictly scientific. Religion sets mankind in a context that is wider and more subtle, gives us a language to express our experience of the spirit within, and our understanding of our purpose through signs of God reflected in the creation around us.

God is Beautiful and loves beauty said the Prophet. Like flowers, we are humbled but not diminished in comparison to the infinite.