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With Cocol visiting Lexington, KY, I joined the Albright Alumni Association’s trip to Longwood Gardens, my first visit there (!). It was a rare June day. And one appreciates the investment and efforts that have gone into the gardens, fountains, collections, and grounds. I knew that flowers are beautiful, to both humans and pollinators. It’s what they do. But rarely has that beauty seemed to me so philosophically challenging. As a photographer I’m often seeking out a beautiful perspective, but at Longwood, and particularly in the Orchid House, there was no seeking. Instead, these blooms reached out aggressively, flaunting their colors, patterns, and forms. I didn’t choose which to photograph; I had no choice but to photograph them all. I found myself reflecting on Generative AI and the challenges it presents academic honesty, employment, human originality, and freedom. But nothing that Artificial Intelligence might generate, it seemed to me, could match these orchids, these natural creatures, for surprising visual originality. Angiosperms aren’t artificial. They’re also not intelligent; don’t need to be. Then I thought of Scripture’s most subversive admonition: “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: yet I say unto you, that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.” We humans, perhaps inevitably, exaggerate our own beauty, our own importance, our own dominion. A half-hour in the Orchid House humbles us, and corrects those misimpressions.