The Importance of Flowers in North Korea

You write about your father planting flowers and that space in the garden could have been given to vegetables. Why were the flowers in some sense important? And was it because they were not materially speaking essential? I've never seen that much tree when I came to America in South Korea. In North Korea, we don't even have trees. They cut all like down the mountains and make the farm land. But he knew how to celebrate life. He knew the gift of life that he fought for his life until the last day.