Of course I don’t have a favourite flower, but this is it.
In 2016, in April, at the end of a trip to Greece, I drove a long way round back towards the airport, though Parnon, or Parnonas, in the Peleponnese. After the beautiful forests of the Taygetos mountains above Anavriti, with both ancient black pines and thousands of young saplings, I quickly found mself driving through the aftermath of a terrible fire. Seven years on, and still desolate.
There were signs of regeneration in young firs, but no pines.
Look how the hard knots resisted the fire:
Then in a shallow bowl of a valley I came to a small orchard of walnut trees which had somehow survived, and some tulips were scattered among them:
Now it seems to me that in the short life of a tulip flower I had chanced upon the perfect day.
For a more detailed account see in the Peloponnese
like a little black book 
Funnily enough I’ve just come in from the garden where I was moving bulbs from some old pots into the garden soil. Most likely some of them are tulips but not so elegant as this one and their story not so poignant. We’ll see next spring if they are survivors of neglect (imprisoned in pots) in a suburban English garden.