Desert Roses

Vulcan's dry air cannot carry scent molecules very far, and nothing that evolved on that planet relies on scent for finding food or mates. This is why Amanda had planted such a profusion of Terran roses in her small garden in Shi Kahr. No one thought these bushy, ruffle-petaled white roses would survive in the red soil, but Amanda knew each plant intimately, knew which had tough stems and which needed support, which could go 25 hours without water and which could only last 22 hours, dabbled endlessly with piles of stone and small thermoplast windbreaks to create microclimates, trained them up walls until the entire garden wanted nothing more than to give up its luscious fragrance for her. The roses were intimately known and loved. Sarek learned about human love through the penetrating logic of their exceptionally sweet scent, Amanda's best argument in favor of pleasure.
Many nights Spock would see his father standing in the rose garden, on a little spot of glittering red soil not covered by moisture matting, surrounded by the alien white blooms glowing in T'Khut's gentle light. It was too dark to tell if his father's eyes were wide in wonder or slitted in ecstasy, and Spock was deeply ashamed for imagining his father in those unseemly states. But the little boy only knew that when he visited the garden, he felt overwhelmed at the existence of these roses.
Sarek usually did not accompany mother and son on their visits to relatives on Earth, and so Spock would be free to gaze at its gardens, forests, riverbanks, plummeting rain that freely filled the cup and quenched the thirst of its guest, at Earth's tumbling oceans, the tumultuous emotions of its humans, the mad diversity of its life forms, so many kinds of flowers scenting that humid cool air, ridiculously lush, the grasslands lying upon the planet like great pools of blood, the intimate folds of forested valleys sliding silkily beneath their runabout.
Later, when he had conquered these unseemly thoughts and emotions, Spock would take a break from Starfleet training to tour botanical gardens and memorize plant names. He met Leila while studying plant biology, and she taught him that he was not completely duty-bound to T'Pring. Still, his heart was not the soil Leila needed to flourish; if only she would have realized that.
But right now he is standing on a far-flung starbase and they have Terran roses, of all things. Beautiful, heavy-headed, lusciously-scented roses blooming in apricot and blush and deepest voluptuous red. And they are rare out here, the vendor wants actual money for them, and Spock fights the illogic of purchasing something that uses so many resources and will die within a week, but his hope that Jim will see, really see, is stronger and he find one perfect red rose, and he transports up with it in an opaque cylinder filled with preservative gas and waits for a moment alone with Jim.
He wants to tell him everything, about Amanda's love for the roses and how she knew each one, stem and petal and root. And that he knows all about Tarsus, and about the command decisions Jim never wanted to make, and the guilt that waits to gnaw his insides out like a worm, and the central core of duranium whose deadness scares him even as he relies on it constantly. Spock has glimpsed it all in the melds; he wasn't supposed to look but it always lingered around their joined consciousnesses, and the thing is he loves Jim all the more for it, every bit of it.
And then Jim is sweeping through the door with his smile and his irresistible sway that makes Spock thirst, and he is looking at the rose, biosphere Terra kingdom Plantae division Magnoliophyta, and he is taking it from Spock, class Magnoliopsida order Rosales family Rosaceae, and their fingers touch, subfamily Rosoideae genus Rosa, and it's enough to transmit just a fleeting image of Amanda's garden bursting into life, so that Jim understands the penetrating logic of Spock's love.