Flower child

Flower child originated as a synonym for Hippie, especially among the idealistic young people who gathered in San Francisco and the surrounding area during the Summer of Love in 1967.

The term originated in the mid-1960s in the wake of a film version of H. G. Wells's The Time Machine that depicted flower-bestowing, communal people of the future in a story characterized by antiwar themes.

American political activists like Allen Ginsberg and Abbie Hoffman advocated the giving of flowers as a means of peaceful protest.

[10] After the January 14, 1967 Human Be-In organized by artist Michael Bowen (among other things, announcements told participants to bring flowers), as many as 100,000 young people from all over the world flocked to San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district, Berkeley, and other Bay Area cities during the Summer of Love in search of different value systems and experiences.

In his book, Prometheus Rising, the philosopher Robert Anton Wilson suggested that the flower children could be viewed in Jungian terms as a collective social symbol representing the mood of friendly weakness.