Flowers reads much more like a classical girls' literature work (think like Anne of Green Gables, etc.)

Considering the unconventional roots of yuri as a genre, I believe that it's the way it was intended by the series' writer, Shimizu Hatsumi. It feels like she is intimately familiar not only with milestones of yuri, but also with its' foundations - the "flowery" prose of Nobuko Yoshiya and the preceding boom of popularity of sentimental coming-of-age Western literature for young women (like Little Women, A Little Princess, etc.) during Japan's late Meiji era.

Sometimes it felt to me that not only specific character lines or their actions, but the actual story progression and the overarching narrative structure were deliberately intended as a metacommentary on the genre, its' history, themes, tropes and and its' public perception.

I would like to wait for Hiver before I will draw any specific and decisive conclusions, but at the moment I truly think that Flowers as a series often reads like a geniune tribute, a "love letter" to the genre. Not just in a sense that it throws subtle references (not really, maybe just a couple so far), but, more importanly, in a sense that it discusses those things I've mentioned via its' narrative.