Gifts from the heart, flowers from my past.

We’ve got a long way to go before having cut flowers in the house are an every day occurrence; I do get the occasional bunch of them from Max and the girls, which I appreciate enormously but it is a long standing joke here (and I suspect in plenty of homes) to immediately say “What have you done?!?!??!?!” in response to being handed them. Although, in fairness, if people really did think that as an automatic response, perhaps florists in general would not do quite such a roaring trade. Maybe it’s just us?

Gifts between lovers and spouses and from child to parent come in all sorts of guises I guess. I’ve bought lots of flowers from florists in Exeter but not really for happy occasions. Most of our beloved lost are buried in Devon and we do tend to take them flowers. We take Max’s mum sunflowers and his Gran always gets an eclectic mix chosen by the girls while the florist winces and I try to forget the language of flowers information I have learned, given we ALWAYS do red and white together for her 😆 While I don’t get flowers from there, one of my most precious gifts from Max was bought on a whim when we stayed in the town, a tiny silver charm on a necklace the celebrated things being on the mend between us.

Back in the days when we were just a couple of studenty types of no fixed abode, Max didn’t visit many? florists in Milton Keynes either. Back then money was very tight and we spent nearly all of it just getting to spend snatched weekends together; the height of indulgence, sandwiched between window shopping and admiring the tropical fish at a local garden centre, was taking it in turns to buy each other a frozen yoghurt pudding from the little stalls in the most soulless shopping centre in the world. And you know, that was romance 🙂

You can’t put a price or a place on the three bunches of flowers that have meant the very most to me ever; a beautiful bunch of white ones sent by a supplier, the SCBU ones which just happened to match the colours most precious to me in my life and the bunch brought by my hairdresser a few weeks later because she had no idea what to say but wanted to just do something. I’ll not forget those bouquets ever, nor the people who sent them.

It’s the flowers from the florists in Leicester that please me the most. I grew up near by there and I planned a rather unusual wedding where it was really important that the flowers took centre stage. It isn’t everyone who emerges from the vestry to see a font has been quickly pulled into place, has a baby placed in her arms and stops the ceremony for a quick christening. Thirteen years ago, I broke the mould rather badly in my family and village by already having a baby at my wedding, it just wasn’t the done thing at all.

We made our wedding day very much our own; colours on a wedding cake (my Fimo skills came in handy for all those flowers) was quite shocking for the older members of the family and I think the tiny model baby tucked into a wreath of them on the second tier nearly cause apoplexy. Our choices of shocking yellow sunflowers and vibrant blue irises might have seemed irreverent in the church, but they made the day glorious.

And I think in the end, everyone agreed that the most precious flower of them all, really added something to the photos 🙂