Reconsidering flowers

“Nobody sees a flower really; it is so small. We haven’t time, and to see takes time - like to have a friend takes time.” - Georgia O’Keeffe

I never used to care much for flowers, didn’t relate to the passion so many people have for them, for bountiful bouquets, for how they seem to lift people’s days like cloudless weather.

My Nana would walk with my sister around the neat edges of her back garden, stopping every few feet with names and facts and a pointed finger. Meanwhile, I’d trailed off back to the house.

Maybe it was the bright colours - like an insistence to look and be applauded, a beauty so loud and obviously there, piled high on a plate. Too high, perhaps.

Then the world turned inside out in 2020 and suddenly I needed them. Peonies, specifically. I can only assume the depths of an Instagram scroll had planted the seed. Whatever the reason, I began counting down the days to them - to all six stems, delivered to my door.

They were beautiful when they arrived, upright in their tightly-packed buds like lollipops, through to their fluffier days when it became impossible for my hand to not land on one each time I walked past the coffee table, fitting so satisfyingly in my palm with a gentle little pat.

They gave me a week of focus and a sense of creativity I felt I’d lost. And when their beauty turned elsewhere, that’s when my camera came out; petals pointing in different directions, all splayed out, and almost unidentifiable for the flower they were. I photographed them during the last of the light at the end of their life, like a sitting portrait of something I’d finally come to appreciate.

“How can I describe my life to you? I think a lot, listen to music. I’m fond of flowers.” - Susan Sontag

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