A response to the English Flower Garden as part of the Hamilton Garden Arts Festival 22nd February.

Unsurprisingly, it is difficult to write in response to a space you have never visited. However, I have always had an irrational love for flowers so I thought I could at least start with that. This is about my floral affliction: flowers I have received and how they made me feel.

What togetherness feels like
They are wild and wiry and crammed in jars at the centre of the room.

Six of us sit around a formica table in the Sunday summer of December. The boys are wearing Speight’s caps; we’re all wearing bare feet as we stretch out in our seats. The roast is almost ready and the light is leaving the sky. We are all slightly sunburned and sleepy as our drinks sink into their cups while we eat chips and wait for the oven timer to go off.

There are salads and sides on willow pattern plates and the meat is something from Nigella. We have pomegranate in our teeth and feta on our tongues and wine on our lips as we laugh about the weekend just been. We are full already but help ourselves to seconds – half because we want them and half because we don’t want it to end.

I insist on doing the dishes because all I bought was an epic fail of a vegan dessert that didn’t set properly in the fridge.

The clock hits eleven and I know I should go: I can hear reality calling. Everyone has retired to the lounge because they can’t hold themselves up anymore. On my way out the door, I turn to say goodbye: my friends on the couch all sprawled together, the open-mouthed windows and three glass jars of bright weeds from Nic’s garden in the middle of it all.

I’m so full of everything, I think as I drive home into the night.

What surprise feels like
They are tall and pink and green – weirdly my favourite combination.

How he knew that I’m not sure because I’ve only met him three times and once was in a sports bar in Southwest Sydney.

I’m standing by the photocopier at work. It’s raining. It’s Friday. The laser is humming on the glass when the doors open and the courier comes in with-

Delivery for Bel?

Everyone who doesn’t know me on my floor thinks I’m engaged. He props them on my desk while I sign for the bouquet. They cover half my computer screen for the rest of the day.

I heard it was an international delivery
I hear someone in the kitchen say.

They are so big and bright I feel like I’m carrying a baby on my hip on my walk home. At the traffic lights two women give me a ‘knowing’ smile -

this is probably what being a celebrity feels like.

I cross the lights and pass a party spilling out onto the street outside a trendy store. There is something inescapable about Wellington: everyone you know is everywhere and if you don’t know them you have somehow managed to pash their friend/flat mate/colleague/old boyfriend and consequently they know too much about you.

Did you get engaged?
A former flame jokes.
Yes
I laugh, and leave. I’ll leave it at that.

At home, on the hunt for a big enough vase I message the sender and he replies:

Yeah, I woke up this morning, went for a 5.30 swim in the sea and decided sending flowers to Bel, whom I’ve met all of three times was a good idea. Before I could question it, it was done.

And this makes me think of that Bub Bridger poem, which is also a favourite of mine:

Bring me daisies
that I will cram
in a bright vase
and marvel at

And really, I think, it's just as simple as that.

What a sad surprise feels like
They are cerise and mustard wrapped in brown paper.

The love is over. I am tired. I am wearing sneakers and a skirt because I am so uncomfortable with the heartbreak it’s the only way getting up and going in the morning was made easier. So you can understand my confusion at arriving home to a bouquet on my bed.

There is a card with them – the border inside is wide and I know he didn’t have space to say what he wanted to when he went to write, so instead filled it with small words of slight significance.

Congrats on six months into your job. I’m sure they can’t imagine their lives without you now.

They sit in a vase beside my bed two weeks longer than they should – until they are dried and sad and my flat mate clears them away one afternoon.

Enough. It’s far too late for these.

And as soon as they were there – they were gone. An empty reminder of how transitory even the best of things can be. Because even a bouquet of flowers with the best intentions can’t make up for what wasn’t given in the first place.

What knowing feels like
They are gerberas: black and orange and red.

Chloe calls out to me as soon as she hears the front door close.

You have to come and look at this.

I put my keys on the bench and rush upstairs. She is standing as though taking in a piece of art at a museum – hands on hips, head to one side.

For my birthday,
she says.

The flowers are drowning in two-toned yellow and purple wrapping paper. Amidst the flurry of Mongrel Mob colours there are bumblebees and butterflies protruding on springs. On top of things, it looks as though the bouquet had been walking out the door to a school disco in the 90s, stopped, and doused itself in one final blitz of glitter hairspray.

Oh my god Bel, what do I do?

She looks at me, I look at the flowers and back to her. Yes. We know. It definitely isn’t love.

Years later and I’m driving in a carful of couples. We are somewhere between Motueka and Mapua and other towns starting with M, all stacked in a four-wheel drive in our togs and sitting on towels and each others’ knees.

What would be the worst kind of bunch of flowers you could be given?
I ask the group.
Gerberas.
Everyone replies. A resounding gerberas.

What mystery feels like
They are long stemmed yellow roses.

        Like funeral flowers?
   My friend asks
Nah, more orange and stemmy than that.
Like, with daffodils? Like a Cancer Society bouquet?
    Nah, different, like a hand-picked colour kind.

There is no note when they are delivered (another surprise at the office – I am starting to worry everyone thinks I am sitting up at night texting boys hoping they will send me bouquets) so I call the florist incase it had been lost in transit.

She affirms the bouquet is intentionally anonymous and that she is bound by a florist’s code of ethics and is therefore unable to tell me any identifying features of the sender.

It’s kind of like doctor-patient confidentiality,
she says.
Wait it out. No one would ever send flowers without taking credit for it eventually.

It takes 10 days. I am in the midst of an ACDC concert when the sender reveals himself. My phone buzzes.

I sent you something recently, did you get it? Should have been the same colour of the dress you wore at the art gallery when you spoke there.

It felt like something I would have done for someone else.

What the opposite of aloneness feels like
This is a decoupage of flowers.

The ones on cards, in letters and drawings that have been given to me.
The neighbour’s lavender bush I pick on my morning commute.
The ghastly agapanthus that line my parents’ driveway.
The Mexican zoo of Begonia House in the Botanical Gardens – the only reliably warm place in Wellington.
The water lilies in the Lake District in Hanoi moving like sheets in the wind in the hot, hot humidity.
The carved carrot roses in all the Thai takeaways my friends and I have shared in hungover disgrace.
The rose in my name of a woman I have never met but carry in my face and the way I hold my pen.
The bougainvillea in Asia and the Pacific that makes me feel at home when I’m so far away from it.
The sunflowers that remind me of friends who are no longer living – I can sometimes hear their voices in the back of my head, when I am in situations, thinking things, hesitating -

Just say it anyway – imagine if you didn’t and then you are gone.

The fist of daisies I sent to Alice on Valentine’s Day.
The bunch of chrysanthemums I took Lisa and waited in her corporate PR foyer to give to her.
The jasmine from former lovers picked from under window ledges and put on my own.
The floral embroidery on the orange shirt my friend gave me before she went away. It looks awful on me but I miss her too much to give it away.

All of them, I love them all. The thing I about them I love the most is their ephemerality: one minute they are here and now they are not. It was beautiful while it lasted.