For Spring? Groundbreaking

Florals

Because she’s iconic

• 🥘 Bright soup.

  Caroline Chambers
  at What to Cook When You Don’t Feel Like Cooking is one of my favourite food writers here on Substack, and her bright butternut squash, red pepper, and garlic soup yesterday was exactly what I needed to load up the soup maker and make a version of it myself. (I’ve used Caro’s photo; hers is much more photogenic than mine!)

• 💭 Thinking about the future. Okay, so this isn’t a ‘thing’ - but - this week, I accepted my place on the Master’s course I’m taking a sabbatical to study next year (!!!!!), and I’m so excited to dive back into student life. I have been browsing through the students’ union website thinking about which student groups I might join in with - while reminding myself I do actually need to leave enough time to actually study for a degree…

• 📕 The World After Alice by Lauren Eliza Green. This was a fantastic debut, which I got a review copy of from NetGalley (thank you, Michael Joseph/ PRH!). It left me feeling wrung-out, but in a good way - I’d describe it as ‘Little Fires Everywhere meets Seating Arrangements’) (Amazon - ad, affiliate link)

Having a flower name (let’s not get into the fact that lilies are often funeral flowers - more on that later), it’s lucky that I like flowers. And especially in spring, it’s lovely to see bright colours jumping up, unrestrained, everywhere around the space. Over winter, frivolity is about defiantly keeping out the dark with candles and glitter and tinsel - but now spring is starting to show its face (broad sunshine in Bristol today - I have been wearing sunglasses! - after unexpected snow yesterday), all we have to do is open the windows and bring some of the outdoors inside.

Christmas seasonal treats are often rich and dark (mince pies…), but in Spring we get cute little Easter cakes, spiced biscuits, and hot cross buns. In particular, I’m loving the St Clement’s (citrus) and honey hot cross buns from the Sainsbury’s Taste the Difference range, though none of them have made it into the toaster yet… Oh, and I can’t ignore the flower- and bunny-shaped crumpets M&S are selling at the moment… and the ‘dippy egg mini whips’. (Psst, if you’re in the UK, celebrating Mothering Sunday next weekend… M&S have free delivery on their food and drink hampers right now!). Just watch me put the ingredients for these cookies in next week’s grocery order…

My parents sent me some flowers to celebrate my confirming my Master’s degree place, and I took the opportunity to build the Lego cherry blossoms my brother gave me for my birthday too - I love how calming it is to spend a few hours building Lego with an audiobook going in the background.

I’ve read a few books lately which have talked about the language of flowers - a traditionally feminine art but one which can be used for all sorts of purposes. The heroine of Laura Wood’s A Season For Scandal is a florist named Marigold Bloom (delightful) and the implications of different, um, blooms are used throughout to drive the story forwards. Then in Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries, by Heather Fawcett, an appreciation of flowers is part of the lore of the natural world in which the faery story plays out.

And that brings us back to the meaning of lilies. While their ‘strict’ meaning might be majesty and purity (shh, no sniggering in the back), in British culture they are funeral flowers, symbolic of death and grief. I didn’t learn this until I was in an English class when I was 15, doing a deep reading of John Keats’s La Belle Dame Sans Merci. Here’s an excerpt (the full poem is worth a read - I’d forgotten how dirty it is!):

O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
So haggard and so woe-begone?
The squirrel’s granary is full,
And the harvest’s done.

I see a lily on thy brow,
With anguish moist and fever-dew,
And on thy cheeks a fading rose
Fast withereth too.

Having been more than a little weirded-out by that discovery, I didn’t think of it much for another four years. I was starting my second year of university, and, because I was volunteering on Freshers’ Week, had moved into the shared house I was living in that year a few days before my housemates. One morning, there was a knock on the door. I wrapped my dressing gown closer around me and stuck my head out. There was a man standing on the step holding a circular arrangement of flowers.

Pretty much exactly like this one.

“Funeral wreath…?” he said.

I blinked.

He confirmed my full name, and checked he was at the right address. Yes, and yes. I took the wreath from him, put it on our kitchen table, then made one of the oddest phone calls of my life.

“Mum… is there any news I should know…?”

“No, why?”

“No-one’s died…?”

“What?”

“I’ve just had a funeral wreath delivered to the house…”

After a few seconds of confused silence, she said, “I know what’s happened. Are they lilies on the wreath?”

My very generous uncle had phoned a florist close to my house and ordered something like ‘a bouquet of lilies’ as a housewarming present. Somewhere along the line, the exact order had got lost in translation, until I was left blinking on the doorstep, in receipt of an arrangement of funeral flowers.

I’d love to hear any similar stories you all have about getting the language of flowers wrong (mistranslations, shall we say…?)

Speak soon,

Lily

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If you liked this, you might like last spring’s mini Easter cheesecakes:

Or this ode to the frivolity of the Girl Internet: