I’ve always had an interesting relationship with flowers. It’s not to say I don’t like them, but I’ve always had difficulty grasping a lot of the customs and rituals around flowers. Why do people buy them and place them in vases only so they can die?
I wandered lonely as a cloud
I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud, William Wordsworth
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils
William Wordsworth’s poem about daffodils is perhaps my favourite poem of all time. Growing up in the Lake District in Cumbria, you would often be exposed to Wordsworth’s poetry. I wandered lonely as a cloud always reminded me that the memories I create, the wonderful and beautiful things I come across would always sit in my mind’s eye, a memory to be cherished for the rest of my life.
Coming across the daffodils is one such memory in Wordsworth’s poem. Whether it is truthful, or something he made up, they represent a moment he has has been gifted, a memory he can reminisce upon whenever he experiences the “bliss of solitude”. And thus flowers became a symbol for me and yet, as I said in the introduction, I’ve always had a strange relationship with flowers.
Growing up around mountains and lakes I would, of course, do a lot of hiking in my youth. Doing so in the same area that Wordsworth lived allowed me to experience my own daffodils many times over. They weren’t always literally daffodils. They were the views I would get to see when I peaked a mountain, the hidden valleys I would wander into, the clearings I would find deep in the forests. And yes, sometimes flowers. Sometimes even daffodils.
Seeing natural flowers was always a delight. But, in a similar way to Wordsworth, I am mostly anosmic. My sense of smell isn’t very strong, so my experience with flowers would revolve around how they look. I would see the first thing people do when they were gifted flowers – hold them to their nose and take a deep breath. That never did anything for me.
I would still enjoy gardens. I would still enjoy seeing bees and butterflies flutter around them as I went on one of my many hikes. But picking flowers and sticking them in a jar of water always seemed weird to me. They just shrivel up and die eventually. To me they were symbols of death and decay. You wouldn’t adopt a pet and slowly watch it starve to death, so why do this with flowers?
When I was at university one of my friends got beaten up on the way home from a night out. His girlfriend was with him, and while she wasn’t physically harmed, she still came out of it traumatised. One of our mutual friends told me the next day that he had sent a 12 pack of beer to his place, and flowers to her. He figured that doing something nice for them after something like that would help them get through it.
I was genuinely impressed. Maybe it’s because I’m autistic, or maybe I’m just not as smart, but I never would have considered doing that. I learned something that day, something I’ve used to help others when they’re going through tough times.
But I still struggle to understand when it’s appropriate to give flowers. I took my partner to visit my parents for the first time and she suggested buying flowers. I tried to tell her that I never do that, that I’m not even sure that my mother likes flowers. She was right, of course, and my mother loved the flowers. Somehow the fact that my mother likes gardening didn’t allow me to make that connection.
I think the point I’m trying to make here, and the reason I decide to write about this is that often things that come naturally to most, don’t come naturally for everyone. Often something as simple as giving flowers, something everyone seems to understand and know how to do, can be utterly confusing for others. We can observe and learn how to do it, but even after four decades on the planet, we may still not fully understand it.
