What Florists don’t Know.
By R.M. Hamilton
Flower arranging is an expressive career. It attracts artists.
But like any art, it has a foundation in immutable scientific facts.
If you don’t clean your buckets regularly with bleach, your floristry will become diseased, and all your flowers will die.
If you don’t cut your rose stems on an angle, put them in boiling water for thirty seconds and then get them straight into cold water, they won’t last very long.
If you don’t wire your gerberas, they will sag at the neck and appear dead, even while they still have some lovely colour left.
These are facts about flowers, and if you ignore them, you will have trouble.
There is also a big fact about people that you learn in a floristry.
When you work with the public in any capacity, you will always encounter tiresome individuals.
It’s a rule of business in any industry to remain polite and professional. But this is about a hundred times more important in floristry than maybe any other job. In this job, you have to be committed to staying kind.
People who enter floristries do so in a heightened emotional state. This is often because something exciting and wonderful has just occurred.
They’re engaged and they’re planning a wedding!
They’re getting their first grandchild!
A friend is flying in, and they want to meet them with flowers at the airport!
But we use flowers for expressing more than joy.
We use them for grief.
Florists deal with a lot of death.
And often, the death isn’t natural.
Death by murder.
Death by suicide.
Death by a drunk driver.
We see it all. We also see the anniversaries of these deaths.
I said before that the commitment to remaining kind is probably more important in floristry than in any other job.
It’s true.
If you’re an undertaker, you know why a customer has found you. If they’re abominably rude while they pick out a casket, you ought to be able to understand why.
But florists don’t have the advantage of knowing exactly why a customer has turned up.
And sometimes, customers appear to be absolutely hideous for the pure sport of it.
I’m not an angel. More than once, I’ve been about to lose it with a customer.
It must be God who saved me for opening my big mouth, I think.
“I’m sorry,” says the customer starting to cry. “My daughter was starting university this year. Now she’s dead. A drunk driver hit her two days ago. I can’t believe I’m organizing a funeral.”
And I realize, I’m not looking at a monster, I’m looking at a hero. How did she even manage to get out of bed this morning? No wonder she can’t manage basic civility.
I had wanted to tell her to get out.
She wants to get out too. She’s been using all her grit to stay and face her hell.
The walls of a floristry hear terrible things.
“I buried my only son, one year ago.”
“My sister tried to conceive for ten years. She finally managed it. The baby was stillborn.”
“I found my brother dead, yesterday. If I’d just gone back there five minutes earlier, maybe…”
All the circles of Dante’s Inferno can convene in a flower shop.
You can arrange flowers without empathy. You can even be good at it. But I don’t believe you can be a florist without empathy.
Because the laws of human behaviour are just as immutable as the laws for keeping bacteria out of your flower buckets.
And we get it so wrong. We get it wrong all the time.
Because grief is ugly.
It doesn’t always cry.
Sometimes it screams.
Sometimes it sneers.
Sometimes it swears and yells and carries on until one really begins to think a good kick might be the right medicine.
Or at the very least, a few choice words on the subject of manners and how certain people should probably get some.
But you can’t do that in a flower shop.
Because you don’t know.
And after a while, you start to realize, you almost never do know. Not in a flower shop. Not in a parking lot. Not in a grocery store.
My religion tells me that a person can go to hell when they die.
But my observation of life teaches me that people can go to hell while they’re still alive.
It’s a broken world.
Compounded by the fact we’re all broken too. So of course, we’re not going to live up to this standard all the time.
But if my time as a florist has taught me anything, it’s that we must try.
Because it’s not only flowers that perish from the wrong treatment.
Essay written by R.M. Hamilton. All rights reserved. Peony picture graciously provided by Pixabay.