Hyacinth Bouquet Quotes

Spring, in Brittany, is milder than spring in Paris, and bursts into flower three weeks earlier. The five birds that herald its appearance—the swallow, the oriole, the cuckoo, the quail, and the nightingale—arrive with the breezes that refuge in the bays of the Armorican peninsula.[28] The earth is covered over with daisies, pansies, jonquils, daffodils, hyacinths, buttercups, and anemones, like the wastelands around San Giovanni of Laterano and the Holy Cross of Jerusalem in Rome. The clearings are feathered with tall and elegant ferns; the fields of gorse and broom blaze with flowers that one may take at first glance for golden butterflies. The hedges, along which strawberries, raspberries, and violets grow, are adorned with hawthorn, honeysuckle, and brambles whose brown, curving shoots burst forth with magnificent fruits and leaves. All the world teems with bees and birds; hives and nests interrupt the child’s every footstep. In certain sheltered spots, the myrtle and the rose-bay flourish in the open air, as in Greece; figs ripen, as in Provence; and every apple tree, bursting with carmine flowers, looks like the big bouquet of a village bride.

I follow her into a storeroom at the back of the shop and catch my breath when I see the bouquets she has made for the shoot. I've seen a lot of wedding flowers, but nothing like these. There are soft apricot roses with dusty-blue delphiniums, creamy-white peonies with miniature pink alliums. Waxy green orchids with deep purple irises. A phone rings in the shop and she excuses herself and goes back outside to answer it. I bend down and pick up a pretty tumble of glossy green ivy and pale purple bells on slender stems. The flowers have a delicate scent, something elusive between hyacinth and freesia.