THE NARRATIVE ARC LOVE-IS-LOVE WRITING COMPETITION
Do What You Love and You Will Never Work a Day in Your Life
My life was never the same after I fell in love with flowers
My story began when I was 18 and has lasted over 50 years. Not some sad tale of unrequited love but an exciting adventure spanning the big cities of Europe and the United States.
Who knew that a single phone call in response to a small ad in a little newspaper in Ireland would lead to a lifelong love of flowers and the floral business?
“Wanted: Apprentice Florist” the small ad read.
It had such a Victorian ring to it. It conjured up images of another whole world. One different from the one I inhabited.
I was born in Ireland and raised in the city. One of eight children. We didn’t have a garden and I didn’t know a daisy from a dandelion.
My only exposure to plant life had been when one of my brothers promised to pay me if I would gather dock leaves to feed his rabbits with while he went away for the weekend.
But brimming with self-confidence, I went for the interview and somehow, got the job. It was probably my purple, homemade corduroy two-piece suit and gloves that did it.
My new boss was English. And Protestant. She lived in a rambling old house surrounded by gardens and a tall stone wall out in the Irish countryside.
An amazingly kind woman, she took me under her wing and introduced me to a whole new world.
Not just the Floral business world and how to design but how to dress and use makeup. I went to nice restaurants for the first time. I met all the well- heeled people in town who spent large amounts of money on flowers for parties at their beautiful homes.
Invitations to tea at her home followed by strolls around the flower gardens as the sun was going down were a treat for this young girl. My boss entered me in the Garden Club competitions where I won one or two prizes. And one time she even paid for me to attend a Residential 10-day Floral Design course at a palatial mansion house in England.
It felt like I had been plucked up and transported into another person's life. My love affair with flowers and the floral business was well and truly in full bloom.
A couple of years passed. I was browsing the shelves at the newsagents one day and picked up a gardening magazine. I had turned 21 that summer and was getting impatient with my life. And there it was.
Another small ad buried at the back of the magazine.
“Assistant Floral Manager Wanted for High Class Flower Shop in the South of England.”
I didn’t have the money to buy the glossy magazine, so I quickly jotted down the details I needed and left.
Ireland in the ‘70’s and snail mail was all we had. No cell phones, email, tweets or texts. I was full of my own importance of course and had a letter in the mail that very afternoon.
Two weeks later, and lo and behold, my reply arrived. The envelope was pale blue, thick vellum with a deckled trim on the flap. My name, written in copperplate with black ink, looked very high class indeed.
I was being invited, summoned even, for an interview. Small detail that I had to travel by boat and train to England. So I did what any young person with not much money but tons of confidence would do. I left the next day for Winchester, England,
And so began the next phase of my crazy life. They paraded in — the gardeners, growers, designers, wholesalers and of course, the customers. Larger than life, colorful, exuberant, funny. Crazy even.
I have to tell you about the shop. It was like nothing I had ever seen. Standing proudly on a corner, it boasted six massive plate glass windows set in black marble. The windows spanned the entire building. Over the imposing door sat an enormous black swan set back in an alcove. A relic of days gone by when the building was a hotel.
Just venturing inside was an experience. The scent was thick, heady, intoxicating. No air conditioning or anything so prosaic as a cooler, the flowers were all displayed by colour.
Huge banks of peaches and pinks, purples, blues and lavender. Lime greens, snowy white and creams. Arranged in massive stone urns on top of elegant columns were longiflorum lilies, lilacs, and roses. Wispy vines and trailing ivy artfully mixed with tall spikes of gladioli, delphinium and larkspur. Vases of spicy scented carnations and pots of freesias, hyacinths and narcissus.
It was heavenly. And it was where I worked for the next seven years, side by side with Hugo my boss.
Our flowers were picked up from the train station every day by Vim the driver. Some came from the Flower Market at Covent Garden in London. more from the market at Southampton. Every Thursday, the Dutch Truck would arrive from Holland. We would run out and shop directly from the shelves. Handpicking the freshest and most exotic blooms Aalsmeer had to offer.
Occasionally, we had a little lady who would arrive in, carrying her trug of fresh cut blooms from her cottage garden. Lilies of the valley in season, violets, hellebores. Anything she thought we would like and could use was brought in. So fresh and smelling of damp grass and dirt, we lovingly accepted them all.
Every day I got to work in this spectacular place. A simple little bunch of flowers or a wedding at some prestigious venue, it didn’t matter. We worked incredibly hard, long hours but it never got old.
I lived and dreamed flowers. In Technicolor. I was like a drug addict needing my fix. It wasn’t a job. It wasn’t work. It was my inspiration. My passion. Filling me with creative energy.
My vacations always included some sort of floral event or festival.
- The Chelsea Flower Show.
- Kew Gardens
- The Bloom Festival, Dublin
- The posh flower shops in London, Edinburgh, Paris. Any city. Any flower shop. Moyses Stevens, Pulbrook and Gould, Columbia Road Flower Market.
- The Garden Centres. The flower shop at Marks and Spencer’s. I would rather visit a Garden Centre than a museum.
The Language of Flowers is spoken worldwide so when I decided to move to the United States with my husband, it was without any fear or reservation. I knew I had a huge, extended floral family waiting for me in Denver, Colorado.
I didn’t know it then but that family was Kings and I was privileged to join the company as a Floral Manager in 1986. I was given my own brand new beautiful store and a dedicated loyal crew. It could only have happened in my dreams. It was like having my very own store and having someone else paying all the bills.
The volume of flowers and plants we sold was incredible. Merchandising all of it was a huge challenge but we took it on and were enormously proud of our departments. We cared for those flowers and plants like they were our own.
We started planning for Valentines Day as soon as Christmas was packed away and everything revolved around that for six weeks.
The morning after February 14th we reported for work. Apprehensive, but with luck, we had sold out and could start rebuilding the department with all new fresh flowers. No red or pink anywhere.
I still meet with my beautiful Floral friends for lunch and coffee. Lifelong friendships, we are the old ladies in the restaurant, laughing loudly and talking for hours. Retired but forever young. Sharing stories and comparing our aches and pains. Our bad legs, our arthritic hands, our sore backs and the talk always comes back to the great times we enjoyed working together.
This story was written as part of the Love is Love Writing Contest for the Narrative Arc.
Here’s a story I liked from Allie G
And if you enjoyed my story and would like to read the follow up, here it is here.
