The Ones Who Taught Me Everything

There are some arrangements you make that change you forever.

I have done this work for people I did not know, and I have done it with all the care and reverence I could give. But there have been a handful of times when I have stood in a garden that I knew, really knew….. and made a casket cover for someone who was deeply, precious to me.

Those times are the ones that live in me still.

The gardens were wild and free. Where vegetables grow alongside roses, where herbs spill onto paths, and things self-seed in the most unexpected places. Gum foliage catching the light. Fuchsias dancing on long stems. Fennel gone tall and feathery at the edges. Geraniums in every crack and corner.

And roses. Always roses. Their absolute favourite.

I walked through slowly. I always do, but this time it was different. Every plant had been tended by their hands. The garden was so completely, unmistakably theirs. I could feel them everywhere.

I won't pretend it was easy to work.

My hands knew what to do — twenty years of floristry means the making becomes a kind of muscle memory. But my heart was very full. I wept quietly as I gathered the hydrangeas, heavy and beautiful. I held the wild fennel and thought of all the times I had seen it growing there, overlooked, just doing its thing at the edge of everything.

That is what I love most about this work. The things that are overlooked. The things that were just quietly, faithfully growing. The grasses, the herbs, the geraniums, all of them becoming part of the final gift.

It felt like the garden itself was saying goodbye.

When the families saw the arrangements for the first time, they wept. Not only from grief, though grief was there, of course, but from recognition. From the feeling that this farewell was truly, completely theirs. That the person they loved was somehow present in the room, gathered there in stems and petals and foliage from the place they had tended and loved.

This is why I do this work.

Not because I am a florist, though I am. Not because I am good at making things beautiful, though I try to be. But because I know, from the inside, what it means to stand in the garden of someone you love after they are gone. To see their colours still growing. To feel their fingerprints on every branch.

And to be able to gather it all up, carefully and reverently, and give it back to them one last time.

It is the greatest honour.

From Their Garden Flowers Co — Southern Highlands, NSW.

If you would like to talk about honouring someone you love, we are here.