"Isn't it marvellous that given all of the beautiful and exotic flowers there are in the world to choose from, it is our most common species that are chosen to express our love between the years of childhood and adult. Flowers are words of love that even a child understands. To the child, the earth laughs in flowers. From the earliest of ages, they pick flowers from the hedgerows and the fields for their mothers.
To a child, those more simple flowers like daisies, cowslips, bluebells, dandelions, daffodils are the earliest in their memories.
The first attraction all children find within the floral world is with the small white flowers that can be found in common grass, wild fields and meadowland in abundance, and which they fashion into daisy chains with tiny hands of love. Such is often the very first gift of nature that is made by the fingers of a fascinated child that is given to a loving mum. The best reminder that we adults could have is to give our mother flowers when she is alive and able to smell them instead of when she is dead. It is as if children can sense that every flower is but a soul blossoming in nature; a thing that smells far sweeter in its first fragrance than when it is pressed between the pages of a book in recollection.
The fashioning of daisy chains during early childhood is sequentially followed by the discovery of the buttercup that is placed beneath the chin to reflect one's character. Then, in our years of growing passion, the dandelion becomes the determinant to measure the likelihood that exists in the heart of another; 'He loves me...He loves me not.... He loves me..........He loves me not......'
Then last, but not least, we should not forget the bloom that is probably the world's favourite and which is given in the most tender of moments to the ones we love; my mother's favourite, the red rose. Whereas a grown man seeking to impress his love may shower his sweetheart in profusion, every smart child knows that one red rose says more than a dozen could ever say.
Being the world's greatest lover of the red rose, my late mother frequently waxed lyrical whenever she received one from me. She would often quote a once-read phrase, 'A single rose can be my garden, and a single friend my world.'
When I started working in the mill at the age of 15 years, I made it a practice never to arrive home on a wage night without calling to the estate nursery and buying my mother a single red rose or a small bunch of flowers she liked. It would give her such pleasure to receive so small a gesture and upon receiving them, she would press her lips to my hand and her nose to the rose and say, ’You’re a good lad, Billy’.
In later years after she had died, I once read, 'Fragrance always stays in the hand that gives the rose', and as I read those words I fondly remembered my mother’s habit of smelling her red rose and pressing her nose to my hand in a tender kiss of gratitude.
Ah... how the simplicity of the common flowers shape our character and determine our fate." William Forde: January 11th, 2018