The Flower Arrangement Quotes

“I am the lover's gift; I am the wedding wreath;
I am the memory of a moment of happiness;
I am the last gift of the living to the dead;
I am a part of joy and a part of sorrow.

-Kahlil Gibran
"Song of the Flower XXIII”
― Ella Griffin, The Flower Arrangement

“Agapanthus and peonies in June. Scented stock and sweet peas in July. Sunflowers and sweet William in August. By the time September's oriental lilies and ornamental cabbages appeared, she wasn't hiding upstairs in the workroom anymore. She was spending more time in the shop, answering the phone, dealing with the customers. One Sunday she spent the afternoon at an allotment belonging to a friend of Ciara's, picking lamb's ear and dusty miller and veronica for a wedding, and didn't think about Michael once, but she kept remembering a Patrick Kavanagh poem she'd learned at school, the one about how every old man he saw reminded him of his father.”
― Ella Griffin, The Flower Arrangement

“She could go on asking herself why roses had thorns or she could be thankful that thorns had roses.”
― Ella Griffin, The Flower Arrangement

“She began to scroll through her Pinterest board. Flowers blossomed on the screen. The golds and ochres first. Golden peonies, apricot honeysuckle, saffron, poppies the color of amber.”
― Ella Griffin, The Flower Arrangement

“The creamy millefeuille roses had arrived from Holland yesterday and been left in the warm kitchen, where they were opening like tulle ballerina skirts. The pale pink peonies were in the coolest corner of the shop downstairs so they wouldn't go over. The wildflower man would be in at 6 a.m. to deliver the cornflowers and foxgloves. Every flower in the bouquet had a special meaning for the bride. She had known exactly what she wanted, Lara remembered, and had turned up at the shop with her own color swatches and mood boards and Pinterest links.”
― Ella Griffin, The Flower Arrangement

“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.”
― Ella Griffin, The Flower Arrangement

“Dusty hydrangeas pale as robins' eggs. Delphiniums iridescent as butterfly wings. Cornflowers the hazy blue of the summer skies”
― Ella Griffin, The Flower Arrangement

“As if in answer to her question, an odor of decay seeped through thee doorway from the darkened shop.
Senescence, she thought. A beautiful word for what happened to all living things as they progressed toward death. Petals fading, leaves falling, stems beginning to rot.”
― Ella Griffin, The Flower Arrangement

“The small pergola that Michael had built was covered in loops of jasmine, and Lara's flower beds were blazing with color. Blowsy white peonies, dusky purple irises with golden stripes, pale orange poppies with sooty centers. The first tea roses of the year were budding. Elinas, pink petals tipped with crimson, and the ivory Jeanne Moreaus that smelled faintly of lemons. Lara wanted to pick one and put it on the breakfast tray, but Michael hated cut flowers.
She went back inside and began to set the tray. Her mother's blue Venetian glass dish filled with raspberries. Orange juice in a white jug. A honey pot with a wooden dipper.
Sunshine streamed in through the window, warming the terra-cotta tiles beneath her bare feet. She could not have cut flowers in the house so she had pictures of them instead. Two huge framed Georgia O'Keefe poppy prints. An apron with a pattern of climbing roses. A wooden clock that Phil had given her with a pendulum in the shape of a red rose.”
― Ella Griffin, The Flower Arrangement

“Sugar-cube houses spilled down the last slope toward the sea. A full moon floated above the inky water; the air from the gardens they passed smelled of gardenias and jasmine.
She slept as soon as she put her head on the pillow of the small white hotel room. When she opened the creaky blue shutters the following morning, brilliant sunlight fell in through the window and the hum of the bees on the vines below filled the room. The sea was every color of delphinium and larkspur. The smell of food drifted up from the small restaurant below her balcony. Bacon, fresh bread, coffee, cinnamon.”
― Ella Griffin, The Flower Arrangement

“He fell into a trance as she worked with the tulips, watching her hands as if he was hypnotized. She talked to him quietly, telling him the names of the greenery she was adding- evergreen viburnum for the primary foliage at the bottom, eucalyptus to fill out the gaps in the middle, tall bells of Ireland to add texture at the top.”
― Ella Griffin, The Flower Arrangement

“Spring was coming. Lara could feel it hovering at the edges of the frigid air. The world was holding its breath. She loved to think of the smallest flowers making their way up through the frozen earth. Pale yellow celandines, pink-tipped daisies, the little white stars of the chamomile, the bright yellow faces of the dandelions.”
― Ella Griffin, The Flower Arrangement

“They shared a platter of meze and dips and, for dessert, summer berries dipped in four kinds of melted chocolate. Lovers' food, Lara thought, watching Phil feed Katy a strawberry.
When she was married, she had made special trips to obscure ethnic supermarkets for Vietnamese rice pancakes and soba noodles. She had bought extra-virgin olive oil online from a tiny estate in Sicily. She had discovered celeriac and plantains and Jerusalem artichokes. She had sautéed and ceviched and fricasseed and brûléed.”
― Ella Griffin, The Flower Arrangement

“It would be heaven to spend your days working in a place that smelled of roses and trees and damp clay, like a garden after the rain.”
― Ella Griffin, The Flower Arrangement

“He hopes the plant doesn't freeze to death before he can give it to her.
He pictures her face when she opens the bag and sees it. A whole load of dark purple flowers stuck onto a tiny bendy stem like a bunch of butterflies about to fly off. Exposed roots like knobbly toes climbing over the rim of the plastic pot as if the whole thing is planning to get out and do a runner first chance it gets. It's a moth orchid.”
― Ella Griffin, The Flower Arrangement

“He hopes the plants doesn't freeze to death before he can give it to her.
He pictures her face when she opens the bag and sees it. A whole load of dark purple flowers stuck onto a tiny bendy stem like a bunch of butterflies about to fly off. Exposed roots like knobbly toes climbing over the rim of the plastic pot as if the whole thing is planning to get out and do a runner first chance it gets. It's a moth orchid.”
― Ella Griffin, The Flower Arrangement

“Pat gave a few little yelps of pain as he was carried down the hall, but he looked around, surprised and faintly pleased, when Phil put him carefully on the bed. And his ears pricked up to listen to the sound of Katy's voice from the bathroom, calling out a thank-you to Phil for the warm towel.
The dog's eyes had seemed to be dimming, like two faraway torch beams moving farther away into the night. But for a few seconds they seemed to brighten, sharpen, intensify. He looked straight at Phil as if trying to communicate something.
"You love her, don't you?" Phil said softly. The dog blinked and then closed his eyes. "Me too.”
― Ella Griffin, The Flower Arrangement

“The air was so frigid that it almost hurt to breathe. They wrapped their arms around one another and thought of all the Christmas cracker jokes they could remember to distract themselves from the cold. What do you get when you cross a snowman with a vampire? Frostbite. What do you call people who are afraid of Santa Claus? Claustrophobic. Why did Santa go into therapy? Because he suffered from low elf-esteem.”
― Ella Griffin, The Flower Arrangement

“Her dad never brought Phil and Lara back to the graveyard. He had buried some of her mother's things beneath a honeysuckle in the garden. A worn leather glove, a birthday card that she had written for each of them. The last photograph of the four of them together.
There was a wisdom to what he had done; Lara saw it now. As the memory of her mother faded, the honeysuckle grew stronger. When Lara stood beneath it in summer, when it was in full bloom, her mother's sweetness seemed to live on in the scent of the flowers.”
― Ella Griffin, The Flower Arrangement

“The only things in the room that she felt any connection to were half a dozen flower postcards pinned to the wall above her desk.
The red and white tulip by Judith Leyster. The vase of white lilac by Manet. The bowl of blowsy roses by Henri Fantin-Latour. The vase of tumbling blooms by Brueghel- lilies and tulips, fritillaries and daffodils, carnations and snowdrops, cornflowers and peonies and anemones. Those flowers had all died four hundred years ago, but that first week back at work, they planted a seed in Lara's heart.”
― Ella Griffin, The Flower Arrangement

“Then she got into her van again and headed on to Foster Avenue, taking the long way along the Goatstown Road so she could see her favorite tree, a rare magnolia Genie that had taken over the entire garden of a suburban house. The tree was ugly in winter, a tangle of twisting branches like scrawny limbs, but in March it was covered in heart-stoppingly lovely pink and cream flowers the size of teacups.”
― Ella Griffin, The Flower Arrangement

“The light catching in the drops that clung to the window cast tiny darts of rainbows that danced around them.
"Spring is the sun shining on the rain and the rain falling on the sunshine”
― Ella Griffin, The Flower Arrangement

“Ordering online was all about ticking boxes. Species. Color. Size. Number. Grade of quality. Degree of openness. But there was something miraculous about seeing the flowers she'd imagined brought to life. Roses from Columbia. Chrysanthemums from Ecuador. Orchids from Thailand. Anemones and agapanthus from Spain. Stargazers and parrot tulips from the vast Dutch flower fields.”
― Ella Griffin, The Flower Arrangement

“The walls behind the counter had deep floor-to-ceiling shelves for vases and jam jars and scented candles, and there was an old wrought-iron revolving stand for cards. But most of the space in the long, narrow shop was taken up with flowers and plants.
Today there were fifty-two kinds of cut blooms, from the tiny cobalt-blue violets that were smaller than Lara's little fingernail to a purple-and-green-frilled brassica that was bigger than her head.
The flowers were set out in gleaming metal buckets and containers of every shape and size. They were lined up on the floor three deep and stacked on the tall three-tier stand in the middle of the shop.
The plants, huge leafy ferns and tiny fleshy succulents, lemon trees and jasmine bushes and freckled orchids, were displayed on floating shelves that were built at various heights all the way up to the ceiling.
Lara had spent weeks getting the lighting right. There were a few soft spotlights above the flower displays, and an antique crystal chandelier hung low above the counter. There were strings of fairy lights and dozens of jewel-colored tea lights and tall, slender lanterns dotted between the buckets. When they were lit, they cast star and crescent moon shapes along the walls and the shop resembled the courtyard of a Moroccan riad- a tiny walled garden right in the middle of the city.”
― Ella Griffin, The Flower Arrangement

“He had left a huge bucket of narcissi beside the door. The tiny white flowers had been picked before dawn and they glowed as if they had been drenched in moonlight. A second, smaller bucket was packed with bluebells and Lara could smell some hyacinths in there too. She bent down and felt around for the little waxy blossoms, and their fragrance rose up to meet her. If perfumes were the feelings of flowers, as her mother used to say, then the hyacinths were as happy to see her as she was to see them.”
― Ella Griffin, The Flower Arrangement

“Spring blooms had been coming in from Holland since December, but now flowers from Irish growers were arriving. Daffodils with their frilled trumpets and tissue-paper-delicate anemones and the first tulips with sturdy stems and glossy, tightly packed petals.”
― Ella Griffin, The Flower Arrangement

“What do Northsiders use for protection when having sex? Bus shelters.
What's the difference between a Northsider and Batman? Batman can go into a shop without robbin'.
What do you call a Northsider in a suit? The defendant.”
― Ella Griffin, The Flower Arrangement