Kate Bingham

More than a thousand buds have arrived in the garden. Yesterday I looked and there were none. Tangled into a slump of sullen green and bursting with sap they’ve over-run the armandii buddleia jasmine vine and cluster by cluster flick their swollen thumbs or sit on their fingers waiting to open, point their beaks up at the little sun. Their copper thorns will not be soft for long and something like a feather in a lung unfurls its spine inside their inside skin. A feeling wonders what it might become and daylight budges up, slips in between as if there were enough for every one. Rain or shine they will be flowers soon and by their own extravagant over-production lost in a scented commotion of white then gone: hips where their heads were, this year’s growing done.

My love arrived with tulips, ‘ten for a fiver’, picked up from the supermarket at the end of the street. Fresh off the plane, perhaps he would have preferred to wash his hands but stood in his coat in the kitchen watching me cut through the cellophane and crush the stems with the stainless heel of the bread-knife. All across Holland trucks were going to and fro between the flower farms and distribution facilities rocking their harvest to sleep over good Dutch tarmac so every bunch could be in store before it opened its eyes, and even as I filled the vase, people on nights were dumping crates of slender-headed replacements cut so premature they didn’t know what kind they were in tubs of glucose solution up and down Holloway Road.