Manpreet Kaur’s Reviews > The Brief Life of Flowers > Status Update

“… something in these flat, red reminders [poppies], simple as a child’s cut-out, still refuses consolation and silently insists that even when life seems to stretch out for ever, it is really as fragile as a wild flower.”

For the wild bluebell is a flower of longing and loss. … Bluebells ring a silent peal for lost childhood, lost home or lost love.

The United Kingdom is the largest daffodil producer in the world, with Cornwall alone producing an annual crop of 30 million tonnes of bulbs.

As the chilly dawn begins to break a little earlier, these seasonal signs [of daffodils] remind yawning drivers and shivering teenagers that things are not, after all, quite as dark and they have been and that brighter days are coming.

The plant [forty years old] which produced the flowers may still be sending out similar rosettes every spring, to claim the annual gold medal for being itself.

“Flowers are always there at the critical moments of life: as gifts to celebrate a birth or anniversary, as bouquets to adorn a bride, as wreaths to accompany the deceased to the grave and as memorials to comfort those who mourn.”