Tulips, peonies, lockdown … how flower power has kept my friendships blossoming

A person must have the hardest of hearts, or the worst of hay fever, not to like flowers. We give them when we’re falling in love or when we know someone needs brightness. Flowers are the beginning of life and respect for the dead. Who isn’t happy spotting the first snowdrops of the year, or answering the door to someone smiling, the rustle of florist’s paper giving away the surprise behind their back? Giving and receiving flowers is such a simple pleasure and right now we desperately need more of it in our lives.

This spring, as the buds began to open, the world began to shut down. Flowers took on greater importance for me. Like many of us, I have no garden and my windows look over a city street. Taking my lockdown-approved daily exercise on quick evening walks when work was done, I started getting soppy about cherry blossom, spotlit by streetlights and dripping on to cars that hadn’t moved in weeks. Weekend walks took even longer as I kept stopping to look at the frothing cow parsley. It was the first spring in years I hadn’t bought cheap daffodils from the market and shoved them into an equally cheap blue glass jug. In the grey coronavirus quiet, I wanted colour and growth; life made out of soil and sunshine.

Of course, there were things I missed more and still do. I wanted my friends in 3D, talking over one another, not stacked in polite rows of boxes on a screen. I wanted to hug my mum. I felt I could settle for running into a random acquaintance at a party – just for a nice chat over some bad wine. By this point the books I picked up had also taken a turn towards nature. I read about how oak trees, alone in the middle of sprayed and sterile wheat fields, will stand but can’t grow as they should, not without beetles and birds and a tangle of connected roots and fungi. Right now, I think we’re all those oak trees, surviving but isolated as the commercial crop around us starts up again.

Then my friend Doris sent me some flowers.

Tulips, for my birthday. It felt like magic, a bunch pulled out of a conjurer’s hat. In another city, she sat and pressed buttons and the tulips appeared on my doorstep. They still had the bulbs on, which I thought was novel and cool and I could watch as they wiggled out roots into the water. They reminded me that I had roots too. When I looked at them I thought of her and all the people we loved in common. They lasted for weeks, so much longer than 40 minutes of free Zoom time. I wanted other people to have that feeling too.

Using PayPal, I paid for birthday flowers to be sent to a friend who lived alone, so that she would know she was being thought about. She trimmed the stems and changed the water and they lasted for a month, she told me. I sent flowers when I had to self-isolate and couldn’t post a card. Flowers where I would normally have bought a pint. PayPal made it so quick and easy to pay that I delighted in giving. I received more flowers too: peonies that turned from glossy buds to blousy showstoppers, a mixed bouquet of roses and daisies that came along with bags of groceries and love. My vases are full. So is my heart.

Related: Our arty crafty lockdown: ‘My creative children are far more resilient than I am’

Yes, I look forward to a time when I will grab a bunch and a bottle of wine before heading to someone’s flat, squishing six to eat at a table that should only hold four. I want to be solemnly presented with a daisy by a toddler, sticky with sunscreen, who I can scoop up and tickle. For now, though, these deliveries will do. And they will continue. Like many of us, the people I care about are not all in one geographical place. The combination of worry and a renewed communal interest in video calling has meant I have spoken to them more frequently. I’ll also send them flowers, something beautiful, something tangible.

There is a language of flowers. Not in the mimsy Victorian way, where it’s more complex than cracking the enigma code and white is pure love and yellow is friendship and you need a daft little card to make sense of it all. The language of sending flowers is simple. They mean “I thought about you”. They mean “I care”. They mean “I love you”.

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