The tulips in the vase
After a few months as a somewhat round-faced baby on this globe, there came the moment no parent ever forgets: the first word. In my moment suprème, I said 'Bloem’, which means flower in Dutch. That was my first word. Bloem, flower.
I was one of those dreamy children, drawn to bright colours, ladybirds, clouds and blue skies. Glitter and all shades of pink were also on the list. Unfortunately, I was not one of those kids who was just fascinated by nature. But I guess no kid is. So the attraction to flowers is not strange. I used to pick them from gardens as presents for my mother without asking. They found their way into my background on Hyves and I even spent a summer trying to fold them out of origami paper. My mother was not too happy about my illegal flower-picking. A certain neighbour had already complained to her. There were beautiful purple crocuses growing along a ditch around the corner of his house. This particular neighbour once caught me picking them illegally and stormed out to reprimand me for possessing them. Crocuses on the side of a ditch. A ditch that ran alongside a path. A ditch that had no sign and was far from his garden. So not his ditch and not his crocuses in my eyes. Why does he have the right to own crocuses that have sprung up from the ground all by themselves? Don't crocuses belong to themselves then?
I didn't understand it at the time. I just stood there with a handful of slightly crushed crocuses in my fist and didn't understand why I wasn't allowed to take something so beautiful and keep it. Of course, I also wasn't sure if this was the crocus's will.
I have now developed a different habit with flowers. One that will please my old neighbour. I no longer touch 'his' crocuses with a finger, but I am happy to buy tulips. When the sun comes out, tulips are the only flowers I like to buy, along with sunflowers. For myself. It gives me a sense of accomplishment and independence. As Miley Cyrus says: 'I can buy myself flowers.’ I don't need anyone to give me flowers. I can just buy them somewhere with my own earned money because I feel like it and it makes me happy. Then I spend about two weeks enjoying how the tulips grow through the phases. How it shows its colour and opens its delicate leaves more and more. Yellow stamens are revealed, only to reveal their beauty leaf by leaf. Then comes the phase where I always feel a tinge of sadness: the moment when I open the bin and throw the pitiful bunch of wilted tulips into the bin. Or rather, lay them into the bin. And press the flowers firmly so that I squeeze the milk carton hard enough to make room for the leftover, forgotten pasta that has been sitting untouched on the top shelf of my fridge for nights.
I think the tulip feeds my soul in a way, so it is in a way a type of nutrition for me. It might sound a bit extreme, but it's about a small gesture and bringing a piece of the outside in. The idea that you have something alive around you, and precisely because you have to say goodbye to it, you appreciate it all the more when it is in bloom.
But there's a darker side to the tulip that I don't really want to face. Research by Greenpeace shows that many flowers sold in shops have been sprayed with a cocktail of pesticides and other harmful substances. Their research found up to 43 different pesticides on different bouquets, with an average of eight different types per bouquet. Mixed bouquets fared the worst, with a concentration of 0.77 mg of poison per kilo of flowers. This may seem low, but even a tiny amount of some pesticides can kill hundreds of bees.
Let that sink in. How can something so beautiful carry such a toxic truth? It bothers me that something small that makes me feel good is also a danger to the climate. It seemed like an innocent gesture, but I'd better say goodbye to it now. For my birthday I got some organic flower bulbs (thanks again Mette and Liesje). But maybe bulbs are a good alternative to my beloved tulip in the vase. After all, bulbs are good for biodiversity. They attract birds, butterflies and bees. And as soon as a stem has sprouted from the bulb, you can cut it off and put it in a vase as flower bouquet.
So, maybe I won't have to say goodbye to my tulip in the vase after all.
