IN PARIS, FLOWERS SAY IT ALL, AND MORE...

By Keith Spicer
Posted May 19, 2009

PARIS. Banks fail, jobs evaporate, budgets shrink. But flowers, as recession-proof as cosmetics, continue defying adversity and charming women -- as will those roses you send your Valentine lover next Saturday. Surrounded by flower-shops, indeed living above one, I marvel at how blooms accompany the French at every turn.
A foreigner here needs to know two languages: French and Blossom-speak. This second tongue boasts a luxuriant vocabulary, but also an exquisite sense of custom. Not easy for a typical Canadian male. Chasing pucks and pigskins, we are barely able to tell a tulip from a daffodil.
An average French teenager can easily distinguish two dozen flowers – a floral literacy matching verbal fluency, that other vital seduction tool. “French lovers” are just fast-talking guys who hang out in greenhouses.
But they’re raised in a poetic culture linking love to flowers. Witness classic 16th-century Pierre de Ronsard’s “Sweetie, let us see if the rose…” Like English 17th-century Robert Herrick’s “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,” it warns maidens not to play too hard-to-get, for beauty, like the rose, soon fades. Perennial male manipulation.
Skeptical French neighbours scrutinize us foreigners for signs of civilization. They’re amazed when, usually by dumb luck, we get something right. The very day I moved into my new apartment, I installed three window-boxes of red geraniums, diplomatically bought from Yann-Aël Gouezou, my bearded young florist below. Ah, for a foreigner, he beamed, such sensitivity! But I only wanted a spot of colour, not a manifesto.
Soon after my arrival in Paris a dozen years ago, I inadvertently pulled off a coup the lady still raves about. After dinner at a friend’s home, I asked a florist to send his wife some thank-you flowers. With no prompting, he chose a lovely bouquet of hollyhock – the lady’s name being precisely and providentially that: Passerose. Should I have told her this was a fluke, or not? A cad either way, I kept my peace – and she kept her delight.
Strolling in the nearby, magnificent Jardin des Plantes (France’s national horticultural garden), I sometimes try to memorize a few more tricks of the social/romantic trade. African violets, Amaryllis, Aphelandra or Amar, just to take a few African “A”s – the last one touching a loyal Canadian because it includes a toxic, light-seeking species called Dieffenbachia (an echo of irascible, grandstanding Canadian Prime Minister John Diefenbaker?).
Less conservatively, Latin America tantalizes Jardin-strollers with hundreds of species -- Freesia, Genistra, Oncidium Orchid, and the spectacularly self-confident Gloriosa Lily. Countless Anglo names tickle the imagination: Loosestrife, Dogbane, Candytuft, Pokeweed and Toadflax. One yearns to sing "hey nonny nonny" and prance around a maypole.
Europeans, including the flower-mad French, draw on a constellation of floral heroes. In the 18th and 19th centuries, Carl Linnaeus and Gregor Mendel stood at the botanical summit. But French flower-cockiness goes deeper – to the polymath 18th-century Comte de Buffon, Intendant of the Jardin des Plantes from 1739 to 1788 and author of a monumental 36-volume Natural History.
See also the statue of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck in the Jardin. Carved on it read these triumphant words: “Father of the Doctrine of Evolution.” “Charles Who?” hangs in the air with the name of Darwin. Obviously a carpetbagger of some sort.
Such masters inspire florists here even today. But what intrigues them more is stories about how flowers explain somebody’s world.
Flowers for public beauty and celebration need little explanation – except that, in Paris, when pleasing the people money is never an object. All the 400-odd public parks overflow with blooms. The Parc de Bagatelle flaunts a disciplined extravagance: over 9,000 species of roses alone.
Gouezou, my downstairs florist, and his beautiful “borrowed” love Rym Karaoun have many tales to tell about flowers in their customers’ lives. Sometimes even weddings and funerals take on a perverse twist. One client sent a funeral wreath to an ex-mistress for Valentine’s Day. Another ex-mistress, pestered by her old lover, paid to stop delivery of his flowers.
One real funeral almost cost a minister his job. He ordered a large wreath with an official République Française ribbon – only to discover that President Nicolas Sarkozy’s flowers, at the same funeral, had no ribbon. Motorcycle gendarmes raced just in time to remove the presumptuous ribbon, thus cancelling the minister’s faux-pas.
A female psychiatrist-client regularly sends her married son red roses: mommy’s little boy just loves ‘em. Dr. Shrink can’t figure why her daughter-in-law despises her.
But Rym’s best story tells how Yann-Aël stole her from her husband. Two months before she married, Yann-Aël met her and offered to compose her wedding bouquet.
When the bouquet came, among the flowers hid an apple and cherries. “The forbidden fruit,” winks Rym. “Yann-Aël and I went on discussing flowers long after I married. Two years later, I left my husband and went to Yann-Aël. We decided to live and love among flowers forever.”
No recession here: their business is booming. Blooming?
K.S.