Living with flowers — a quiet manifesto for spring

Par Gabriel Goldberg 22 May 2026 5 min read

There is a moment, every year, when I feel winter loosening its grip. It is never a date on the calendar — it is a patch of colour. The first flower of a Japanese quince in a Brussels garden, blue grape hyacinths shyly emerging between two blades of grass, a neighbourhood kiosk suddenly overflowing with orchids and gerberas. In that precise instant, I understand exactly why I insist on living with flowers. The first quince blossom — February still, but spring is officially declared. Stepping out of winter, one flower at a time Belgian winters are long. The light is missing for months, the skies stay grey, and the body eventually adjusts — a little too well. Then arrives that minuscule signal: a pink corolla on an otherwise bare branch. No speech, no theory ever does what a single flower does when it announces, quietly, that the season has turned. That is what I believe in — flowers do not decorate spring, they declare it. April grape hyacinths — a blue no pigment ever quite captures. In April, grape hyacinths colonise neglected lawns and park borders. I always stop. Always. Because that blue exists nowhere else — not in painting, not in textile, not on any screen. It is a colour that only exists alive. A table without flowers is not quite a table I genuinely believe — and I will defend it — that a floral composition at the centre of a table changes the very nature of a meal. No need for ruinous peonies or signature florist bouquets. A few sprays of spirea, some lily of the…