This Magic Moment

1. Dahlia is my son Roman’s flower as they blossom around his birthday in August. When we celebrated his first birthday, we filled our small apartment with dahlias and family.

2. In the vast mountains of Mexico, I once met an old lady named Berta. She lost most of the men close to her. She loved flowers. She told me that when her husband was alive, he would bring home a flower from the fields coming home every evening. And each day he said that he was sorry it was not a rose. She loved him. Every Saturday she goes to the cemetery to put new flowers on his grave and the grave of her son.

3. A year or so after I first met Berta, I returned to visit her. I bought the biggest bouquet of long lilies in a local market and drove with it on the back of a pickup truck to her village. She was so moved and touched that she immediately invited me to spend a few days with her and her family. It wasn’t until a couple of days later that I realised she didn’t remember me; she just thought I was nice to bring her flowers out of the blue.

4. When I photographed this bouquet that Sophie made, I placed it in my home, close to a window. Sometimes the sun enters and hits the wall, but the time of year means it barely rises above the roofs of the other buildings, even if the clouds let it shine through. I often sat waiting to see if the sun would shine through, while I watched the flowers wither. The leaves slowly crumbled, the colours became more and more faded, dusty. There is a special moment between blossom and decay where the flower is so beautiful. Where it reminds me of fall.

5. A couple of years ago I opened a flower bar called Blomster Bar with my dear friend Emelie. It was never a real bar, more an idea to combine flowers with drinks. Emelie loves being in nature, and I love to drink, so we thought it was a good match. On our first real flower job we made a mistake in the budget; we left out a zero in the price of each flower, so it nded up being a terrible business.

6. Actually, the idea of a flower bar I first got with my old friend Goose long ago. We wanted a place where people came to drink after work and when they
got drunk, they would buy flowers. We went to a lecture by Søren Rye, a famous Danish garden expert, to learn about flowers. It was in the library of Thorvaldsen’s Museum, the most beautiful building in Copenhagen. It was only Goose, me and a lot of old ladies at the lec- ture. I can’t remember what we learned.

7. Once I took my girlfriend Tamara to the top of a mountain in Spain to see a beautiful flower field at sunset. We climbed falling rocks and walked through thorn bushes. It was our first holiday together. I remember I thought she was a tiny bit lazy and slow walking up the mountain. Later we found out that she had been 10 weeks pregnant at the time.

8. Once I bought a bouquet of flowers as a gift for the host of a dinner, but on the way I realised how ugly the bouquet was and felt so embarrassed that I threw it away at a subway station. I took a picture of he flowers sticking out of the garbage can and gave the picture as a present instead.

9. I also once forgot about my own birthday. My whole family was sitting at a restaurant waiting for me. They kept telling the waiter I would show up soon, but I never came. Later they texted me a picture of the table. I felt so bad. It was filled with presents and a big, beautiful bouquet of flowers in the middle. It was delphiniums.