Eucalyptus

I've read the novel Eucalyptus more times than it strictly warrants, I think. It's weird given how resistant I was to anything Australian at the sort of age that I was reading it. I'm still resistant to any writing set in the bush or whatever on earth 'the outback' is but I can now appreciate a lot more of my home setting than I once could. That's probably another essay, though.

For $12 I bought a bunch of Australian native flowers today. From that $12 I now have five vases with flowers or foliage in them, scattered all over the house (plus another vase with pale pink carnations that were my boyfriend's pick). Most of my vases are from op shops, bar the one above - Venetian glass, a gift from a friend - and my Mozi jug. 

Having a couple of vases around is important, even if they're just in the back of the cupboard. Floors don't look as dirty when there's a bunch of flowers on the table. Mixed bunches can be broken up into a bunch of separate posies that not only probably look nicer than the tacky supermarket bouquets but also mean you get more flowers around the place for the same price. This is my important lifehack. It's probably very obvious but I'm chuffed with myself for how far I stretched one bunch of flowers today.

Eucalypts smell so wonderful and will keep smelling nice even after they don't look great, unlike other flowers. The series I'm doing my thesis on* has this description of this horrible goat monster that lives in waterways and smells like flowers that have been left rotting in a vase for too long. Having just thrown out some old flowers a couple of days before rereading that line, I had a very vivid idea of what that smelled like. In a way that was nice because it's a high fantasy series so it's not exactly *super relatable* so having a very fresh and present concept of what that smell would be really helped engage me in the scene. But on the downside, gross. 

My hands smelled like eucalyptus for hours after cutting and rearranging the bouquet. The below is the one I'm most happy with/proud of. The crumpled bag vase is one of my best Savers finds. I love spinning gum for it's soft grey colour and unique shape (this is Mum's influence, hi Mum), and I haven't seen the dark red puff ball flower before but it's fantastic. This is the third, possible even fourth social media platform I've gushed about it on today so hopefully someone will tell me what it is. Every now and then I think about how nice it would be to be a florist but then I remember they have to get up ludicrously early in the morning. 

A florist and a homewares store that were on Sydney Rd have just recently relocated into the same space, right near my bus stop. It's really expensive but everything they have is beautiful and it will be a lovely place to duck into on the wait for the bus. 

*The Bitterbynde Trilogy by Cecelia Dart-Thornton, for the curious