Mimosa in Stoke Newington

How this powerful bloom brought the sun to the first days of February

I snuck through January somehow, I gamed the darkest days and won. I wrote about what to smell in the quietest month to feel in the moment, and now in February, I’m floundering. So, I’m going to try and practise what I preach and smell one good thing: the mimosa flowers in a vase on my windowsill. I’ll meditate on the scent, and search for calm with my nose, when my head feels anything but.

I first experienced the tropical assault of mimosa when I shared a pop-up shop with a florist. She’d go to the flower market when the rest of us slept, then bomb into the store, frozen but inspired with armfuls of impressive loot. I sold perfume, she sold flowers, and we rented a room to a yoga girl. It was in the pockets of time between lockdowns, and the combination of these three sensory elements (perfume, flowers and yoga) felt vivid, tactile and strangely elicit at that odd time. We counselled customers through the days as they tentatively came in to touch, smell and stretch with like-minded strangers. It was one of those things we did then because we needed it, that we can only start to understand now.

Sharing that space with a florist taught me the true scent of flowers: fresh sweet peas, hyacinths, eucalyptus and mimosa. It was like finishing school for my perfumer’s nose. In an on-demand world where we can smell everything all the time: sad strawberries in March, Christmas candles in September, I feel like the perfume of seasonal plants is the one thing that can still locate us throughout the year.

I got my bunch of the bushy blooms in Stoke Newington last Sunday. It was pay weekend, the sun was out and North London felt untouchable. It wasn’t January sun, the kind with stark shadows and ice, it was showy end-of-April sun where you carry your coat in the crook of your arm, and start thinking about the state of your toenails.

I woke up to a Pepto-Bismol pink sky with my niece, we whispered not to wake the others and revel in the precious slip of rosey time. My muscle memory of ‘how to do things with a big baby on my hip’ kicked into gear, I wedged her between the kitchen cabinet and my pyjamaed body and made hot milk for her and coffee for me. We drank and looked at the candy-floss clouds. I thought about all the skies she’d go on to see in her life. I remembered my daughters at her age. Was I too busy to stop and look at the sky with them back then? Perhaps. We both knew it was going to be a good day. We had one clear plan: to buy a bunch of mimosas from the shop on the green.

When we finally got our flowers, they smelt greener than I had remembered. The blossom honey and animalic notes were there, but I was struck by the addition of freshly mown grass, watermelon ice lollies and camphor.

We sat on a low wall (well, low for me, not for her) and watched a pack of dogs. I had already forgotten the decadent slowness of killing time with a two-year-old. A happy, but grimy man, already three sheets to the wind, serenaded us with a song from Oliver! The musical. As he slurred, ‘Who will buy this wonderful morning?’ he could have been a character written by Dickens himself.
A beautiful twenty-year-old in expensive shoes (who probably shares a bathroom with five others) cycled past us on a rented bike. She was wearing her wealth on her feet like a traveller with gold teeth. I did the same at her age. I polished the shoes in a scruffy houseshare where we boiled water on the stove because we didn’t want to waste money on a kettle. At that moment I loved her for this, and I loved her shoes. The mimosas were yellow, the bike was green, and my niece’s cheeks were pink. The parents in the nearby playground drank coffee that smelt of cherries in paper cups. The dog walkers, the drunken singer, the cyclist with the expensive shoes, we had all witnessed the pink sky and were pleased with our collective self. I thought about the passage in Mrs Dalloway when the main character feeling exalted by the city thinks: ‘life; London; this moment in June.” I wondered if Virginia Woolf ever experienced the scent of mimosa in her London, in 1924.

And now, as I search for something to ground me in the yellow pom poms, I think about how important seasonal smells are that fold memories neatly into their notes, then file them away to deliver back to us when we need them the most. I hope I’ll remember Sunday, a day when nothing remarkable happened: no new baby was born or pitch won, no one got the all-clear from cancer, there was just life, London, that moment in January with the suggestion of spring, the honey-green notes of mimosa and her.