Look up: you’ll see yellow. Mimosa is out in our trees again. It’s out in the market, too. I wrote this last February, after going to find it. A year has passed, and much with it, but the market stays the same.

Flower markets operate in the dead of night. After the bars have been wiped down and the clubs have closed, and before the street cleaning cars come out under mealy, newborn skies, the flowers and their sellers set up shop. 

A few years ago, in Hanoi, we set an alarm for 3am and jumped in a pre-booked cab to go to the flower market. Our sleepy selves were carried along a dual carriageway where striped stall holdings and strip lighting marked out industry. It was raining, and people - not tourists, we were the only tourists - were wearing those pastel-coloured transparent ponchos you get at festivals and theme parks. Beneath low, make-shift ceilings of corrugated steel lay rows of flowers all bunched up. I ate something doughy and deep-fried. M accompanied me, yawning, because he is the most patient person I know. 

The flowers we saw were strange in their familiarity. Chrysanthemums and hydrangeas and gypsophila, tightly packed into paper sausages and strapped up on the back of a scooter. A whole wall of roses in every colour. We’d gone on a tip from an old, beloved housemate who went away to Hanoi for six months but never came back to claim her room. Go to the flower market in the night, she had written. Buy flowers. Put them in your bedroom and feel lovely all the time.

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As a gardener and earth-worrier, flower markets are complex places for me. It was at Columbia Road Market that I first bought the herbs and lavender to try and keep alive in a Hackney side return, and then again on a balcony. I reported on New Covent Garden Flower Market in the early days of writing about plants. They remain bellwethers on the gardening and floristry trends that ripple through the internet and into our homes; I find them fascinating - in the abundance, in the mechanics, in the glimpse they offer into how the sausage gets made in a niche little world I occupy.  

I also find them sad and indulgent. The average bunch of flowers carries half the carbon footprint of an economy flight between London and Paris. The floral industry is one of season-bending and toxic chemicals, of biodiversity loss and problematic farming practices. We frown at eating strawberries in December but fewer people question roses in winter, or tulips in January. 

For a while, now, I’ve only bought British-grown flowers - but even then, while flowers grown in Britain are more likely to be seasonal, you can only really guarantee that they’ve been grown without use of unnatural chemicals or industrial polytunnel heating if you know who’s growing them (there are plenty of flower farmers who do this, many of whom are listed on Flowers From the Farm in the UK).

Still, I go to the market. I love the ritual of it, which involves creeping out of bed at sixish - earlier in the summer, when the market is bursting and the day is light already - and throwing on layers because it’s cold and fresh in there. Beneath the soaring cranes and building sites, by the rush of a tiding Thames, sits the low, broad expanse of the market. Beyond the door, there are flowers.

It’s easy to be overwhelmed here. There are plenty of gruff, seasoned men, many of whom have been born into this patch by their forefathers. There are tall trolleys and piles of reserved things. Among the sellers and the professional florists - easily identified by their large coats and keen eyes - I can feel like a fraudulent bystander. This is alright; it encourages me to keep out of the way. From there, I can spot the other things: the tight, fuzzy buds of magnolia branches being coaxed out of a van; the dipping shoulders of someone dancing to the radio. It is impossible for me to watch someone buying flowers and not wonder who they are for: a party? A wedding? Dinner that evening, in some grand house?

A few years ago the market was redeveloped; it’s a slicker, somehow smaller place now than its architecturally dynamic but ultimately leaky predecessor. That one had a cafe, though, where you could get a bacon butty and a cup of tea. There you could sit and watch all these different compartments of an industry knit together when people said hello. A whole world at work while the other one hadn’t even woken up yet.