I wasn’t in a great place when I had the idea for my debut novel, Send Flowers. I was consigned to bed with an autoimmune disease and surrounded by neglected houseplants—each dropped leaf seemed a symbol—pathetic fallacy, surely—of my ailing health.
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Staring down the barrel of months off work, I had, for the first time in my adult life, an abundance of time. And it was in this sickly limbo that I began to reflect.
Eight years earlier, my family had been struck by profound loss. It happened when I was home from university for the summer break. After six weeks of turmoil, I returned to my studies as if the axis of my life had not been turned on its head. It wasn’t until nearly a decade later that, struck down by illness, I had time to confront the experience.
And so, between hospital trips and marathon sessions playing Skyrim, I wondered how grief had changed me and my family. I noticed the ways in which it had altered our perception. Not at first. In the immediate aftermath, we could think of nothing but the magnitudinous finality of death.
But later, I saw how we each sought out messages from beyond the gravewhite feathers, robins, flickering candles. We are not a religious family and yet, once bereaved, we viewed coincidence as evidence of an afterlife.
Magical realism has a long literary tradition as a means to explore grief.
Magical realism has a long literary tradition as a means to explore grief. From Shelby Van Pelt’s Remarkably Bright Creatures to Toni Morrison’s Beloved, it reflects how human beings cope with tragedy: our desire for meaning, our struggle with impermanence, and the ways we cultivate hope after loss. But I didn’t choose to pursue it from a place of literary fluency.
It was intuitive. Because as I laid in bed, watching my houseplants die and opening old wounds, a story began to emerge. Or rather, a proposition. I wondered what it would be like to think that a houseplant is the reincarnation of a deceased loved one.
In Send Flowers, Fiona Reid is a bereaved climate activist who comes to believe just that. At the beginning of the novel, we find her much in the state I was when I had the idea—stuck in her apartment, immobilized by loss and unable to care for her houseplants, all of which have succumbed to a record-breaking London heatwave.
But when a tree appears on her doorstep, she feels a glimmer of hope—it’s her dead boyfriend’s favorite. She sprinkles his ashes into the soil and wakes to find that the plant has flowered. Not just that—it can talk.
I chose to set the novel in the near future, when the climate crisis has worsened in the West, to broaden my exploration of grief from the personal to the planetary. When I started Send Flowers, protest rights had just been (and continue to be) eroded in the U.K., with climate activism becoming increasingly criminalized with every draft I completed.
I now see the novel as a magical realist allegory that mirrors both the gravity of the climate crisis and the imaginative, mythic thinking we need to face it. But it took me a while to get there.
When I signed with my publishers, they encouraged me to lean deeper into the magical realist genre. But I found myself wrestling with how to do that without taking away from the point I was trying to make about climate change. Then Jenna Gordon, my editor at Verve Books, said: “To solve climate change, we need all the magical thinking we can get.”
It was a moment of real clarity. Because climate change isn’t just a scientific or political problem—it’s an emotional, existential crisis that impacts how we relate to the world and each other. So if magical realism can help us process grief, can it also give form to ecological loss and the intangible ways we experience environmental collapse? And can it somehow provide answers, too?
That’s when I turned to mythology. Fiona, who is Scottish, first felt the pull to protect nature as a child. By grounding reincarnation in the myths of her upbringing, I hoped to deepen hers, and the readers, connection to the landscape, and to the wider natural world. Early Scots practiced Celtic Druidry, an ancient form of paganism that was defined by a reverence for nature—”druid” means to “know the oak tree.”
From the beginning of the writing process, I’d struggled to land on what species the houseplant should be. At first it was a peace lily, then a desert rose, but neither felt right. It wasn’t until I started researching Druid mythology that I discovered the perfect fit: the yew tree.
In ancient times, yew trees were potent symbols of resurrection and considered portals to the ‘Otherworld’, where spirits could cross back into the land of the living. I realized that, if Fiona’s boyfriend returned as a yew tree, it would blend magical realism with this cultural memory of myth, deepening her belief in reincarnation.
When you consider that our once sacred connection with nature has been replaced by rampant consumerism and late-stage capitalism, it bears wondering what the world would be like if we hadn’t lost touch with this reverence. Because it not only distances us from nature’s suffering, it actively contributes to the ecological crises we now face.
In an interesting parallel, many climate campaigners are now turning to the wisdom of Indigenous Peoples, whose reverence for nature is central to their belief systems, and who have always tried to live in harmony with their environment. At the same time, they’re often on the frontlines of the ecological crisis, whether that’s facing down loggers in the Amazon or fighting for their livelihoods in the Arctic.
The Wajapi people, an Indigenous group in Brazil, believe that animals, trees, and most plants have human souls and are part of an interconnected spiritual world. Their wellbeing is linked to the health of the forest—as all of ours is—but unlike humanity as a whole, their spiritual connection to nature makes them proactive guardians.
This custodial approach is shared by many Indigenous Peoples, including the Sungai Utik community of western Borneo, who believe, “The forest is our father, the land is our mother, the water is our blood.”
At the end of the novel, Fiona reflects that she has “long since surrendered logic” in the face of nature’s mysteries. She has grown to realize that, “The earth is full of intrigue. It possesses inexplicable magic.” Magical realism becomes not just a tool for exploring her grief, but a bridge to reinvigorate Fiona’s determination to change the world, to “love life enough to imagine a future where we are free and the land is free and both are symbiotic.”
I believe that to solve the ecological crisis, we must surrender logic and our “modern sensibilities,” and embrace a sense of awe in the wonders of the world again.
As climate change accelerates and the urgency grows, we are confronted with the need to reconnect with the natural world, to take notes from Indigenous communities whose spirituality is central to their defense of nature. I believe that to solve the ecological crisis, we must surrender logic and our “modern sensibilities,” and embrace a sense of awe in the wonders of the world again.
Perhaps then, we can begin to mend our broken connection to planet earth and finally act in its best interest.
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Send Flowers by Emily Buchanan is available via Park Row Books.