On my first real editorial, six years ago, the shoot fell apart in slow motion. The location cancelled, the light went flat, half the wardrobe was stuck in a courier van somewhere near Breda. While everyone made phone calls, I walked the verge of the car park and picked what was growing there (yarrow, chicory, a very stubborn poppy) mostly to have something to do with my hands.
The stylist saw the little bundle, took it off me without a word, and pinned it into the neckline of the one dress we did have. Those were the frames that ran. Full page. And because I was twenty-one and needed the world to make sense, I decided it wasn't the stylist's eye or the photographer's patience that had saved the day. It was the flowers. Obviously it was the flowers.
So now I bring them. Every job. In summer they come from the verges along the Oudegracht where I let my bicycle drift; in winter I dry them in September and hoard them like a squirrel with a fine-art practice. Cornflowers travel best. Poppies are divas, they'll drop every petal the moment you need them, which is exactly why photographers love them. There is a paper bag of meadow in my kit next to the backup tights, and by now, clients I've never met have heard about it. A set dresser in Antwerp once greeted me with an empty vase held out like a password.
Do I still believe they're lucky? Here is the honest answer: I believe in what they do to a room. A studio is a machine for making pictures: flags, stands, tape marks, everyone slightly on edge. Then someone puts a jar of buttercups on the props table and the machine remembers it's a group of people making something beautiful on purpose. People walk past, touch one, soften by a degree or two. The pictures get better. Whether that's luck or botany is above my pay grade.
The superstition has one rule: a flower stays behind when I go. On a windowsill, on the projector cart, once tucked into a lighting rig where it presumably still is. Partly it's a thank-you to the set. Mostly I like the idea of some rigger, weeks later, finding a dried cornflower forty feet up and wondering, just for a second, how on earth the meadow got in.