Bouquet "Iron and Flesh"

"Drawing is a verb," Richard Serra once said. In 1967 and 1968 he wrote out a list of 84 of them, to roll, to crease, to fold, to store and so on, and used it as a guide to his work. No adjectives. He cared about what material does, not whether it looks pretty.

Forty years later he brought the same thinking to the Grand Palais in Paris. Promenade, May 2008: five plates of bare steel, each seventeen metres tall, standing in a line down the nave under the Belle Époque glass roof. The point was not to look at them from a distance; in his words, "the real content is the walking experience".

Read this bouquet with Serra's verbs, and take them literally. Celosia burns: its name comes from the Greek for burning. It also folds: the top of the stem flattens into a ribbon and pleats over itself, covered in tiny flowers packed so tight they feel like velvet. Ilex holds: it drops its leaves in autumn and keeps its berries all winter. The hydrangea turns: left on the shrub into autumn, it has gone green, and cut at that stage it lasts longer in the vase.

Iron and flesh. Bare steel on one side; on the other, a velvet you reach out and touch like skin. Walk around it and it changes from every side. A long-lasting bouquet that never sits still.

For a desk that has seen too many polite bouquets, or for someone who would rather be impressed than charmed.

Delivered in Paris, Monday to Saturday; delivery is free from €100.

Some flower substitutions may occur if we find that the quality of the delivered blooms isn't up to our standards, but the overall color palette and style will remain intact.