2023
The name Swanson was now just a logo, a clean serif font, silver on black. The company owned florists, perfume brands, seed lines, and luxury greenhouses from London to Tokyo. Its heritage campaign, “Over a Century of Growth,” ran during spring fashion week, pairing pale pink petals with runway models in translucent gowns.
No one remembered Evansville.
No one remembered Vera.
But every so often, in a rare catalog or late-night collector’s forum, an older bouquet would surface, pressed, preserved, still impossibly vibrant. They were called the “Century Arrangements.” Each bore a small embossed tag with a name: Blauw, Brzoskwinia, Natura, Violaceous, La Couleur Bleue, Brun. And one more. Noire.
The Noire arrangements were different.
Deep black blossoms with undertones of garnet and plum, their petals soft as silk, their scent subtle and addictive, like damp earth after rain. They were said to have been cultivated only once, from the last living cutting of Vera’s original greenhouse stock.
The public loved them.
Collectors paid thousands for a single preserved stem. Celebrities posted them on social media with captions like “Beauty reborn.”
Very few people know but deep inside Swanson’s corporate archives, tucked beneath decades of acquisitions and patents, there existed one final, unlisted file, Project Noire: Soil Replication Trials. The research logs described a recurring anomaly: test subjects exposed to the enriched soil reported auditory hallucinations, heightened empathy, and vivid dreams of an orchard “filled with red light.”
The lead researcher resigned. Her replacement scrubbed the record clean.
The flowers, however, continued to grow, thriving in conditions no one could reproduce.
In one leaked image, quickly removed from the internet, a cluster of Noire blossoms appeared to have faint, vein-like threads beneath their surface, arranged in delicate spirals resembling fingerprints.
When a journalist from an environmental magazine tried to trace the company’s oldest property records, she found one deed still active, a what seemed to be forgotten plot of land, listed as Crimson’s Orchard, Evansville County, IN. The file had been updated three months earlier.
No one knew by whom.
That winter, a small shipment left the Evansville facility, six crates, unmarked, bound for distribution centers across the country.
By spring, Shades of Noire appeared in flower shops everywhere. The blooms glowed faintly under moonlight. Customers said they lasted forever.
And on the back of each black tag, etched so faintly it was almost invisible, were three words:
Good to grow.
Swanson’s Flower Shop
- Chapter I: Shades of Blauw
- Chapter I (continued): Shades of Blauw
- Chapter I (final): Shades of Blauw
- Chapter II: Shades of Brzoskwinia
- Chapter III: Shades of Natura
- Chapter IV: Shades of Violaceous
- Chapter V: Shades of La Couleur Bleue
- Chapter VI: Shades of Brun
- Chapter VII: Shades of Noire
- Epilogue: The Geddes Report