Love in the Waiting Room
Amid the haste of modern care, when attention can be stretched, Dr Iona MacCallum offers a quiet reminder of how the simplest acts can return us to love and presence.
“The seeds I sow fill my garden with flowers, and most weeks this summer I have taken a small bunch with me to sit in my clinic for the day, then at reception for the rest of the week. The process is simple but when I step back and think about it, it’s become like breathing. So essential to my presence and essence.
It’s starts with picking seeds. I go for walks and get inspired, then have a cosy evening scroll through a seed selling website or two.
The seeds arrive and I have a rough idea of when to sow them. It takes me back to science class- the right conditions- sun, water and heat. How much or little equipment I use makes a difference. In Scotland there is less of the heat, so I help them out a bit on that front.
As they start to emerge from the soil, the seedlings bring their seed shells with them. ‘Look where I came from!’
Grow water grow and they are ready to throw in the ground. Usually very haphazardly. Then water and feed and watch the flowers pop. The colour combinations can really POW 💥 my soul.
There I am sitting drinking my tea one morning and I grab my snip and totter around the garden picking flowers here and there. Noticing a few buds or a weed to pull as I go.
A little bit of string, an old jam jar of water and into my cup holder they go to brighten up my day.
The little lift I get, the sharing of something beautiful in the world. So simple and small, slow and steady. But also intentional. To be human. To connect. And make a little change.”
Dr Iona MacCallum, GP at Bangholm Medical Centre, Edinburgh. Iona is also an artist, gardener and mother. Find her on instagram @ionamaccallumart
Sage Practices Team Reflection
Iona’s piece speaks of care as something seemingly small and quietly transformative: an act of love offered through flowers gathered from her own garden. Week by week, she brings colour and fragrance into the clinic, a living reminder that care is not only about fixing and doing, but also about tending and being.
Her story brings to mind the call for bread and roses - for the sustenance that keeps us alive and the beauty that makes life worth living. In their BMJ article, Iona Heath and Victor Montori reflect on this idea, inspired by Rebecca Solnit’s Orwell’s Roses. They write:
“Bread and roses are what the humans involved in care—the patient and the clinician—want from healthcare. Bread is sustenance and therefore life; roses are courage and hope, curiosity and joy, and all that makes a life worth living.”
The flowers in Iona’s waiting room are small offerings of hope and colour that feed something beyond the measurable. They remind us that care, like a garden, depends on conditions that allow life to flourish: warmth, patience, trust and time.
In this way, a handful of flowers becomes both a gift and a lesson: that even in systems built for efficiency, we can choose gestures that make space for connection, joy and shared humanity.
For a beautiful further exploration of these ideas, read Heath and Montori’s article, Responding to the crisis of care (BMJ, 2023).
