It was a true lunchtime phenomenon - hundreds queuing round the blocks to get pots of flowers.
They were free, it's true - but still. The atmosphere was great. In a cynical age, a good, honest love of a bloom was, well, blooming lovely.
"I chose these pots because they give some sort of hope and they relax me," Gene Guevara said as he held a couple of pots of some sort of purple number.
Further back in the line, which must have been hundreds of metres long, was Amy Bolas who just wanted "something colourful".
At one stage, the line stretched from the table tennis tables at Hutton Street right back to University Avenue.
The weather was right - dry and warm (perhaps too warm for the planet). It brought the floral fans out like an early spring blossoming.
"Someone put this on Facebook that there was a plant giveaway - I think one thousand plants - two plants per person - so I'm just here to grab some plants for myself," Malik Haroon said as he stood with about 300 people in front of him.
"These are flowering plants - very nice - like lavender to decorate my apartment." He got there when there were 300 people in the line.
The giveaway was organised by the City Renewal Authority. Part of the intent was to show off its new electric street sweeper which it has called - poetically or not - "Sweeping Beauty".
But the flowers were the big pull. The giveaways came from the city's flower bed displays as they faced renewal. Out with the old - to apartments and backyards across the city, many of them in the ANU judging by the composition of the crowd.
Authority organiser Lucy Wilson explained: "We refresh these planter beds which are placed throughout the city every six weeks, so that the pots that we are giving away are in those planter beds.
"We give these to the community and we then put new pots and new plants in those planter beds to give a new floral display throughout the city centre."
And it's still winter.
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