Symbolism, Imagery, Allegory
Flowers are abundant in The Hours, and they symbolize all of the many things that they tend to represent in our everyday lives: celebration, life, love, friendship, romance, and even death and mourning.
When Clarissa Vaughan heads out to buy flowers for her party, she's looking for symbols of vitality and celebration. She's going to "fill the rooms of her apartment with food and flowers" (1.7) for her dear friend Richard Brown, and, in doing so, she'll celebrate both his literary achievements and his life.
Flowers can fill rooms in sadder occasions, too, and Richard himself points out this irony when Clarissa brings some of her flowers straight to his apartment. "Have I died?" he asks her (4.36). When Richard does in fact die later on that day, the flowers that fill Clarissa's apartment quickly become symbols of death and mourning rather than symbols of life and celebration.
Symbols like this that have multiple meanings pop up all over The Hours.
By the way, if you look closely, you'll even find that one flower in particular—the yellow rose—appears in all three of the novel's main narratives.
In Virginia Woolf's narrative, the famous author and her niece make a lovely deathbed for a dying bird and surround it with yellow roses. In Laura Brown's narrative, the birthday cake that Laura makes for her husband is edged with yellow roses. In Clarissa Vaughan's narrative, Clarissa buys yellow roses for the party, and Clarissa's partner, Sally, buys yellow roses for Clarissa. By using this symbol three times, Cunningham encourages us to notice how similar themes are repeated in each of the novel's three plotlines.
Flowers, with their short-lived, evanescent loveliness, are the perfect symbols of the beauty of life and the tragedy of death. It's no wonder that one edition of The Hours has chosen drowsy, drooping tulips for its cover.