Ah, but you haven't left negative space, at least not in the ordinary sense. There is a lot of stuff going on at the right of the image. It may not be in sharp focus, but there are a lot of contrasting and colourful fuzzballs that, frankly, my eye finds more interesting than the bud. (I've tried, but my eye just can't find the bud first. I see the yellow and blue blobs meeting, then I spot the subject — every single time.) The poor bud is competing with yellows and blues and brighter greens and lavenders and oranges, and all it's got is a bit of a dull reddish flash and a couple of bugs to fight with.

Fundamentally, there's nothing wrong with the composition geometrically, at least in terms of where in the frame the bud is placed. The problem is that the space to its right isn't empty or uniform/bland enough to ignore. It's not "negative", it's merely out of focus. If it were darker or significantly brighter or less saturated, or more uniformly coloured no matter what the tone, then you would probably have achieved what you set out to do.