A Year of Bloom

The environment around us is like a time capsule, you can look at your surroundings and see things like flowers and trees that tell stories of a time now gone. That's what happened with this flower. Like many an afternoon, my family and I had decided to hike up the hill above our house. We all got on our shoes, got our dog and started to go up. Nothing particularly exciting happened, and the hike itself was quite easy, and within 25 minutes we were nearing the top. We stopped for a moment when my dad spotted a flower. We huddled around and admired its beauty, all taking a few pictures each before heading back down. On the way down, I began to wonder why we hadn't seen that flower or ones like it before. We hike the trail almost weekly, but this was the first time this had happened.

I started thinking about how the rest of the world's flowers are faring during the strange situations of the pandemic and lockdown. It seems to be very hit or miss depending on whether you're looking at the flower industry or flowers out in the wild. The flower industry was hit very hard: suppliers stopped shipping to retailers as their workers weren't able to come in. Due to the travel bans there weren't even any flowers from outside of the country. Even shops that still had plenty of stock quickly lost sales as there was no longer any demand for them. In March executive vice president of the Association of Floral Importers of Florida Chris Boldt said, “We have plenty of flowers in Miami, the problem is, there is no demand.” The entire industry as a whole has lost more than 8.5 billion dollars from the crash and its aftermath.

On the flip side of it, wildflower populations are booming. Ninth grader Max Jansen says, “I have seen more flowers and people gardening.” Which I would have to agree with, I have seen many more people out in their yards tending to their flowers or garden. Flowers in public parks and on roadsides have actually been getting less attention: because of social isolation and personnel needed for more important tasks, they haven't been able to cut the grass as often as they normally would. This means the flowers have a longer time to grow and their seeds can spread farther. This increases the plants chance at survival because now plants can grow in areas that might not be trimmed or pruned.

It's hard to stay optimistic about this year and the coming months when we see things like the crash of the flower industry, devastating people’s businesses and lives. But we can look to things like the wildflower for hope, growing when the rest of the world wilts. Even during some of the strangest and scariest times of the past decades the wildflower prospers and continues going, oblivious to the world around it.