Decadence & Impermanence: A Flower Essay
There’s just something about a flower, isn’t there? It catches the eye irresistibly. Somehow simple and intricate all at once, and supremely delicate yet undoubtedly the result of strength and the will to live. It did, after all, come from just a small seed—that seed germinating and pushing its first green shoots up through the soil, from there staving off attacks from insect and bird, outcompeting the weeds, managing the elemental forces of sunlight and rainfall and wind (being both nourished and threatened by those elements), growing to maturity, tiny buds forming and within days opening into a many-petaled creation, and then at the appropriate ripeness harvested and finally arranged into a form pleasing to eye and soul, to sense and spirit.
Our flower operation started back in 2021 as an experiment. Lauren had been following the work of Floret Farms out in Washington state and began a small trial run to see if cut flowers could be successful enough to integrate into the farm business here. For the first two years it was just Lauren and her mom holding it down; over time it became clear that this was an avenue worth pursuing, so in 2023 flower production was expanded and we’ve never looked back! It’s been a great addition - we’re not just a vegetable farm or just a flower farm, we’re both, and they balance and sustain the place. (It’s also been a great addition to the local agricultural economy, because most flowers that come to florists have been shipped in from places in South America built on terribly low wages and terribly high usage of pesticides.)
We have a lot of flowers on the farm during the summer, and more this season than in any past year. Lauren, Maile, Lilly, and sometimes April harvest them and create the bouquets that you may see in Okoa or Marlow or Mana Foods (and, of course, in the two-dimensional representational format of Instagram). Plenty more are moved wholesale to florists as well. It is a wondrous thing—but also completely overwhelming to me—to walk into the barn on a Monday or Thursday afternoon and find what was formerly the ping pong table now entirely filled with buckets of freshly cut flowers and greenery. Dahlias, snapdragon, ranunculus, roses, forgetmenots, silosia, statis, geranium, scabiosa, straw flower, corn flower, amaranth, white dill, yarrow, cress, ferns: hundreds and hundreds of stems needing to be put into arrangements with care, with a judicious eye, and with quickness.
The flowers are among the top priorities to be harvested before it gets too hot. After our morning huddle the gals jump to it, filling innumerable buckets with water and placing them on the back of our repurposed-golf-cart-turned-all-purpose-farm-vehicle. While Michael, Aaron, and I begin harvesting the heat-sensitive produce (mushrooms, salad mix) and April begins setting up the washing and packing area (and steeling her mind for the eight hour juggling act that is harvest day), Team Flower begins their journey.
The flower beds are located all over the farm; as of this writing there are flowers to be harvested in every field block but one, and the hunt for ferns and other usable greenery can take them to the edges of the property. The dahlias are concentrated behind the tunnels in block 1 and at the bottom of block 5, and a fair chunk of block 4 is entirely devoted to a truly incandescent variety of flowers. There are some perennials at the bottom of 3 and roses above 2, and pretty soon the beds that were chock-full of onions just a few weeks ago will need harvesting as those transplanted flowers do their life’s work of growing. (Somewhat anachronistically, that area is still known as “Lauren’s Garden” from the bygone era where flowers occupied only the teensiest bit of real estate at Lapa’au. It needs a new designation; suggestions welcome.)
Lilly—what an appropriate name for someone in this role!—tells me harvesting flowers is the best way to start the morning. You just let the bliss flow, she says, with a breezy poetry that belies the very orderly process inherent in the task. And that seems to me to be the paradoxical truth at the heart of our flower operation: it takes hard work, methodical and attentive work, to successfully ferry the beauty of a single flower from the field into a bouquet in someone’s home. Every cut stem crosses a threshold from life to death, and it is the art and skill of the bouquet-makers to maintain or even elevate the beauty found in the field. The harvesting is fun (as testified to by the laughter I will hear ringing out across the fields) but also time- and heat-sensitive. You can’t be sloppy; every stem needs to be carefully tucked into the buckets in such a way that the stems don’t snap on the drive to the barn. They need to be made comfy in the back of the golf cart, for who wants an arrangement of wilted and bruised flowers?
It is a small joy of mine—I am only now realizing this—to look up from my own fieldwork and see our little golf cart bumping along from block to block, field to barn and back out again, with all those white buckets bursting with color, the flowers quite literally overflowing, their containers unable to contain all the beauty. Envy my mornings.
“All flowers,” writes Zoë Schlanger in The Light Eaters, “are basically billboards to attract pollinators.” Come close, unwitting member of the animal kingdom, and let me use you: that’s basically the vibe. In a brief section on the origins of flowers, she notes how plants originally relied solely on the wind to spread their pollen, but over the eons learned to adapt to the presence of land animals - as they roamed and grazed, mammals and birds and insects unintentionally moved pollen from plant to plant, completing fertilization much more efficiently than merely airborne pollen could. Plants developed petals, nectars, and scents, the confluence of these “enticing configurations” emerging eventually as the flowers we now know. They are beautiful to us because they were beautiful to our evolutionary ancestors, beauty being in itself a form of communication—that is to say, seduction. Come hither.
The flower—the shape, size, and number of petals, its color(s), its scent(s), its everything—calls forth our attraction, our affection, our desire. This is as true of us on the farm as it is of those who buy the bouquets in the store, and as true as the bees and other pollinators that are drawn to them. It is a relationship spanning the depths of time, the ‘enticing configurations’ of the flower coevolving in time with the aesthetic preferences of ancestral pollinators and now coevolving with the humans who have shown a quite devoted interest in the further development of floral beauty.
I’m not sure how many varieties of ornamental flowers are on the market and available to purchase from seed, tuber, or corm. I would guess approximately a bajillion. We may not be pollinators per se but our species is clearly as obsessed with flowers as any bee. In fact, I was literally stopped in my tracks by a dahlia last week. I’d been working on the bed of cherry tomatoes right next door and as I stood up and turned the damn flower just stole my breath away—an oversized bobblehead of a dahlia, its purple (lilac? violet?) and white (eggshell? moonlight?) hues blending seamlessly and softly into one another, petals still curled slightly inward, maybe a day away from peak harvestability. I actually forgot what I was doing for a second and just stared.
That experience, I believe, is what Team Flower works so hard to recreate in those many (many) bouquets they make.
Just as there is an easy beauty to a flower that makes us forget all the energy the plant put into producing it, there is an effortlessness to the beauty of a Lapa’au bouquet that disguises the work that has gone into it. That’s a marker of success, of course; these flowers in all their variety—the riot of color and shape and size rubberbanded together within a sheaf of butcher paper—should feel harmonious. You know you’ve got a good arrangement when it just feels right, when it needs no explanation of form or vision but instead simply coheres. This coherence starts in the field, from the get-go. Are you paying attention to stem length as you harvest? Which leaves do you keep and which do you cut away? Are you mindful as you move from one variety of flower to another that they require different styles of harvesting? And once all the flowers are in their buckets and have moved from field to barn, and you have a borderline-insane number of stems before you, can you surrender to the process?
Let go of any specific outcome, any preordained finished product. Sometimes that perfect symmetrical arrangement occurs. Hooray! Sometimes an unexpected, off-centered and non-uniformly tall bouquet sticks the landing too. Also hooray! Sometimes, I guess, the bliss does just flow. And then some days, like everywhere on the farm (and in life), it feels like the flowers themselves are fighting you, like they’ve set themselves against you and your vision. Your hand’s cramping from holding bouquets, the colors are unbalanced, the stems are snapping because the flower is too heavy. I’m not sure how the gals feel, but I imagine if I was in their shoes I would want to smash every stupid bloom under my boot heel, crunch all the stems together into a tumbleweed of the formerly beautiful, and toss the whole mess into the compost pile.
Probably this is why I have not been asked to participate in bouquet making.
They do let me take leftover flowers home though, which is very kind. What a gift to have a steady supply of fresh flowers to bring home with me! Nowhere is as beautiful as the farm, but taking a bouquet home with me (or what passes for a bouquet in my own, um, rustic arrangments) means I get to transfer a little bit of that beauty to my home. It’s pretty amazing how something as small and simple as a vase of fresh flowers can liven up a room. No need to rearrange the furniture or replace the wall art; a few flowers on the table are all the redecorating anyone could need.
Cut flowers won’t last more than a few days, it’s true; but after all, that impermanence is part of the beauty. Nothing that decadent gets to last forever. So don’t let the summer slip away—grow you some flowers, or go pick some wild ones, or grab a bouquet from us. The flowers are there, quite simply there, growing and unfolding and being beautiful under the sun. And they could be beautiful for you, if you let them.
