Lilacs quietly tell the story of climate change. Since the 1950s, phenologists across the U.S. have used them as an “indicator plant” to track the start of spring because of their extreme sensitivity to temperatures. Their blooms elucidate the first warm day of the season as not just a feeling, but a fact. There’s an entire “lilac network” that stretches from coast to coast, made up of volunteers who have spent decades documenting the exact days that the buds burst open and winter becomes a passing thought.
As it turns out, lilacs have been blooming one day earlier every three years since 1973. During those interim years, however, lilac blooms have come early, late, as anticipated—all an indicator of increasingly erratic weather.
Although Sou Sisoumankhara works with flowers all day in the Los Angeles Flower District, when she can, she drives to a friend’s farm in Acton, California to handpick lilacs. It’s something she says “everyone should do in their lifetime if they get the chance—go to a lilac farm just after they’ve bloomed and smell the lilac as you cut them by hand.” By mid-March, it’s usually time to make her annual pilgrimage to gather the tumescent blooms. This year, they hadn’t opened until mid-April.
“The lilacs are late. The hydrangeas are freezing. The roses are rotting.” The climate crisis weaves its way into conversations around L.A.’s flower markets, vendors and wholesalers exchanging observations of which flower species are struggling, mutating into unrecognizable forms, or dying en masse. What may have been attributed to “strange weather” just a few years ago at the market is now named outright: climate change. While many flower businesses continue to face destabilization by the pandemic, what once felt like the slow burn of an unpredictable climate has become an unavoidable blaze. What’s available at the markets has always been at the whim of weather, but capricious has shifted into catastrophic as heatwaves, drought, flooding, cold fronts, and wildfires disfigure and destroy crops globally, from Ecuador to Ethiopia and all across the United States.
At the start of the pandemic, entire seasons’ worth of flowers went unharvested as COVID-19 swept farmworkers in California. Flights importing flowers internationally were widely canceled. Between mid-March to mid-April of 2020 alone, flower sales dropped by 85% across California’s 225 flower and foliage farms, according to the California Cut Flower Commission. Cut flowers grown in the U.S. brought in 10% less sales in 2020 than the previous year—and of that 10%, California was solely responsible for over three-fourths of flower revenue. “There’s a high demand for flowers as people are starting to have events again—but shortages from things like cold weather and drought are causing chaos,” says Sisoumankhara.
The 100-year-old Los Angeles Flower District is the largest wholesale flower district in the U.S. It blossomed from two major markets that now sit directly across the street from each other. First, there was the Southern California Flower Market, formerly the Japanese Flower Market, which was formed in 1912 by Japanese immigrants. Then came the Original Flower Market, which was founded by European immigrants some years later. Each is home to about 50 wholesalers, still predominantly immigrant-owned. Since the 1990s, a constellation of smaller flower markets, malls, standalone shops, and independent vendors have oriented themselves around the original two.
The California Flower Mall, one of the Flower District’s prominent malls, published a notice on their website in May, after their vendors expressed worry about the effects of climate change on their businesses. “Mother Nature is responding to what we are doing with one catastrophic event after another. It is time for the global flower industry to start talking about what we are going to change to live in harmony with on our planet,” said Gersain Bustos, owner of Growers Direct Flowers.
Nestor Lara has worked in the Flower District for about 18 years. Up until a year ago, he worked at some of the district’s biggest wholesalers before deciding to start his own business, NL Flower Wholesale, despite the challenges posed by the pandemic and the increasingly frequent flower shortages. “I try to keep my prices stable, I don’t really go up even when there are shortages. I don’t like to take advantage of people,” he says. “Some flowers are just so impossible to get your hands on. Hydrangea alone has gone up two to three times the normal price recently.” Lara goes on to describe the theatrical choreography of a fight that almost broke out in his stall over the last of his hydrangeas just the other day.
The hydrangea shortage can be traced all the way to Colombia, a major importer of the flower, which experienced a severe temperature drop just a few months ago, resulting in hail storms that almost entirely destroyed the country’s hydrangea crops. It forced many of the flower vendors to dramatically increase prices to make up for losses. Hundreds of flower farms closed in the aftermath.
“Something new that’s been happening is that since it’s so cold and damp in countries like Mexico, roses are coming in and they start rotting really quickly—even though they’re new flowers,” says Gisselle Bravo, who has been working at her father Hector Bravo’s business, HB Wholesale Flowers, since 2012. “What we’re really paying for is plane tickets for flowers. They travel thousands of miles just to get here. Our main flowers are hydrangeas, tulips, lisianthus, and lilies, which we usually source half-and-half, both internationally and locally. But we’ve been working with local farms a lot more now.” It’s true that the global flower industry’s own carbon footprint is significant, largely due to refrigerated plane transportation.
As someone who has been coming to the Southern California Flower Market since he was a kid because of his father’s flower business, Erick Barajas has watched the market’s flower options narrow down over the years. “In the ’90s, the market was different. It was pounding, there was a heartbeat. To me, it was like going to Disneyland. It’s much quieter now. Most people sell the same flowers, because you can’t really experiment as much with what you sell when there’s such limited availability and a lack of stability from COVID,” he says. Customers are trying to work around what’s available, Barajas notes—typically during September, people gravitate towards fall colors, but because of shortages, they’ll take pinks, purples, whatever they can get.
Pointing around the market, Barajas maps out his family tree, branches extending every which way. One aunt here, another aunt over there, a third cousin just across the aisle. Their flower offerings aren’t dissimilar—and neither are their difficulties meeting customer demands.
The word people keep using to describe L.A.’s flower industry in our conversations is “ecosystem.” Some folks mean the families that have been working in the flower business for generations. Others are referring to the ripple effect that happens when tempestuous weather causes a flower shortage that rocks everyone, including the farm laborers, farmers, wholesalers, retailers, and florists.
Alex Floro is another entrepreneur who launched her business during the pandemic, a floral design business called Under New Mgmt. “Knowing that I have to charge people a bit more because of these supply chain issues—and because I’m trying to work as sustainably and ethically as I can—it’s hard sometimes. I just lost a wedding client because I was more expensive than someone else,” says Floro as she loads bundles of flowers into her car. “Does that mean I just stop using certain flowers because the prices are so astronomical—or will I have to just stop being a florist because I can’t afford it?”
Last Valentine’s Day, she and her team raised money to provide holiday care packages to Original Flower Market workers. She wrote on Instagram: “We’re showing love and gratitude to the mostly POC and immigrant workforce of the Original Flower Market. Floral essential workers begin their days at 2-3 a.m. in the morning and work through the day. They face cold conditions, constant potential exposure [to COVID], and perform hard manual labor.”
From its inception, the Los Angeles Flower District was grown and nurtured by immigrants of color—many families who have been selling flowers for generations are still there. The floral industry zooms in on the ways that climate change is aggressively impacting marginalized communities worldwide—the same communities who have been systemically exposed to COVID-19 at higher rates. “During COVID, we had to throw all of our flowers away because there was nowhere for them to go, no one to buy them,” Sou Sisoumankhara says. “Now, it’s impossible to meet the demand with shortages like this. Sometimes people are understanding of that, sometimes they aren’t.” Either way, she says, the earth requires our attention.
