A flower farmer’s worst nightmare arrives not as fire or flood, but as something far subtler: a fraction of a degree too warm through the night, rain that fell at the wrong hour, or a frost that arrived three weeks early. Across Kenya, Ethiopia, Colombia, the Netherlands, India, California, Japan, and China, growers who supply the world’s bouquets are discovering that the climatic rules their industry was built on have stopped holding.
Flowers are weather made visible. Their color, stem length, fragrance, and the precise day they open are instructions written by temperature, light, and water. For millennia, growers have read those instructions and responded. What has changed in the last two decades is that the instructions increasingly contradict themselves—and the farmers who supply Valentine’s Day roses, wedding garlands, and festival bouquets are the first to notice.
Water Extremes Strike East Africa’s Rose Belt
Lake Naivasha in Kenya’s Rift Valley tells two opposing stories simultaneously. For years, the narrative centered on drought: rose cultivation requires seven to thirteen liters of water per stem, and Kenya exports millions of stems annually. Rivers that once fed the lake, including the Gilgil and Karati, dried up entirely during dry spells.
But since roughly 2015, the lake has been rising—not receding. Unusually heavy rains falling on the Aberdare mountain range have pushed water levels up year after year, startling scientists and devastating lakeside communities.
“Some growers have already seen parts of their farms encroached by the rising lake waters, disrupting production activities in affected areas,” said Lina Jamwa of the Kenya Flower Council.
The Kenya Flower Council lacks a precise figure for how much farmland has vanished beneath the water—a fact that itself illustrates how quickly conditions have shifted. Families with no connection to the flower trade have also lost homes. Ngome and Rose Wafula told the Associated Press they woke one October morning to find their home surrounded by roughly a foot of water.
“It seemed as if the lake was far from our homes,” Wafula said. “And then one night we were shocked to find our houses flooded. The water came from nowhere.”
Some five thousand people were displaced that year alone.
Meanwhile, Lake Ziway in Ethiopia—home to one of the world’s largest rose farms—has seen its water level drop by roughly one meter over two decades, with surface area shrinking by an estimated eight percent since 2000.
Patrick Mbugua, general manager of Wildfire Flowers Kenya, described the compounding pressure plainly: “We’ve seen increased disease pressure due to unusual weather patterns, sometimes we have excessive hot weather which sees a jump in the number of pests, and other times unusually low temperatures which increases fungal infections, reducing yields.”
New pests are also arriving. The False Codling Moth, “that wasn’t there some years ago,” has become an emerging threat with changing behavior widely attributed to warming temperatures expanding its range, according to a Kenya Plant Health Inspectorate Service officer. In response, Kenyan regulators built an entirely new farm-level surveillance framework to keep export markets open.
According to a 2024 Christian Aid analysis, approximately fifty-nine percent of all internationally traded roses originate from just five Global South countries—Kenya, Ethiopia, Uganda, Ecuador, and Colombia—all now facing escalating extreme-weather risk.
Temperature Swings Shatter South America’s Valentine’s Production
Colombia’s flower growers learned the hard way that temperature volatility destroys crops from both directions.
In 2010, an unusually severe cold snap swept through the savanna surrounding Bogotá just weeks before Valentine’s Day—the single most important date on the global flower calendar, responsible for roughly twelve percent of Colombia’s annual sales. At Unique Collection Farms, workers sprayed water over rose beds in a desperate bid to release latent heat as the water froze.
It was not enough. A significant share of that year’s holiday production was lost outright.
That same year, Colombia experienced its worst rainy season in sixty years. Flooding largely spared the flower-growing regions, but lingering excess humidity drove up costs as growers fought fungal disease, according to Augusto Solano, then president of the growers’ association Asocolflores. National production losses during the subsequent La Niña episode are estimated between five and fifteen percent.
By February 2024, El Niño brought the opposite crisis: clear skies, record-high temperatures, and an unusually dry stretch pushed roses to bloom earlier than intended, throwing off carefully timed harvest schedules.
“El Niño has definitely arrived with clear blue skies and high-temperature records across Colombia,” said Elkin Farfán, a planning manager at Phytotech. “It is a challenging time for the industry, and many exporters are struggling to keep afloat.”
Farms like Passion Growers, located an hour west of Bogotá, compress roughly fifteen percent of an entire year’s rose production into a ten-to-fifteen-day harvesting sprint, running twenty-four hours a day with a thousand workers on shift.
“We need to harvest approximately fifteen percent of our whole year’s production in a ten to fifteen day period,” farm manager Moises Croitoru explained—a logistical high-wire act with essentially no margin for freeze, flood, or heatwave.
Dutch Tulip Fields Drown in Wetter Winters
Arjan Smit has spent his entire adult life among tulips, cultivating a family business his grandfather started in 1940 in Spierdijk, North Holland. His fields still produce the postcard image the world associates with the Netherlands, but Smit describes how that image is fraying.
“The climate has changed. We can feel that,” he told a reporter in 2024. “We have more wet periods. Last year, it was just raining, raining, raining, and you can see the result.”
Walking his rows, he points out muddy gaps where entire tulips drowned. “Last winter, it was very wet. In total in our sector, we lost around eight to nine percent of the bulbs in the field. They were killed by water. And we planted four percent fewer. That means we are now starting to harvest our bulbs but we have lost a minimum of thirteen percent of the new bulbs for next year.”
Tulip bulbs require long, cold, relatively dry winters to develop properly. Without it, stems come up short, flowers emerge lopsided, or fail to bloom at all. Yet those same winters are becoming milder and wetter just as spring heatwaves become more frequent—squeezing the plant from both directions.
“When I started this work around thirty years ago, we had to water the fields two to four times in a spring season,” Smit said. “In the last ten years, sometimes we have to water every week. That means ten times. It’s much more expensive.”
Manuel Aguirre-Bolaños, a biologist studying tulip bulb development, frames the crisis in scientific terms: “Tulips are extremely sensitive to temperature. In order to form flowers properly, they need long, dry winters. If these winters stay away, the stems stay short, the flowers come out lopsided or unevenly, or they don’t bloom at all.”
Annual temperatures in the Netherlands have risen by roughly 2.3 degrees Celsius since 1901, according to World Bank data—measurably reducing the frost days tulips depend on.
The consequences have rippled directly into global supply. De Vroomen Garden Products, a major wholesale supplier, reported it could source only about eighty percent of tulip bulbs the market required in 2024. Industry analysts initially projected a twenty-percent shortfall that grew to roughly thirty percent.
India’s Marigold Farmers Face ‘Wet Drought’
In India, weather’s assault on flower farming plays out on a shorter, more frequent cycle tied tightly to a ritual calendar that leaves growers almost no room to absorb a bad week.
Marigolds occupy a specific place in Indian life: strung into garlands for weddings, temples, and festivals including Dussehra, Diwali, and Onam, they are grown by hundreds of thousands of smallholder farmers as a reliable secondary cash crop.
In the autumn of 2025, days of unrelenting, unseasonal rain destroyed large stretches of the crop around Bhiwandi in Maharashtra’s Thane district just as flowers approached festival-season harvest. Standing water turned blooms black and rotten; humidity spread a fungal blight local farmers call karpya rog.
“The flowers were just about to bloom when the rain came,” one grower reported. “Within a few hours, everything was destroyed. Now there’s no harvest, no market and no income.”
Ganesh Patil, farming two acres of marigold in Bhiwandi taluka, said the rains “completely wiped out” his crop. Traders refused to buy what remained.
The same pattern has recurred with mechanical regularity. In Karnataka’s Gadag district, growers of chrysanthemum, marigold, and jasmine lost heavily to unseasonal rain before the Ugadi festival. In Punjab, hailstorms caused estimated losses of up to thirty-five percent for floriculturists growing flowers timed for the Baisakhi wedding season.
One farmer from Karmala recounted planting marigold on two acres, only to watch heavy rain destroy most of it. “I managed to bring four tons of flowers through knee-deep water and arrived in Pune by train at midnight,” he said. “Even now, I am getting only fifty rupees per kilogram. People are not buying. We appeal to the Chief Minister to declare a wet drought and provide immediate relief to farmers.”
His phrase—“a wet drought”—captures something distinctly modern about the crisis: the old vocabulary of agricultural disaster, built around too much rain or too little, increasingly fails to describe conditions that combine the worst features of both, arriving out of season and stripped of predictability.
California Wildfire Threatens Central Coast Flower Region
In December 2017, the Thomas Fire—at the time one of the largest wildfires in California’s history—swept toward Carpinteria, home to a concentrated cluster of flower farms at the foot of the Santa Ynez Mountains.
Dani Hahn, owner of Rose Story Farm, watched dozens of firefighters race to set a controlled backburn. “We know we live in a desert climate and are prone to wildfires, but I don’t think anyone could expect the scope of this,” she said afterward. Her farm was scorched but largely spared; trampled roses and damaged trees were “small prices” measured against what could have been lost.
West Orchids Inc., founded by one of four Dutch families who settled in the valley specifically to grow flowers, watched flames advance to within half a mile of its thirty-acre operation, forcing evacuation and halting production entirely.
Kasey Cronquist, then chief executive of the California Cut Flower Commission, noted that Carpinteria’s flower farms employ roughly eight hundred people and generate more than two million dollars in daily economic activity. What could not be avoided was the interruption to shipping.
“These aren’t crops that can just hang on trees and wait until this thing passes,” Cronquist said. “It’s a very perishable product that just needs to keep moving.”
Rose Story Farm alone lost nearly a week of deliveries.
Japan’s Cherry Blossom Record Shatters
In Japan, climate change is rewriting one of the most closely watched natural calendars on the planet—the blooming of the cherry blossom, or sakura.
Japan’s Meteorological Agency has tracked cherry blossom flowering dates since 1953, and the trend line has moved almost without exception: earlier. Tokyo’s bloom date shifted from an average of March 29 between 1961 and 1990 to March 24 between 1991 and 2020, according to Daisuke Sasano, a climate risk management officer—roughly 1.2 days per decade.
In Kyoto, cherry blossoms hit full bloom on March 26 in one recent year, ten days ahead of the historical average and the earliest date since formal record-keeping began in 1953. Historical research using centuries of literary and diary records found that peak flowering in Kyoto has moved up by roughly two weeks compared with the 1820s.
“Our studies have shown that the start of cherry blossom season is closely linked with the average temperature in February and March,” said Shunji Ambe of the Japan Meteorological Agency, noting a pattern in which “spring phenomena, such as cherry and plum blossoms, tend to take place earlier, while autumn phenomena are delayed.”
Elizabeth Wolkovich, an associate professor at the University of British Columbia, called Japan’s long, unusually precise cherry blossom record one of the most powerful windows into the pace of planetary warming. “To me, the cherry blossom record really captures how extreme these changes are.”
Research projecting forward under a medium emissions scenario suggests peak bloom could advance by another full week by 2100.
A warmer winter does not simply produce an earlier bloom everywhere. In places where winters no longer get cold enough to fully break dormancy, flowering can instead be delayed—or, in projections modeled by researchers at Japan’s International Research Center for Agricultural Sciences, prevented entirely. Their research suggests that under continued warming, Somei-Yoshino cherries could eventually stop flowering altogether at the southern limits of their current range.
China’s ‘Flower Province’ Stunned by Frost
In Yunnan province, known across China as the “Flower Province” and home to the “City of Eternal Spring” of Kunming, a genuinely rare climate—mild year-round temperatures, roughly 2,200 hours of sunshine annually, and a frost-free period exceeding 240 days—has allowed Yunnan to become the source of roughly seventy percent of all commercially sold flowers in China.
In late November 2025, Yunnan experienced an unusually long rainy season followed by an early and severe frost. Temperatures fell as low as minus 2.2 degrees Celsius, with sub-zero readings recorded inside greenhouses. Major growing districts reported extensive damage, hitting smaller and mid-sized growers hardest.
Wholesale prices for some rose varieties rose by roughly twenty renminbi per bundle in the weeks that followed.
As one account of Yunnan’s floriculture sector put it: “a single late spring cold snap can cause heavy losses”—a sentence that could, with minimal adjustment, describe Naivasha’s rising lake, Colombia’s freeze, the Netherlands’ waterlogged bulb fields, or Bhiwandi’s blackened marigolds.
An Industry Improvises Toward an Uncertain Future
No single story here proves a planetary trend; weather has always been variable, and flower farming has always been a gamble. What is harder to dismiss is the pattern that emerges from stacking these stories side by side: a Kenyan lake that reversed direction, rising instead of falling. An Ethiopian lake shrinking as the flower economy along its shore keeps growing. Colombian growers spraying water onto roses to keep them from freezing one year, then racing an early bloom caused by unprecedented heat a few years later. A Dutch farmer watering his fields ten times a season instead of two to four, still losing more bulbs to rot than expected. Indian marigold farmers coining the phrase “wet drought.” A Californian rose farm scorched by one of the largest wildfires in state history. A cherry blossom record spanning twelve centuries, broken repeatedly within a single decade. A Chinese flower-trading hub blindsided by a frost warning in a province that frost warnings were not supposed to reach.
Growers everywhere are adapting through solar power and crowd-financed irrigation upgrades in Kenya, biological pest control in Ecuador, drought-tolerant plant trials in Dutch gardens, disaster relief appeals from Indian marigold cooperatives, fire-preparedness infrastructure across California, and an accelerating push in Yunnan toward domestically bred, more climate-resilient flower varieties.
None of these responses resolves the underlying problem. Taken together, they describe an industry—global, decentralized, and enormously labor-intensive—improvising its way toward a future in which climatic assumptions built over twenty, fifty, or hundreds of years can no longer be taken for granted.
What remains constant is the particular vulnerability of a flower itself: unlike grain, it cannot be stored against a bad season; unlike livestock, it cannot be moved out of danger; and unlike almost any other commercial crop, its entire economic value depends on a narrow, specific, often ceremonial window of time—a wedding date, a religious festival, a single retail holiday—that does not move to accommodate the weather, even when the weather refuses to cooperate.
Florist