A Floral Love Letter to a City

I can't be the only person overwhelmed by the news these days. Most mornings I'm torn between the need to know what's going on and whether I can better prepare myself and the need to protect my poor brain from despair and fear. I am certainly no expert in physchology, but I do believe very strongly that turning to uplifting stories can help us not to lose hope. And hope, as anyone who's been through a tragedy or severe hardship will tell you, is very important.

“Hope. It’s like a drop of honey, a field of tulips blooming in the springtime. It’s a fresh rain, a whispered promise, a cloudless sky, the perfect punctuation mark at the end of a sentence. And it’s the only thing in the world keeping me afloat.”
Tahereh Mafi

I am currently in Portland, Oregon, a place I called home for many years and where a part of my heart will always reside. This is a city with a strong sense of community, which is one of the things that drew me to it after years in a bigger and less friendly place. For several years I had a small floral design company and I'm still connected to many of the other designers and the companies and farms that supply them.

Flower farming is one of the many, many industries drastically affected by the COVID-19 crisis. Last week I was seeing a lot of distressing stories from flower distributors showing truckloads of flowers being sent to the landfill because so many shops have had to close. Some of my flowering friends in Portland had a beautiful idea and worked together quickly to get as many flowers from one distributor closing here to as many florists as were able to pick them up.

And in less than 24 hours, they made these:

by Knot & Fern

by Sea of Roses

by Good Seed Floral

by Color Theory Design Co, who organized the tour map.

I'm so proud of everyone involved in this spontaneous love letter to the city. 

There were perhaps a dozen more I couldn't get to yesterday, but if I see more images in the coming days, I'll add them. If you are in Portland and would like to see them before they fade, text flowertour to 21000. They were created on March 22nd and some will be refreshed for a few days.

"Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much" Helen Keller