From Kenya to Colombia, Holland to India, flower farmers face unprecedented weather volatility that threatens an industry built on predictability
The dread arrives before dawn, invisible and silent. It is not the roar of a wildfire or the crash of a flood—those at least announce themselves. It is the quiet discovery that the air itself has shifted: a degree too warm overnight, a millimeter of rain at the wrong hour, a frost three weeks early or a rainy season that never arrived at all.
Flowers are weather made visible. Their color, stem length, fragrance, and the precise day they open are all instructions written by temperature, light, and water. For millennia, growers have read those instructions and answered them. What has changed in the last two decades is that the instructions have started to contradict themselves—and the farmers who supply the world’s markets, roadside stalls, and Valentine’s Day bouquets are the first to notice when the old rules stop holding.
Kenya’s Lake Naivasha: A Reversal That Defies Expectations
For decades, the story told about Kenya’s Lake Naivasha was one of drought and shrinking water. Rose cultivation consumes between seven and thirteen liters of water per stem, according to industry estimates. By 2009, what Jane Ngiga, then chief executive of the Kenya Flower Council, called “the worst year in terms of drought, countrywide” had emptied lakes across the Rift Valley and forced growers to confront how much of the region’s water was being exported as flowers enjoyed for a week and discarded thousands of miles away.
But since 2015, the lake has done the opposite of what growers expected. It has risen—not receded.
Unusually heavy rains falling on the Aberdare mountain range have pushed water levels up year after year, in a pattern that has startled scientists and devastated communities. Lina Jamwa of the Kenya Flower Council described farms that have simply watched the lake advance onto their land. “Some growers have already seen parts of their farms encroached by the rising lake waters, disrupting production activities in affected areas,” she said.
The Wafula family, who live near the lake but have no connection to the flower trade, told the Associated Press they woke one October morning to find their home surrounded by roughly a foot of water that had crept in overnight. “It seemed as if the lake was far from our homes,” Ngome 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.
Simultaneously, higher temperatures and shifting rainfall patterns are disrupting growth cycles, straining irrigation systems, and introducing new pests. The False Codling Moth—”that wasn’t there some years ago,” according to an official with Kenya’s Plant Health Inspectorate Service—has become an emerging threat with what he called “a changing behaviour,” attributed to warming temperatures expanding the moth’s range.
Patrick Mbugua, general manager of Wildfire Flowers Kenya, described the compounding pressure: “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.”
Kenya’s flower sector, worth billions of shillings annually, employs more than half a million people directly and indirectly. Mohamed Adow, director of the Nairobi-based think tank Power Shift Africa, called the industry’s climate exposure “yet another example of the future we face if governments continue to let the climate crisis wreak havoc.”
Ethiopia’s Lake Ziway: A Mirror Image in the Same Rift Valley
Nine hundred miles north, a strikingly similar story unfolds around Ethiopia’s Lake Ziway. The country’s floriculture industry has grown with remarkable speed over the past twenty years, much of it clustered along Ziway’s shores, where volcanic soils, equatorial light, and reliable freshwater once created near-ideal conditions without the artificial heating that burdens Dutch greenhouses.
Frank Ammerlaan, a second-generation Dutch rose grower who arrived in Ethiopia in 2006 with his brother Wim, founded AQ Roses, a family-owned nursery that now spans fifty hectares and exports more than one hundred million stems a year. “Climate-wise, growing roses is not ideal, even impossible in many places,” he has observed.
Lake Ziway has seen its water level drop by roughly a meter over two decades, and its surface area has shrunk by an estimated eight percent since 2000. Fish populations have declined, surrounding wetlands have dried, and communities report growing scarcity.
According to a 2024 analysis by Christian Aid, roughly fifty-nine percent of all roses traded internationally originate from just five Global South countries—Kenya, Ethiopia, Uganda, Ecuador, and Colombia—all confronting escalating extreme-weather risk.
Colombia: When Too Cold and Too Hot Strike the Same Crop
In South America’s flower-growing highlands, temperature swings arrive with almost no warning.
In 2010, an unusually severe cold snap swept through the savanna surrounding Bogotá just weeks before Valentine’s Day—responsible for roughly twelve percent of Colombia’s annual flower sales. At Unique Collection Farms, workers sprayed water over rose beds in an old but desperate technique meant to release latent heat as the water froze. It was not enough. “El Niño is already bringing colder than normal nighttime temperatures,” said Alejandro Llano, the company’s general manager. A significant share of that year’s holiday production was lost.
“That same year,” Augusto Solano, then president of the growers’ association Asocolflores, noted, brought the worst rainy season in sixty years, triggering flooding and humidity that drove up costs as growers fought fungal disease. National production losses among rose growers are estimated between five and fifteen percent.
By early 2024, the opposite problem emerged: clear skies, record-high temperatures, and unusual dryness pushed roses to bloom earlier than intended. “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.”
Moises Croitoru, farm manager at Passion Growers, explained the logistics: “We need to harvest approximately fifteen percent of our whole year’s production in a ten to fifteen day period”—a high-wire act with no margin for freeze, flood, or heatwave.
The Netherlands: Tulip Fields Rewritten by Rain
Arjan Smit has spent his entire adult life among tulips, cultivating a family business his grandfather started in 1940 in North Holland. “The climate has changed. We can feel that,” he told a reporter touring his farm in 2024. “We have more wet periods. Last year, it was just raining, raining, raining.”
Walking his rows, he pointed out muddy gaps where entire tulips drowned. “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 have lost a minimum of thirteen percent of the new bulbs for next year.”
The physics are well understood: a warmer atmosphere holds more water vapor, producing wetter winters even as spring and summer bring hotter, drier stretches. 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.
“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 with ties to Utrecht University, confirmed: “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.”
The autumn of 2023 brought unusually heavy rainfall that delayed planting. By harvest time in mid-2024, yields had fallen substantially. De Vroomen Garden Products, a major wholesale supplier, reported it could source only about eighty percent of the tulip bulbs the market required—a shortfall that grew to roughly thirty percent.
India: Marigolds, Monsoons, and a “Wet Drought”
In India, the weather’s assault on flower farming plays out on a shorter, more frequent cycle tied 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. In the autumn of 2025, days of unrelenting, unseasonal rain destroyed large stretches of the crop just as flowers approached festival-season harvest. Standing water turned blooms black and rotten; humidity spread a fungal blight called 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.
In Karnataka’s Gadag district, growers of chrysanthemum, marigold, and jasmine lost heavily to unseasonal rain before the Ugadi festival. In Punjab, hailstorms caused losses estimated at up to thirty-five percent for floriculturists growing flowers timed for the Baisakhi wedding season.
One farmer from Karmala recounted: “I managed to bring four tons of flowers through knee-deep water and arrived in Pune by train at midnight. 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.”
His phrase—“a wet drought” —captures something distinctly modern about the crisis facing growers worldwide: conditions that combine the worst features of too much and too little rain, arriving out of season, concentrated into destructive bursts, and stripped of predictability.
California: Fire at the Foot of the Santa Ynez Mountains
In December 2017, the Thomas Fire—at the time one of the largest wildfires in California’s history—swept toward the seaside city of Carpinteria, home to a concentrated cluster of flower farms.
Dani Hahn, owner of Rose Story Farm, watched firefighters set a controlled backburn to stop the advancing blaze. “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, in her words, “small prices” measured against what could have been lost.
Kasey Cronquist, then chief executive of the California Cut Flower Commission, noted the region had been “pretty fortunate”—the fire had claimed a firefighter’s life and destroyed more than seven hundred homes. But 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.”
The Thomas Fire was an early warning. California’s subsequent decade has brought increasingly severe wildfire seasons, making fire not an occasional emergency but a recurring feature of the growing calendar.
Japan: Cherry Blossoms Arriving Ahead of Schedule
Not every disruption announces itself through destroyed crops. In Japan, climate change is rewriting one of the most closely watched natural calendars on the planet.
Japan’s Meteorological Agency has tracked cherry blossom flowering dates since 1953. Tokyo’s cherry trees, which bloomed on average around March 29 between 1961 and 1990, had shifted to an average of March 24 by 1991–2020—a movement of 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 recorded since 1953. Some recent years have registered the earliest peak bloom dates in twelve hundred years of recorded observation.
“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.
But the mechanism carries an unsettling twist. Cherry buds form during the preceding summer and enter a dormant state that can only be broken by sufficient cold winter temperatures. In places where winters no longer get cold enough, flowering can be delayed—or, according to projections from Japan’s International Research Center for Agricultural Sciences, prevented entirely. Their models suggest that Somei-Yoshino cherries could eventually stop flowering at the southern limits of their current range.
China’s Yunnan Province: A Frost That Should Not Have Come
In Yunnan, China’s “Flower Province” and the source of roughly seventy percent of all commercially sold flowers in the country, even one of the most stable climates on Earth is not immune.
In late November 2025, Yunnan experienced an unusually long rainy season followed immediately by an early and unusually severe frost. Temperatures fell as low as minus 2.2 degrees Celsius, with sub-zero readings recorded inside greenhouses. Major growing districts including Jianshui, Honghe, Chengjiang, and Qujing reported extensive damage, hitting smaller and mid-sized growers hardest. Wholesale prices for some rose varieties rose by roughly twenty renminbi per bundle.
As one account of Yunnan’s floriculture sector put it: “a single late spring cold snap can cause heavy losses”—a sentence that could describe Naivasha’s rising lake, Colombia’s early freeze, the Netherlands’ waterlogged bulb fields, or India’s blackened marigolds with equal accuracy.
What the Growers Are Learning
No single story amounts to proof of 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, displacing the very farms once blamed for depleting it. An Ethiopian lake shrinking as the flower economy along its shore grows. Colombian growers spraying water to prevent freezing one year, then racing to beat an early bloom from unprecedented heat a few years later. A Dutch farmer watering ten times a season instead of two to four and still losing bulbs. Indian farmers coining the phrase “wet drought.” A California rose farm scorched by wildfire. A cherry blossom record spanning twelve centuries, broken repeatedly in a single decade.
Growers everywhere are adapting in the ways available to them—solar power in Kenya, drought-tolerant plant trials in Dutch gardens, fire-preparedness infrastructure in California, domestically bred climate-resilient varieties in Yunnan. None of these responses resolves the underlying problem. Together, they describe an industry improvising toward a future in which the climatic assumptions built over decades or centuries can no longer be taken for granted.
What remains constant across every farm and every crop 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; 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.
It is that unforgiving combination of biological fragility and calendar-bound demand that makes the flower trade, perhaps more than any other form of agriculture, an early and unusually visible register of how much the climate growers depend on has already begun to change.