Human Flower Project

Tuesday, November 02, 2004

No Necesita a Henry Higgins

You won’t find any Eliza Doolittles among the flower vendors of San Antonio’s Castroville Road. They’ve stood up to the local flower shops, lobbied the city council for the right to sell, and around El Dia de Los Muertos, they’re working around the clock.

Castroville Road, San Antonio

Carmen Almaguer is a flower lady down to her sandals: they strap onto her rough feet with a band of plastic blooms.

For twelve days around The Day of the Dead, November 2, Almaguer and her family coordinate a non-stop relay, bringing flowers to San Antonio’s West Side. Along with some forty other street vendors, they set up at dawn beneath umbrellas in the parking lot of Las Palmas shopping center, where a rivulet of buyers trickles all day and into the evening. Nearly all her customers will take what they buy across the street, to San Fernando II Cemetery, observing the centuries old custom of All Souls Day.

Carmen Almaguer
Almaguer, at age 72, has been doing this work since the late 1970s. Two decades ago, local flower shops tried to shut down the open-air market along Castroville Road, but the city council ruled in favor of the street vendors. If they buy a city license for $180, they can sell here for a few specified days around the six main floral occasions: Christmas, Valentine’s Day, Easter, Mother’s Day,  Father’s Day, and All Souls, known in Mexico, and much of San Antonio, as El Dia de los Muertos.

Maria Orta cuts zinnias at the Verstuyfts’ farm.

Almaguer makes up some arrangments of artificial flowers to sell. For $75, she also buys several rows of field flowers from Roger Verstuft, whose farm is just south of the city. Each morning and evening, Carmen, her sister Maria Orta, one nephew and a grandson, take the pickup to Verstuft’s fields and pick their own marigolds, zinnias and feathers (a type of coxcomb). They pack up several washtubs of fresh flowers, taking them home to trim, mix and arrange into coffee-can vases. By early afternoon, Almaguer’s fresh flowers, $5 a bunch, have sold out.

Carmen works down a row of feathers.

(All Saints is a huge floral holiday in the Philippines also. The Manila Times published this report on the busy Dangwa flower market, where yellow chrysanthemums are the favorite flower of the season.)

Monday, November 01, 2004

Flower Farmers All Schedule around All Souls

Most of San Antonio’s flower shops sell silk arrangements and gladiolas from Latin America, but for All Souls Day, discerning ghosts prefer the bounty of the southside’s Belgian Gardens.

A generation ago, faithful Roman Catholics from as far south as Laredo, Texas, used to drive to the southern edge of San Antonio to buy coxcomb (mano de leon) and marigolds from Roger Verstuyft’s father, Dorson.  Theirs was one of about 15 Belgian farm families who produced vegetables year round for the San Antonio market and flowers for All Saints and All Souls Days.

Today, Roger and his wife Patsy own and work one of the last few flower farms in “The Belgian Gardens.” This year they raised a half acre of marigolds—the traditional flower for Dia de los Muertos, or Day of the Dead—selling three dozen bunches, enough to fill six big plastic buckets, to San Fernando Cathedral in the city center. The marigold (close relative to Southern Mexico’s cempasuchil flowers) was favored by the Aztecs for its luminous color—bright enough to direct a wandering soul back earthward.

Patsy Verstuft sells a bunch of marigolds to longtime customers.

Roger makes several daily deliveries to local flower shops, those on the west side that serve San Fernando II Cemetery. The Verstuyfts also sell rows to local flower vendors, who come pick their own fresh stock every evening, when supplies sell out. And the Verstuyfts sell zinnias, feathers, and marigolds at the farm too. Most of their customers have been coming for many years, buying a bunch or two to decorate the family graves.

The Verstuyfts try to calculate their planting so the flowers will all be at the height of bloom by Oct. 31, just before All Souls, November 2. This year Roger had to replant the marigolds when his first crop got off to a disappointing start. Then, toward the end of the six-week growing season, there was more work than he and Patsy could handle. Cousin Mark Verstuyft, who farms flowers nearby at Von Ormy, sent two of his hired hands over to help.

Patsy and Roger Verstuyft
Photos: Julie Ardery

After paying for seed (often twice), planting, nursing the flowers along through the hot stretch of September, and then wading out to pick in the buzzing dusk, Roger and Patsy charge only $3 for a bunch of homegrown radiance. Roger looks weary. He says this may be the last year he’ll mess with flowers.

He said that when I was here two years ago.

Campaigning with Marigolds

For Dia de los Muertos, the traditional cempasuchil flower flashes a radiant welcome across the veil of death. This year, protesters in Mexico City send a message to the living at the U.S. Embassy.

NDTV (India) reports that demonstrators in the Mexican capital spelled out “No to Bush” with mounds of blossoms Saturday in front of the U.S. Embassy.

“Mexicans prepare similar offerings as they honour the dead on November 1, when the souls of dead children are believed to return, and on November 2, when adults are believed to arrive.”

Cempasuchil flowers, much like the marigold, smell pungent and fix the eyes with oranges and yellows as high-beam as runways lights. For All Saints and All Souls Days (Nov. 1-2) these blooms are used on memorial altars (ofrendas) to draw back spirits of the dead, a tradition that combines Aztec ancestor worship and Roman Catholicism’s holidays of All Saints and All Souls days.

Over the past dozen or so years, this strong tradition has fanned from its place of origin, Southern Mexico, out across North America and other parts of the world both in personal tributes to the dead and, more recently, as a sensuous and compelling medium for all kinds of artistic and political expression.

According to NDTV, “Protesters hung art that incorporated images of Iraqi prisoners being abused. One sign labelled the US Embassy the ‘embassy of death.’”

Can anyone send us a photo of the protest?