There isn't always "next year" when it comes to flowers

I had a tendency when I decided not to visit a particular flower field in a given year, to say to myself, "sure I'll go next year". But as I have learned over the years, when it comes to flowers, there isn't always "next year". In my previous post I wrote about a particular flower festival (Tokorozawa Lily Festival) that hasn't been on since the pandemic. But dozens of flower festivals never came back after the pandemic. Worse still, not only did the festivals not come back, but the flowers were also never grown again. 

And it's not just the pandemic. Every now and then, flower fields just disappear. There is a mixture of reasons why this may happen. In my own town when the mayor changed two years ago, several flower fields just disappeared. No explanation, so I just assume it was the administerial change. Last year, I went to see poppies and the field was bare, with no sign and no information online as to why. Earlier this year the same thing happened with canola fields. No information at site or online as to why or whether its permanent or temporary for any of them. 

Other places, give a bit of notice. When Higashimatsuyama City were updating their agriculture park they gave due notice that the popular poppy fields would be gone forever. Sometimes there is less notice, but at least they give us a heads up that the flowers are going. For example, in a neighboring town that was known for cosmos, in 2022, they put up a sign in the cosmos field to say, 'this is the last year the cosmos will be grown'.

I have also seen flower displays disappear because the land on which they were grown was sold. Sometimes I hear of flower fields ceasing to be because there is no money and / or nobody left to maintain them. I think of the dear old man at a peony garden in northern Saitama who with great sadness announced that he could no longer maintain the flowers due to his old age and there was nobody to pass the baton too. Something similar happened in my own town when a woman became too sick to manage the lupine flowers she used to grow annually.

Other reasons I have seen quoted for flowers no longer being grown or open to the public is because of visitors behaving badly and / or neighbors complaining about visitors. There have also been cases where too few visitors were quoted for the reason why somebody stopped growing flowers. And then there is the case of large parks who purposefully change their flower displays every few years to keep things interesting. At least they replace them with something else!

The moral of the story - if there is a flower field you are interested in, best to go to see it this year rather than waiting until "next year", because there is always the possibility the flowers won't be there next year!