Flowers are a wonderful gift, but with the coronavirus sweeping across the world, they are being thrown in garbage bins or added to fertilizers.
Florists across Europe are facing a tough situation. The peak of the pandemic coincided with this year's flower season, and the festivities of Easter and Mother's Day. With the beginning of the spring, nature thrives and inspires people to decorate the corners of their house with colorful flowers.
In the Netherlands, the countryside features countless fields of tulips blooming in pink, red, yellow, and purple. In a regular spring, this landscape would attract over 1.5 million tourists, but this year, everything is calm.
Boxes of unwanted flowers are being abandoned or distributed on cars and pedestrians, and 50 tulips are being sold for 5 euros ($5.40). According to the German News Agency, the Netherlands' annual exports of plants and flowers are estimated at 6 billion euros, however, this trade has stopped due to the pandemic.
Michel van Schie, spokesman for Royal Flora-Holland, a huge auction house for flowers, said: "The closed borders and the declining sales have strongly affected the industry. In March, auction houses used to gather a big number of local flower trading companies in Aalsmeer, near Amsterdam, one of the biggest centers of plant and flower trade in the world."
In a normal situation, the auction house would sell 12 billion units of plants and flowers. But today, the industry witnesses an unsurprising recession, after the coronavirus outbreak has called off all the occasions on which people buy flowers, from Christmas and other religious holidays to weddings, and even funerals.
Visiting patients in hospitals, houses, and nursing homes have also been banned.
"We no longer meet people, for whom do we offer flowers?" asked Schie.
As a result, the Dutch union urged flowers companies to display only 25 percent of their products in the daily auctions to help cut the transport costs.
The rest, which represents the biggest share of the produce, is being destroyed. "We have never seen such thing before," said Schie.
"We are currently throwing tons of flowers in garbage bins. Flowers sales have dropped to around 20 percent, and many kiosks selling African flowers in big malls and centers are empty," said Norbert Engler, chairman of the Executive Board of the Association of the German flower wholesale.
