In the middle of rapidly urbanizing Hanoi, Tran Nguyen Bo, a 70 year old man from Ngoc Ha Ward in Ba Dinh District, uses an 800 square meter garden to plant daisy flowers for earning his family’s living, following his ancestors’ work.
Old farmer keeps the flowers fresh
Sandwiched between tall buildings in a long, curvy and tiny alley of Hanoi, Bo’s small house was built in 1985 and is the only one-storey house remaining there. At the back is the green garden with fresh buds of daisies ready for the Tet holiday.
“This year winter started late, thus our crop was late as well,” Lien, Bo’s wife said while using newspaper to wrap daisy plants to be delivered to the night market.
According to Bo, they only germinate baby plants because of the limited available space, and the land that they are farming now belonged to her sister, who luckily hasn’t built anything on the area, or sold it to anyone.
Born in the well-known Ngoc Ha flower village, Bo spent his youth serving in the army and later worked in a communist co-operative. After the economic reform of the late 1980s, the co-operative was dismissed and land was returned to individuals, and people started to sell their farms to buy high-rise apartments. That explains why farming areas are shrinking. Then, flower growers started to find new jobs, and hardly anyone wanted to keep the traditional village business. Lien has also noticed that there are more people from other places coming to live in Ngoc Ha and it is only a flower area in name now.
Bo’s nursery avoided the real estate storm because it was the most important thing he inherited from his parents, and many of his siblings and relatives also lived around it.
“It is a family business that was passed on from my ancestors to me, and now my son. Since giving him this arboretum, I work as a caretaker for some plant companies, which earns me about VND1.5 to 3 million (US$71 – 142) a month,” Bo said while showing his palms, which are full of scars from flower thorns and branches.
Tran Nguyen Bo is taking care of his garden used as a farm to earn his living in the urban center of Hanoi (Photo: Tuoi Tre)
Young follower in a blooming business
Tran Nguyen Thanh, born in 1980, is Bo’s youngest son. While his three brothers chose other jobs, Thanh inherited the garden and tending techniques from his father naturally, and seemed to have no intention to change his career.
One would not think that the young fellow with a baby face and delicate fingers could be a true gardener, until they see him skillfully use the secateurs or work the soil to raise young plants.
“I always wondered if I would like this when I first started the job. But it is the kind of work that I am most familiar with. I know of flower species and have been helping my dad in the garden since I was a kid. Now, something from childhood has become my livelihood,” Thanh shares as he pushes bricks under the luscious green flower rows.
Bo reveals that the flowers thrive in Ngoc Ha because the village used to have many ponds and lakes. At the end of the fishing season, every family would dredge mud from the lake beds, dry the sediment, grind it into small parts, and then spread them over all their gardens.
He reckons that rich, nutrient-filled mud nurtured the flowers and made them flourish better, with more ardent colors and greener leaves.
Now all of the ponds and lakes have been filled in, as the village becomes urban. In order to grow his crop, Thanh hires people to bring in trolleys of mud and cover the whole garden.
“When the mud arrives, I mix it with some manure as a supplement, which can make the neighborhood stink,” Thanh joked. Now, he has shifted his focus to grafting young plants, rather than farming, to save time and make use of more of the land.
The grace of the city
Like any kind of farming, flower cultivation depends on weather. When there are unfavorable changes in the weather, Thanh has to protect the plants with plastic covers, even at night. The nursery must also be shaded during the day. Moreover, plant germination requires more gardening techniques, such as tending for the breeding plants, protecting them from heavy rain and bugs, pruning, and branching to keep them healthy all year round.
The worst thing that has happened to his garden was a heavy rain that flooded the area several years ago, damaging his crop and forcing him to replant all the daisies.
Since Hanoi is flooding more often now, Thanh needs to build embankments around his garden with more soil now, which costs him VND1.4 million each trolley, double the price compared to a couple of years ago. Yet he has to pay, otherwise the quality of the ground soil will deteriorate and the daisies won’t grow.
While Thanh spends most of his time tending the garden, his mother Lien takes care of selling the plants. Every day she packs the daisies into boxes, with one hundred plants in each, and sells them at VND10,000 (50 US cent) each at Quang Ba night market, which is open from 11 pm till 4 am.
Big orders usually come from their regular customers from nearby flower villages such as Nhat Tan in Tay Ho District, Tay Tuu in Tu Liem District, Me Linh District; and even from other northern provinces like Quang Ninh, Bac Ninh and Hai Duong. According to Thanh, these sales can be over 10,000 flowers some days.
However, he claims that the income is not high, as he produces daisies all year round, even when sales are slow. He starts to sow and nurture the breeding daisies in February, then grafts new plants in May. The young parts of the mother daisies are pruned and replanted in mixed sand clay for ten days before they mature into baby daisy plants.
Three generations of Bo’s family lives in one small house, but they never think about selling the garden.
“This is the one last remaining green cloth of Ngoc Ha village and it keeps us going,” Thanh said. He smiles when he talks of how surprised his wife was to see farmers in the middle of the capital when she first came to Hanoi from mountainous Yen Bai Province.
Tran Nguyen Thanh in the garden in residential area in Hanoi Capital (Photo: Tuoi Tre)
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