Tay Tuu Flower Village

In the last lunar month, most of Hanoi is still going about its ordinary days. Out in Tây Tựu, the land has already changed color. Fields of flowers run side by side in long bands of yellow chrysanthemums, red roses and purple gerberas, and the cold air carries the smell of damp earth and green manure. This is the busiest time of the year for the flower village.

The village now belongs to Tây Tựu ward, in Hanoi. Its old name was Đăm, according to a Hanoi newspaper. It lies about 20 kilometers west of central Hanoi, on flat land at the edge of the city. The soil and conditions there suit growing flowers all year round.

The Hanoi Department of Culture and Sports says that flower growing here began in 1930. For many decades, though, people mostly grew rice and vegetables, and gave only a small share of their land to flowers. In the early 1990s, as life in Hanoi improved, demand for fresh flowers climbed fast. Only then did the people of Tây Tựu turn fully to flowers. Slowly the fields traded the color of rice for the colors of chrysanthemums, roses and lilies.

In March 2017, the Hanoi People's Committee officially recognized Tây Tựu as a Hanoi Traditional Craft Village. The department records this too. The recognition honored almost a hundred years of flower growing.

Tây Tựu grows a wide range of flowers. The newspaper Nhân Dân reports many kinds of chrysanthemum, along with roses, lilies, gerberas, violets and dahlias. Growers change the crop from season to season to meet what the market wants. Roses and chrysanthemums are on sale all year in Hanoi's flower markets, and most of them come from the fields of Tây Tựu. They are the main supply of fresh flowers for inner Hanoi and the northern provinces.

But the finest and brightest season is the last lunar month, which is the twelfth month by the lunar calendar. According to Nhân Dân, this is when growers tend their flowers so that they open exactly in time for Tết. Tết is the Lunar New Year festival in Vietnam. The whole field becomes a carpet of yellow, red, white and purple woven together. People get up before first light, harvest in the cold dew, tie the flowers into bunches and carry them to the Quảng Bá flower market and to stalls across the city.

Life in the flower trade follows the seasons. In the blazing summer, growers cover the plants with netting and water them at night so the flowers do not wilt. In the cold of winter, they must adjust when the plants bloom to fit the schedule of the Tết markets. This knowledge has built up over many generations.

Tây Tựu has lasted almost a hundred years because its people chose to stay with flowers, generation after generation. The colors on those fields at the edge of the city are the colors of sweat and patience. And any bunch of flowers on sale in a Hanoi market may well have started in a field in Tây Tựu ward.