Flower farms happy to delight the pandemic-weary

After being stuck at home for weeks, visiting Sunny Meadows Flower Farm is sheer relief. The air smells of mud and vegetation, with undertones of floral. The sun is warm, and two dogs are lounging in front of the garage, one of whom wants to be your best friend

Then there are the flowers, rows and rows of them in brilliant pinks, oranges and reds. They grow inside one of the seven greenhouses and two hoop houses necessary to protect early blooms from Ohio's finicky spring weather. It's the week before Mother's Day—the busiest weekend of the year for many in the flower business—and all seven of the farm's employees are harvesting flowers like mad, while wearing masks and standing six feet apart.

The Columbus farm, owned by Gretel and Steve Adams, grows tens of thousands of flowers across multiple fields. Right now, the star flower of the spring is in bloom—the ranunculus, whose rows of impossibly close petals lead people to mistake it for a rose. The Adams grow it in multitudes of colors, including a vampiric red-black. Already harvested are tulips with gigantic buds that resemble Venus fly traps—"it looks like it could eat you," an employee says—but that will open to reveal delicately fringed yellow and orange petals. Poppies with crepe paper-like petals sit in buckets next to a flower that literally shimmers, its pinky-white petals reflecting the light.

Source: Columbus CEO
Photo by Rob Hardin

Source: Columbus CEO