Sa Dec villagers are readying prolifically flowering plants that will grace hundreds of thousands of homes and offices in a few weeks. 

Sunlight lights up the spray as a farmer in a boat tends to flowering plants
kept on elevated racks in Dong Thap Province’s Sa Dec flower village.
The village is home to 2,000 households that earn a living mainly
by growing flowers and ornamental trees.

The village is considered the floral capital of the Mekong Delta
and the main supplier of flowers to provinces
and cities across the country,
with around 2,500 varieties
grown on a total area
of 600 hectares.

Just a few weeks before Tet, the Lunar New Year Festival,
local farmers work from dawn to dusk on their gardens
to prepare their flower and bonsai plants for sale.

Vietnamese people have a long tradition of using fresh flowers as offerings
to deities and their ancestors to pray for luck and for house
decoration during the country's biggest festival.

Women wearing conical hats take care of marigold flowers,
heavily favored as a symbol of luck and longevity.

Farmers here have been growing flowers and bonsai plants for
more than 100 years. Their annual peak season,
of course, is the Tet festival.

A unique feature of Sa Dec is that villagers grow flowers all year
round on platforms built above water. Farmers, therefore, must wear boots
or use boats in taking care of or harvesting the plants.

Locals say this method helps them save costs because
most of the arable land has been appropriated from
rice farms in low lying terrain that floods easily.

For this Tet season, an estimated 3 million plus flower baskets
of about 2,000 different flower species, dominated by
yellow daisies, chrysanthemums and marigolds, will be
supplied to neighboring localities including Ho Chi Minh City.

Typically, each orchard in the village has 20-30 workers doing
different jobs including planting, watering and pruning flowers.

Two children help their father harvest and transport flowering plants
in full bloom. This is the busiest time of the year for the villagers.

An elderly villager is all smiles as she poses with flowering plants prepared for Tet.

For years now, residents have also taken advantage of their flower
growing tradition to develop local tourism. The flower village
opens its door for visitors at this time, and the place
gets crowded from late December to mid-January.

Sa Dec is now a tourism attraction in Dong Thap Province,
139 km (86 miles) southwest of Ho Chi Minh City.

Sa Dec Town was the original setting of the autobiographical novel
"L’Amant" (The Lover) by French writer Marguerite Duras,
which is based on her love affair with the extremely
rich Chinese-Vietnamese man, Huynh Thuy Le. The novel
was published in 1984 and has since been translated
into 43 languages and adapted into a movie in 1992.

Photos by Nguyen Van Luan