Heather Myers had just read August’s “Miss Floribunda” column about the pesky garden infection aster yellows before noticing something peculiar in her garden. Soil tests confirmed her suspicions — the disease had made its way to her own plants.
Myers, the owner of Bloomsday Farm and a newsletter editor for Life & Times publisher Streetcar Suburbs News, said she didn’t initially believe the infection to be widespread. But soon it became evident that even her perennial florals, which are meant to flower for upwards of two years, had been rendered infertile.
“I rely on perennials like coneflowers and black-eyed Susans for half of my stock for selling flowers,” Myers said. “That’s like, I would say, tens of thousands of dollars worth of perennials over the years of buying them. So replacing them is kind of impossible without incurring huge debt. I was plann[ing] for a whole crop failure in the [seasonal] flowers, … but it was really a shock that this chain of events could have happened.”
As Miss Floribunda mentions in her column, aster yellows infections are tricky to beat. Not limited to a single area or climate, the disease can spread to nearly any plant and has no known cure. The disease is spread when aster leafhoppers, who transmit the disease their entire life once contracting it, feed on bacteria-infected plants. Because the disease cannot be eradicated, Myers had to set about uprooting all the plants she knew were infected.
Julie Wolf, president of the Hyattsville Horticultural Society and a plant, fungal and soil scientist, said that although the infection can be found almost anywhere, she had never seen it hit her hometown until this year.
“My background is with agriculture, and I’ve heard of it hitting canola crops in Canada pretty hard,” Wolf said. “I’ve heard of it hitting barley. Obviously, it can hit sunflowers and ornamental crops. It is very general. And, honestly, I’ve been in Hyattsville since 2003, and this is the first time I’ve heard about it here.”
Myers began Bloomsday Farm as a way to reduce the cost of her property through Prince George’s County tax credits and grants from the Soil Conservation Service; as a hobby, she had already been making dried wreaths for neighbors and friends. But when the Trump Administration’s freeze on U.S. Department of Agriculture grants went into effect, Myers decided it was time to start up her business.
Soon after she created a Bloomsday Farm website, customers started pouring in — without any need for marketing or a social media presence. To Myers, the local popularity came as a complete shock.
“I put it onto Google, and people started coming … without any marketing whatsoever. My marketing budget is zero, and I’ve had, like, almost more orders than I can handle for one person,” Myers said. “I grew everything, I dug everything, I did everything, 100% myself, no help from anyone. So for one person to do all of that, I was maxed out in selling bouquets.”
The infection struck after nearly a year of successful business for Myers. The florist said she believes aster yellows first got to her garden through an infected plant purchased from a local nursery, but Wolf says the source of such diseases is not always so simple.
“It’s hard, because from what I’ve been reading in some years, you don’t see too many impacts, but there can be plants with that [bacteria] in their tissues that just aren’t exhibiting a lot of symptoms,” Wolf said. “And so as much as you want to maybe blame a nursery … this is a really challenging thing for everyone in the horticultural industry to deal with.”
Despite the setback, Myers is continuing to sell bouquets at a discount to customers (with a warning not to compost them at home for now) and plans to host more events at the farm, such as grant-funded workshops and a bouquet-making party in the style of the Maryland Renaissance Fair. She said the community’s overwhelming support has encouraged her to continue the business.
“People are just pouring their hearts out about how much they love this in a way that I was not expecting at all. For me, the initial reason was a tax credit, you know, and now it’s like, ‘Oh my gosh, this is weirdly satisfying,’” Myers said. “People order flowers for relatives in the hospital: I’ve delivered flowers to someone right after a surgery. … I’m there for the happiest and the saddest moments in people’s lives. So I actually want to keep doing it.”
Stella Garner is an undergraduate journalism major at the University of Maryland.
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