There's a stretch of hillside in Carlsbad, California — fifty acres of it, give or take — where every year between March and May, seventy million flowers open at once. Yellow, orange, red, pink, white, picotee. From the freeway it looks like someone spilled a can of color across the bluffs. From inside the rows it looks like a small piece of fairyland that somebody forgot to put away. And every single one of those flowers has a story behind it. The growers who have been working that ground for nearly a century. The horticulturist who brought the first seeds over from Asia Minor in the 1920s. The kid who dropped out of high school at sixteen to work the family's flower operation full-time. The man who walked the rows for sixty years and saved the seeds of every odd-colored bloom he could find.
This is one of those places where the photograph is only half the story. The other half is yours.
The Photograph
The image on this card is a low, looking-out-across-the-bloom view of the Tecolote Giant Ranunculus in their peak — yellow petals dominating the frame, tightly layered like small roses, with bright accents of red, orange, and pink scattered through the field like punctuation marks. Green stems and leaves push up between the blooms, the whole thing tilting away into the distance until the field disappears into a soft horizon at the top of the frame. There's a slight painterly quality to the rendering — every flower distinct enough to read individually, but the whole field somehow more than the sum of its parts. It's the kind of image that does something different the longer you look at it. The first glance is yellow. The second glance is yellow with surprises. The third glance is seventy million flowers, one at a time.
That's the photograph. Now here's the rest.
The Half You Already Know
Tell me what you remember about the Flower Fields. Tell me about the year you went with your mom, or your sister, or your college bestie, or your kids when they were small enough to disappear between the rows. Tell me about the wagon ride. Tell me about the rose garden, the sweet pea maze, the American flag laid out in pansies on the slope above the parking lot. Tell me about the dress your mother wore in the photo, and the photo your kid lost in a move, and the bouquet you bought at the gift shop and dried and kept on the kitchen windowsill until the petals went brown. Tell me about how you almost forgot to go this year, and then went anyway, and stood in the middle of an acre of orange and red ranunculus and remembered why you live in California in the first place.
Everyone who has ever been there has a piece of that story. The card on its own is a beautiful image. The card paired with your memory is a complete one.
The Half You Might Not Know
What's growing on this hillside is the result of nearly a hundred years of careful, patient, almost obsessive work by a small handful of people. It started in the early 1920s, when a horticulturist named Luther Gage settled in coastal North County San Diego and brought ranunculus seeds with him from Asia Minor. He grew them on his own land, next to a small vegetable farm owned by a man named Frank Frazee. Frank watched his neighbor's flowers come up year after year and eventually decided to try a few rows himself. By 1933 he was growing ranunculus alongside his vegetables, and he taught his son, Edwin, how to seed them, irrigate them, and select for color.
Edwin Frazee dropped out of high school at sixteen to work the family flower operation full-time. He spent the next sixty years doing one thing very well: he walked his fields, found the unusual blooms — the doubled flowers, the fuller heads, the picotee variegations, the odd reds and the soft pinks that nature occasionally throws into a yellow row — and he saved their seeds and planted them the following year. He did it again. And again. For decades. By 2026, every Tecolote Giant Ranunculus on that hillside was a direct descendant of Edwin Frazee's slow, decade-by-decade selection. The ranunculus were originally only red and yellow, single-petaled, and not particularly popular as a cut flower. The thirteen-color, full-bloomed flowers you see at the fields today are not a coincidence. They are a man's life work.
In 1965, Edwin moved the operation to its current site, on land owned by the Ecke family — the same family famous for being the world's largest poinsettia grower for most of the 20th century. Paul Ecke Jr. and Edwin Frazee became friends. When Edwin retired in 1993, Paul convinced him to stay on as a consultant and brought in Mellano & Company to take over the day-to-day growing. Paul also did something arguably more important: he opened the fields to the public, betting that tourism could keep working agriculture financially viable on California coastal land that was rapidly becoming too expensive to farm. Paul Ecke Jr. died in 2002. Edwin Frazee died in 2004. Both men finished their lives knowing the work would continue.
That's what's growing on that hillside. Not just flowers. A multigenerational handshake between two California families and the land they loved.
Why "Together"
Some photographs are complete on their own. A great portrait, a striking architectural shot, a perfectly framed landscape — these can stand alone. But some photographs are conversations. They need the viewer to bring something to the frame: a memory, a story, a piece of context, a face, a year, a person. The Flower Fields image is one of those. Yellow ranunculus on a California hillside is a beautiful photograph. Yellow ranunculus on the same hillside where your mother took you the spring she finally finished her degree is a different image entirely. Yellow ranunculus that exist in that color because a sixteen-year-old kid named Edwin spent sixty years saving seeds is a different image still.
That's the idea behind this card. The image gives you the visual. The history gives you the context. Your memory finishes the story. None of those three pieces is enough on its own. Together they make something complete.
That's true of a lot of photographs, actually — and it might be one of the reasons greeting cards have lasted so long as a form. A printed image, sent from one person to another, is never just an image. It's an image plus a sender, plus a recipient, plus a moment, plus everything they bring to it. The card is just the place where all of that meets.
A Card for the Story-Keepers
This image is available as a 5x7 archival glossy greeting card from Will Davis Studios, printed with the depth and richness this kind of color photography deserves. Each card ships with a quality envelope and can be ordered with one of sixteen inside message options — or left completely blank inside for your own handwritten note.
It's a versatile card for moments that call for warmth, gratitude, or shared memory. Send it to a Carlsbad friend, a Southern California native, a flower lover, a gardener, a mother on her birthday, a sister you haven't seen in a while, or anyone you've ever stood next to in a field of flowers. Equally well-suited for thank-yous, get-wells, encouragement notes, thinking-of-yous, or simply a hello sent across the country to remind someone the ranunculus are blooming again, just like they did last year, just like they will every year for a long time to come.
Blank interior cards also frame nicely at 5x7, making this small piece of California botanical art at home on a kitchen wall, a writing desk, or a sunny windowsill where it can keep the bloom going year-round.
A Last Word
The Flower Fields will open again on March 1st. They'll close again around Mother's Day. Seventy million flowers will come up out of the ground, hold the light for two months, and then go back. Edwin Frazee's seeds will plant themselves for another generation. Somebody's mother will buy a bouquet at the gift shop on the way out. Somebody's daughter will run laughing between the rows.
We can tell you what's in the photograph. You can tell us what it means.
Together, the story is a good one.
Send one to someone who'd want to remember.
Explore the full collection of California, botanical, and Americana fine art greeting cards at Will Davis Studios.
