Annette Walton with Minh Vu.
Outside Yorkside Pizza, Yale doctoral student Minh Vu surveyed a basket of roughly 70 chrysanthemums.
“I’ll take them all,” Vu told a woman bedecked in a party hat, aka “Flower Lady” Annette Walton.
Walton invited Vu and fellow Yalies to an impromptu 64th birthday sidewalk celebration for the lifelong New Havener who, except for a hiatus during the pandemic, has been selling flowers around Yale’s downtown campus since the 1990s.
The gathering took place Wednesday afternoon. Walton originally invited a handful of regular customers from Yale’s graduate schools, who in turn spread the word to dozens of others who showed up in a constant stream bearing hugs, cards, and food.
“Saying thank you to anyone who gives me money didn’t feel like enough,” Walton has said, “and flowers, they can only make you happy.”
“Annette is an icon and a staple for Yale,” Vu, who’s specializing in American Studies and Gender Studies, said amid the throng of summer school students filing along the sidewalk Wednesday afternoon. “She reminds us that there must be slowness and beauty and joy everyday.” To honor her, Vu planned to give a flower to everyone they met that day.
Erin Sommers, a rising senior who’s a teaching assistant in the Pathways to Science Program this summer, sounded a similar refrain. “Just having Annette ask me how I’m doing, what I’m up to, it’s one of the highlights of my day,” she said, as the Flower Lady called out a greeting to a honking car.
At that moment, a woman approached Walton with pastel orange gladiolas.
“These are freshly picked from my garden,” said the woman, who works at Yale Law School’s Early Learning Center, giving her a hug. Heather Gerken, Yale Law School dean, followed, handing her a container with a slice of cake. Then came Peighton Lotwis, a rising junior who’s working at the Yale Farm this summer, with a small box of vegetables and herbs, and a glass of lemonade made with fresh lavender.
“This is the first harvest, it all came out of the ground,” she told Walton. “The garlic, you can cover it with olive oil, let it bake. And you can use the mint for tea.” They hugged.
Over the years Walton established the practice of selling flowers rather than asking for change to get by, and has established relationships with New Haveners of all walks of life along the way.
She gets the flowers each morning, taking an Uber to National Floral Supply in Milford. Fortunately, that day, she had brought enough for the next two days. On her return with another cart of flowers, a man, alighting from his car, beamed a smile at her before heading in. “I know him,” she said, springing over to open the door to the restaurant for him. “He’s a professor.” She couldn’t remember his name. It was, it turned out, the Yale historian Paul Kennedy.
A Yale Young Global Scholar named Sam approached.
“Can I bring you a slice of pizza?” he asked her. He was from Hong Kong and had just met Walton a day earlier, he said.
“I’m good,” she said.
“Then can we all sing you happy birthday?” he asked.
With that, a group of his fellow Young Global Scholars broke into song. “That was just beautiful,” she said, as someone else, birthday card in hand, waited her turn. “I’m going to give every one of you a flower for that.”
Annette Walton with group of Yale Young Global Scholars.