I don’t think I have mentioned it before, but my village is probably one of the most beautiful in the Caribbean. This is a relatively recent thing, due to the specific human and physical geography of the place, and it is part of my job here to discover the precise process by which it became so beautiful.

The stereotype of a beautiful Caribbean village might be a quaint fishing village surrounded by vast, empty expanses of white sand, bordered on one side by turquoise clear water, and by swaying palm trees on the other. If this is your idea of Caribbean beauty, let me recommend either Boca de Yuma in the southeast DR, or Rincon on the Samana peninsula. However, this vision is most certainly not applicable to my village, as it is over 4,000ft up in the mountains, and very close to a monument that marks the centre point of the DR, and therefore the furthest distance from the sea of any point of in the Caribbean archipelago. Rather, what makes this village so special is a specific change in the agrarian economy, combined with the unique microclimate of the area.

The little valley that my village occupies is the first dip after the vast rise of the outermost slope of the cordillera as it emerges almost vertically from the Cibao plain. This makes it the first rest that air masses get after they rise up the steep incline, producing a microclimate that a tourist board or real estate salesman might describe as “refreshing and well watered”, or “cold and wet” to the rest of us. This might sound miserable, and it sometimes is, but when the rest of the country is sweltering in the tropical heat, we up here remain fresh and comfortable. It is our little secret, and it is why rich city dwellers who are in on the secret have built weekend homes up here.

About twenty years or so ago, when most of the villagers were living from producing root crops such as yucca, supplemented by bean growing and keeping cattle, someone worked out that this climate was perfect for growing the flowers that had become a commercial crop in North America and Europe. Over time, other people noticed the success this person was having, and as new varieties and growing techniques emerged, eventually almost the whole village was growing flowers. Now, as I walk through the village, I am surrounded by roses, anthulia, lilies and a whole number of flowers that I don’t know the name for in English, but are nonetheless rather beautiful.

This has also represented an improvement in the lives of villagers, as these flowers sell well in the markets of the big cities of Santo Domingo and Santiago. There are certain high points, such as the Christmas party season, Mothers’ day, and of course Valentine’s day, when the price of roses can increase tenfold. Throughout the year, although the market has its ups and downs, flowers always sell. As one villager put it, “people are always falling in love and getting married, and people are always dying and having funerals”. Daily I see my friends carrying bundles of freshly cut flowers to be taken down to market that night and sold the next morning to the florists of the cities. If a single flower can be beautiful, seeing a van stacked with hundreds of lilies or thousands of roses is certainly very impressive. A field of swaying gladioli is a nice sight to see on one’s way to work.

The flowers that don’t make it to market, the lilies with too short a stem, the roses that can’t quite make up a dozen, are not thrown away, but rather decorate the tables of every household in the village. When one enters the house of a friend here, if it doesn’t smell of freshly made coffee, it is filled with the sweet scent of lilies or roses.

The downside of this, as a friend told me, is that such abundance of flowers makes it more difficult for the men folk to think of a present to charm the ladies.