Sempre-Vivas

High in the rocky fields of Brazil's Cerrado, delicate flowers form the foundation of a UNESCO-recognized traditional culture: the Apanhadores de Flores, the flower pickers. For centuries, communities scattered across the Espinhaço have harvested the Eriocaulaceae (known as Sempre-Vivas, or "forever alive" in Portuguese) drying the blossoms and selling them for bouquets and timing their lives by the flowering season, migrating to natural grottos and high-altitude fields to gather the blossoms.

But the world around the sempre-vivas has changed. Over the last two decades, native flower fields have shrunk dramatically as quarries and monocultures pushed into the mountains. Many species are microendemic: they grow only in tiny patches of rocky grassland.

As the flowers disappeared, so did income. Young people began leaving the tradition, drawn to better-paying jobs in agribusiness and mining.

In 2002, Sempre-Vivas National Park was created to protect the flowers and their ecosystem. The measure helped parts of the ecosystem regenerate, bringing back animal species once rarely seen in the region. At the same time, it forced traditional flower pickers to walk far beyond the park boundaries to find the remaining wild flowers, extending their journeys and intensifying long-standing tensions between conservation policies and local livelihoods.

Last year, the park granted one community of traditional flower pickers permission to collect flowers inside part of the protected area. But monitoring who enters a territory of more than 124, 000 hectares remains difficult, especially with a very limited number of park rangers.

As access became harder to control, outsiders with no connection to the region or to the flower-picking tradition also began entering the fields, often harvesting the flowers incorrectly and killing the plants in the process.

Preta, who lives on land inherited from her father along the edge of the national park, says part of the sempre-vivas she cultivates were recently stolen. Her father, Zé Basílio, was the first person in the region to successfully experiment with cultivating the flowers, knowledge that remains rare today.

Meanwhile, in another region far from the national park, some flower-picking communities found another way to keep their culture - and income - strong. Instead of depending solely on harvesting large quantities of sempre-vivas, they began producing artisanal crafts by combining the flowers with other native dried spec