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It's a lesson that the Clifton business owner learned from her own mother, Rosie Vargas, 66, a longtime gardener living with the final stage of Alzheimer's Disease.
It's a lesson she's applied to her own life.
"Flowers are about embracing the beauty of the moment," Vanessa Vargas said. "When my mom was okay, I took it for granted. I never thought she'd have Alzheimer's. I should've lived in the moment, and the same goes for flowers."
Vargas is the owner of Love at First Bloom, a mobile flower business she brought to life in 2021 while working as a surgical technician. She says her mother, along with her own two daughters, inspired her.
Vargas is a first-generation American, her family having immigrated to the United States from Colombia before she was born.
Her childhood was filled with flowers. Ones her mother planted in her garden. Ones her mother kept in the house. Ones her mother picked from flower festivals, including Colombia's famous, month-long flower festival, Medellin's Flower Festival, to which she brought Vargas.
"My mother was the one who taught me to always have flowers in the house," Vargas said. "Every two weeks she would go food shopping and after she put the groceries away, we would sit at the dining room table and arrange them."
But in 2010, everything changed.
First, Vargas moved out of the house. Then, her mother started losing her memory. It began harmlessly, forgetting where she put things, for instance. And then it became dangerous.
"She would forget how to get home while driving, she would lose her way," Vargas said. "That progressed little by little to where she would go for walks and wander off."
After a while, Rosie Vargas wasn't allowed to leave the house unattended, even to tend to her garden, because she'd wander off. She was diagnosed with early onset dementia in 2012.
"She was only 50 years old," Vargas said. "It was very hard to believe."
Vargas had just started her career as a surgical technician around that time. Eventually Vargas became her mother’s full-time caregiver while also providing for her own daughters, Delilah Rose and Sienna Jade.
Ultimately, Vargas realized she needed something a little more. That was three years ago. While she loved being in the operating room, her newborn, Sienna, was immunocompromised and getting sick often, and her mother's health was also only getting worse.
"I needed a new income," Vargas said. "That's when I decided to start Love at First Bloom."
She'd had a business arranging flowers out of hat boxes called Love at First Box. She decided to start her own mobile flower company, using a horse trailer, after seeing someone start a similar business in California. It was an idea about which she could not let go.
"I was determined," Vargas said. "I just thought 'This is what I was meant to do and I’m just going to take the leap for it.'"
It took several weeks but Vargas finally found the trailer of her dreams, vintage, 1968, and it was in Morristown.
She called her Rosie.
Vargas had Rosie wrapped by a boat upholstery company and painted from silver to off-white. The rest of the renovations Vargas and her husband did themselves (with help from YouTube tutorials), floor-to-ceiling, literally.
She kept Rosie in her driveway while she researched the best places for flowers and local pop-up markets to which she could bring her new trailer.
“Getting the business off the ground was tough,” Vargas said. "New Jersey wasn't too welcoming to the trailer. The concept was cool but it wasn't user-friendly."
It took time and consistency for Vargas to build up a client base. There were many times she felt defeated, but after a while, she started seeing success. She began getting repeat clients and she began making real money.
Vargas recently added a small, Japanese Suzuki pickup truck to her fleet of vehicles, along with a tricycle and a cart, rounding out the business's look.
All of her flowers are seasonal and all color pallets are her choice. She tries to source from local farms, but she gets plenty of them from a farm in Holland that ships overnight, directly to her house. She knows everything is fresh.
Vargas says owning a successful business doing something she loves with meaningful roots is surreal.
"I absolutely love it," she said. "Going around and seeing everyone smile because they see the truck trailer is so fulfilling. It makes me happy we can spread happiness through something so fun.
"I just hope to keep growing and growing."
As for Rosie, Vargas' mother: She's become entirely nonverbal, but Vargas makes sure to keep flowers around, as she says they bring her smile back to life.
Click here to follow Love at First Bloom on Instagram.
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