I really like the idea of flowers working like the ingredient crates. My issue is it makes it hard to quickly go around and collect them because you may target one that you've already gotten, and unless you hover over the item for long enough to see the CD, you won't know you already got it until you get to it, at which point you may be fighting/dismounted.

Ideally, the flowers would spawn as phased items, separate for each player, and once obtained, they would go away for the player that got it. I don't know if they fully have the tech for this, but Hytbold did many things, so they might. Main issue may be the flowers not being NPCs, and they didn't do much phasing with items.

Another solution could be to have a quest that players need to have in their quest log to be able to interact with the patches. They could then use the quest item usage mechanic where each player can interact with each item, even at the same time, and they won't despawn (if they don't despawn, a player also can't farm the same spawn picking the respawned ones); not sure if they have done it where the quest items actually give loot, but I'm sure they could. There could be a Flower Basket quest item, or something similar, that is given to players after completing a qucik intro quest (and can be re-obtained if you need it), from the Herb Traders. You could use the basket to infinitely start/restart the repeatable flower-picking quest. The quest might be to pick like 25 flowers throughout Ithilien, and once you finish that, you could either get a North Ithilien token, or a box that you can open for a better chance at a rare flower, or rep, ixp, or nothing. No cooldown if you finish it, 5m cooldown if you abandon it. The one issue with this is that the flowers would likely all be located at the same place every time, so you could know where to go for certain flowers, but so long as they are spread out well, it shouldn't matter, since you couldn't just farm the rare ones easily (if they're spread out well); you'd need to finish/drop the quest to be able to pick the same resource twice in a row, which would have a cooldown. Ideally, just make each flower drop random items so no one would want to farm any given area.

The quest approach would also have the benefit of not distracting players who don't want to worry about the flowers at the moment. You could just drop the quest if you want to focus on harvesting wood or whatever, and you'd have fewer items to cycle through and item names (if you have them on) to see.

Also, might be nice to have a resource instance for the flowers, which could give maybe North Ithilien silver tokens, and some other stuff. But this may be too much work. I'd like it though, if you stick with the resource node approach, as opposed to a quest item approach.