In East Texas, thousands of Easter lilies with no place to go

[TexasTowelie]

by Emma Platoff, Texas Tribune


A proper Easter lily is a long time in creation. The regal white flowers now in Don Darby’s New Summerfield greenhouses spent their first three years in the ground on the west coast, the bulbs planted, then dug up; planted, then dug up; planted, then dug up one last time when they'd grown big enough to sell.

After the bulbs arrived in East Texas, Darby planted this crop, his 42nd, in mid-October, as he always does. The 34,000 bulbs in 34,000 little pots spent their first six weeks stacked on shelves in refrigerators, 40 days at 40 degrees.

Now the flowers are many times the height of their pots, their necks heavy with blossoms, elegantly curved like swans. They sit clustered in humid, sprawling industrial greenhouses, tens of thousands of blooms with nowhere to go, marking the end of Lent under a clear domed sky.

Darby, now 68, was 10 when his dad built his first greenhouse. Darby planted his first Easter lily crop in 1977, after he graduated from Texas A&M and joined the family business. He specializes in holiday plants; at a different time of year, he’d be anxiously minding his poinsettias.

Read more: https://www.texastribune.org/2020/04/09/easter-lilies-coronavirus-east-texas-greenhouse/