This article was taken from our archives. It first appeared in the May 2004 issue of The Bermudian. The full text appears here in its original form.
EASTER MORN
Easter morn with lilies fair
Fills the church with perfumes rare, As their clouds of incense rise, Sweetest offerings to the skies.
Stately lilies pure and white
Flooding darkness with their light Bloom and sorrow drift away, On this holy hallow'd day.
Easter lilies bending low In the golden afterglow, Bear a message from the sod To the heavenly towers of God
by Louise Lewin Matthews
A chilly mid-March spell has locals and tourists alike shivering and reaching for their sweaters, but farmer Joe Pacheco and his sons, Mark and Joey, are not complaining. With two weeks to go before Faster, the conditions couldn’t be better for their prized crop of Bermuda Easter lilies.
Lilies, you see, are temperamental plants at the best of times, and bringing them to their peak for the Easter rush takes hard work, patience, timing-and a good late spell of cool weather.
“When Easter is later in the year, it can get too hot,” explains the 71-year-old Joe Pacheco. “Even 10 days can make a big difference.”
Certainly it’s a healthy-looking crop in the half-acre top field at Locust Hall farm in Devonshire where the Pachecos grow more than 80 percent of the island’s lilies. A few elegant, white trumpet blooms are already appearing, waves cresting on a sea of tall-stemmed, green. pineapple-like plants. In a week or so, the field will look as though a blanket of snow has descended upon it. The sight and sweet scent of lilies are as much a part of a traditional Bermuda Easter as kites, hot cross buns and fishcakes.
The Bermuda Easter lily, or lilium longiforum to give it its full botanical name, is native to the southern Japanese Liukiu Islands and was introduced to Bermuda in 1853 by an unnamed English missionary on his way home from the Far East. The plant thrived in Bermuda, and by the 1880s, the island had established a lucrative trade exporting bulbs to the United States. Indeed, along with its botanical cousin, the sweet Bermuda onion, it became a major industry with hundreds of growers and acres under cultivation.
At its peak, in 1895, Bermuda shipped an astonishing three million bulbs to the U.S. In fact, until the early twentieth century, the bulbs were so highly valued that many of the flowers themselves were thrown away. An old photograph in the Bermuda Perfumery shows thousands of them being thrown into the sea (a wasteful act that prompted W. B. Smith to start the Perfumery in 1929, using the oils from the flower to produce the company’s successful first scent, Easter Lili.)
A 1942 Lili magazine advertisement boasts of “exquisite perfumes from Britain’s flower gardens of the western world.”
Today, two variations of the Easter lily are grown in Bermuda: harrissii, named after the Philadelphia nurseryman W. K. Harris who first put the Bermuda bulbs on the market and which blooms in April and May; and howardii, a sturdy, early-blooming lily developed by Howard E. Dunscombe Smith of St. David’s, which flowers between December and June.
Indeed, howardii, for which Smith received an OBE in 1948, was crucial to reviving the lily industry after a virus introduced by a new Japanese stock infected many of Bermudas bulbs in the late nineteenth century.
In 1932, there were 44 acres of commercial lily fields being cultivated in Bermuda, and the rich soil of St. David’s grew almost 70 percent of them. In addition to the aforementioned Howard Smith, Malcolm J. G. Hollis, Reeve Smith and Eugene Outerbridge were among the prominent St. David’s growers. Legend has it that the strong scent of the flowers once carried far enough out to sea to enable St. David’s pilots to navigate their gigs back to the island. Tourists and residents alike would make special trips to the east end by horse and carriage or bicycle just to see the splendid white acres blooming in springtime.
"...the charm of lilies in a vase can never equal the beauty of an Oleander-bordered field,
snow white in moonlight,"
waxed Richard B. Smith in a 1946 edition of The Bermudian.
Bertha March, in Bermuda Days: Intimate Glimpses of the Happy Island, wrote of entire graveyards covered in a “garden of white and gold,” gleaming in the spring sunshine with “a promise of eternal peace.” “And the lily fields in the springtime!” she exclaimed. “If one drives at nightfall home from old St. George’s or along the shores of Harrington Sound their fragrance perfumes the air for a long distance ahead. There is one lily field situated on a hill with the blue waters of the South Shore beyond, which makes a picture not to be forgotten.”
Even in 1944, by which time all the St. David’s lily fields had been swallowed up by the construction of the U.S. naval air base, Bermuda still exported close to a million bulbs and around 20,000 cases of cut flowers. But in the 1950s, viruses virtually decimated local bulb stocks. Joe Pacheco, who arrived in Bermuda from the Azores in 1949 as a teenager, recalls having to dump thousands of yellowing bulbs at Ferry Reach Park. Even so, some survived and still bloom to this day.
From 1955 to 1971, the Bermuda Easter lily was in danger of extinction and not a single bulb was exported, but in the early 1960s, Malcolm Hollis’s son, the late Malcolm (Buster) Hollis, set about reestablishing the lily at his farm in Smith’s in conjunction with a vernalisation programme run by his friend Dr. Walwyn Hughes, then assistant director of agriculture, to produce an earlier blooming flower.
By 1970, Hollis had planted 7,000 bulbs and the following year exported 14,000- Bermuda’s first shipment for 15 years – along with thousands of cut flowers. In the following years, he shipped Bermuda Easter lilies to many heads of state, including the Queen, to whom he sent Bermuda’s annual tribute for 35 years until his death in 1993.
However, the lily constantly required new ground to thrive, and by the mid-1970s there simply wasn’t enough arable land left for adequate crop rotation on a large enough scale to make it viable. By 1977, serious viruses had struck again. That year, 2,000 boxes of cut flowers, but no bulbs, were exported, and the department of agriculture and fisheries reported: “Lily stocks are now at a low ebb and are in serious jeopardy of elimination.” By 1979, there was virtually no commercial production, and the export trade disappeared altogether. The annual stems sent to Her Majesty are now the only Bermuda Easter lilies leave the island each year.
For many people the lily remains a spiritual symbol of Easter and its message of hope everlasting. According to the Bible, Jesus said in his Sermon on the Mount: “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they toil not, neither do they spin and yet…Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.” They were found growing in the Garden of Gethsemane, reportedly where beads of Christ’s sweat fell during his final agonising hours, and throughout history, churches have been decorated with lilies at Easter to commemorate his resurrection.
Come Easter week, the whole Pacheco family goes to work picking lilies as churches and people from all walks of life flock to Locust Hall and the family’s stall on Trimingham Hill to buy $20 bunches, each with just the right mix of blooms and buds. “People don’t want them if they are all in bloom,” explains Pacheco. “They like them better if you have about five closed buds so that they will last longer in the vase.”
On the Monday before Easter, the governor and his wife will visit to select the stems with buds to be sent to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth Il as a gift from Bermuda. Each bud is wrapped in tissue paper and inspected by government scientists before being given a clean bill of health and flown to London, courtesy of British Airways.
In Easter week the Pachecos will sell as much as $60,000 worth of flowers, making it easily the most lucrative crop they grow. “It sounds a lot,” says Mark Pacheco, “but you’ve got to remember that more than 10 months of work has gone into producing them.”
“I’s very labour intensive,” adds Joey Pacheco. “It’s definitely a science to get them right on time. You just can’t get to Easter week and not have them bloom.”
The Pachecos have been growing lilies for 23 years, ever since Manuel Lopes, father of radio-talk-show veteran David Lopes, gave Joe Pacheco a five-gallon bucket of about a hundred Bermuda lily bulbs. “He told me that if I wanted a good stock, to plant them but not to pick them for the first few years,” he explains. “So that’s what we did. We didn’t sell any for five years but just dug them back into the ground each year.”
Now the Pachecos have a handsome stock of between 80,000 and 100,000 bulbs. Work on each year’s crop begins around August when all the bulbs are dug up and stored on the cool, concrete floor of the farm garage rather than the traditional mediums of dry sand or peat moss. “This way the air gets to them, and they dry out nicely,” says Joe Pacheco. “If they get too much humidity they rot.”
In late September or early October, the bulbs are dug back into the ground. The planting field is rotated each year, and it seems a preceding year of feed corn works best for healthy lilies.
“The roots of the corn eat the fungus out of the ground,” claims Pacheco. “We try to plant them close together so that they can support each other during high winds,” explains Joey Pacheco. After that, it’s a constant round of careful weeding, fertilising… and patience.
“Lilies,” says his father laughing, “are greedy. You’ve got to feed them all the time. A lily needs more nutrients than other plants.”
And occasionally they need a little artificial help, too. Recalls Pacheco: “One year I went away on vacation. When I left, things looked OK, but when I came back, the lilies at my house looked fine but the ones in the field looked short. I thought, How are we ever going o get them ready for Easter? I couldn’t work it our. Then I realised that the lights outside my house were making them grow faster so we went out into the field, put up wires and lights and come April we had all the lilies we wanted.”
He adds: “It’s Easter time, and you’ve got to have lilies. It’s a tradition, like kite flying. Not everyone can grow them, so we’re proud to have them. li’s a pleasure for us. We love them.”
