This article was taken from our archives. It first appeared in the April 1976 issue of The Bermudian. It appears here exactly as it did originally.
There are some lilies you wouldn’t want to eat, and some you wouldn’t want to sniff, but Bermudians can take their choice – their island is well-known for both.
The fragrant white trumpet of the Bermuda Easter lily covers springtime fields like snow. Thousands of budding stems are exported to North America annually, their internal clocks ticking and set to bloom shortly before Easter. Lovely to look at, but you probably wouldn’t want one in your salad.
But the island’s fields also abound with another member of the lily family sought by gastronomes the world over — the Bermuda onion. Botanists recognise the Easter lily and Bermuda onion as kin, but not many laymen would, for any similarities end below ground. Above ground, the lily sisters go their separate ways. One produces two spindly green shoots and is never allowed to flower lest its flat-bottomed bulb be robbed of the mild flavour so sought for everything from hamburgers to soupe a l’oignon. The other is allowed to send up its tall, leaf-covered spike to erupt in the nodding trumpets which herald the coming of spring.
Both plants were once of significant export value to Bermuda, but only the Easter lily remains so.
Bermuda onions reached their peak in 1899 when nearly half a million bushels were exported. In the mid-1920s, Texas growers found their soil suitable for cultivation of the Bermuda onion and, with cheaper labour, lower shipping costs and protective tariffs, they offered a highly competitive onion which drove Bermuda from the U.S. market.
Bermudians, of course, maintain that a Bermuda onion by any other name would not taste as sweet. The island’s soil, they claim, nurtures the local eatable lily and makes all the difference in the world – those North Americans are being cheated when forced to consume Texas or California-grown Bermuda onions.
There were even some moves suggested back in the 1920s to have the name trademarked. But the island’s Director of Agriculture in 1926, the late E. A. McCallan, had this advice for Bermuda onion growers: “The word Bermuda describes the variety and not the locality where grown. Bermudas are now grown extensively in Texas and California and to a smaller extent in Louisiana as well as this colony which gave the variety its name. It is up to us to grow the best Bermudas and stop grumbling about other people using the variety name.”
Quality would make little difference in the onion war. The year after McCallan wrote those words, Texas had 43,000 acres, or nearly three and a half Bermudas, completely covered with nothing but onions. Bermuda farmers experienced their own Black Friday in 1929 when onion exports to the U.S. plummeted to 81 bushels.
“Onions” , the universal nickname for Bermudians, still cherish the flat-bottomed vegetable and will pay sometimes three times the price of locally-grown yellow onions to get them. They are used in every part of the meal – from main course onion pie to dessert onions heated and glazed in a mixture of honey and rum. One local restaurant owner claims to have a customer who can tell the difference between a foreign onion and the local variety instantly with sometimes spectacular results.
He’s been known to pluck the offending interlopers from his cheese and onion sandwich and fling them frisbee-style back toward the kitchen. “You’re bloody right I can tell the difference and anyone who lives in Bermuda should be ashamed of himself if he can’t tell a Bermuda Bermuda from a Texas Bermuda.”
Although the Bermuda onion is recognised for its mild flavour and civility, the Bermuda Easter lily remains the more socially acceptable of the two. Onions were banned as food for U.S. astronauts as “flatus-producing” , but the fragrant Easter lily, the onion’s sister, is welcome everywhere.
The more refined lily sister is Bermuda’s botanical alarm clock.
On a sub-tropical island nation where flowers bloom throughout the year, oranges and grapefruit ripen in January and vegetable farming is at its peak on George Washington’s birthday, discerning the advent of spring can be tricky. But the Easter lily seems to know.
From bulbs planted in November, hoary fields erupt timed to the vernal equinox.
Since the first bulbs were brought here by a missionary en route home to England from southern Japan in 1853, Bermudians have nurtured the delicate, difficult to grow plants through good years and bad. As with onions, lily production was one of the colony’s principal industries with growers supplying millions of bulbs to overseas nurseries. But the lily trade, too, has dwindled until few commercial growers remain, and Malcolm Hollis, of Smith’s Parish is one of them. This year, Hollis will still export hundreds of thousands of lily buds to North America, set to bloom about three weeks before Easter, to decorate homes, churches and offices.
But Easter’s date changes each year – the lily may recognize spring, but how can it tell when Easter is, you ask? The lily can’t, but the lily grower can and sometimes even tricks the plants into blooming.
Lily growing, says Hollis, has always been, and is, a bit of a gambler’s business. Lilium longiflorum is extremely vulnerable to insect-borne viruses and the changing date of Easter does mean that growers have to vary their planting times and hope they’ve estimated correctly to get their lilies to the budding stage for shipment. The process of vernalisation, or chilling the bulbs for various lengths of times, has taken away some of the guesswork, however. Even without vernalisation, Bermuda’s lily growers, whether professional or amateur, have been at it for years and the likelihood of a lilyless Easter is as remote as a snowy August.
So, whenever you’re seeking a few slices of garnish for a hamburger, or a whole hillside blooming in white on which to feast the eye, Bermuda’s lily sisters have never failed to make their spring debut.
