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Farming flowers
Hilliard's wholesale peonies rooted in 1920s

By Karen Binder, The Southern

Sunday, May 11, 2008 9:26 AM CDT

HARRISBURG - This Mother's Day, David Hilliard will find himself surrounded with buckets full of white, pink and red peonies.

This spring's rainy, chilly season has delayed his wholesale peony crop by a week or two. Yet it appears he'll have a bumper crop of the showy flowers and with longer stems than usual, giving each stem more room for equally showy dark green foliage.

Hilliard calls his two lots of the dark green shrubs the "peony patch" - one of them is rooted with 2,500 plants and the other has 3,500. The patches were planted eight to 10 years ago with crowns dug from Harvey B. Hartline Jr.'s old nursery property on south U.S. 51 in Makanda, now the site of Stone Creek Golf Club.

The Hartline peonies were originally planted at the nursery by Hartline's father, Harvey B. Hartline Sr., in the 1920s, Hilliard recalled.

"All of these are from the same old stock planted by Mr. Hartline," he said, pointing to the patch at his Harrisburg farm. He and his wife, Julie, also farm corn, soybeans and wheat.

The species' trade names are Sarah Bernhardt, President Taft and Alice Roosevelt.

Hilliard's peony lore also includes learning that some 2,000 acres of peonies were once cultivated around Evansville, Ind., just 60 miles or so from Saline County. He has run into some elderly people who remember working in the peony fields as youths.

"There's the saying that if apples will grow, peonies will grow," Hilliard said.

Southern Illinois is almost the southernmost area tolerated by the heat-sensitive plants, he said. Most commercially grown peonies are from Minnesota and other northern areas, but Hilliard said it was competition from flower farms in Colombia, Holland, Israel and Mexico that crushed Southern Illinois' flower industry, which flourished in the 1940s and 1950s.

Union County, for instance, was brimming with fields full of daffodils, lilacs, gladiolas, jonquils and other blooms that were picked and packaged for delivery by train.

Hilliard's business methods are not very different from then.

"One day late is a ruined flower," Hilliard said as he walked between rows. With a practiced pinch, Hilliard checks for blooms that are soft and just barely beginning to break open; the tight, hard ones need more time.

He cuts the stems just above the second set of leaves from the ground. Buckets full of stems are moved into a giant cooler set at 34 degrees and stored "dry" to await color sorting by his wife, Julie. Five stems are bundled into a bouquet and 200 to a carefully packed flower box with ice or a cool pack.

From there, Hilliard moves the boxes to Carbondale, where they are loaded onto a Chicago-bound Amtrak train.

"You cut only the ones with tight buds, then cross your fingers and hope they get there alright," he said.

Less than week elapses from time Hilliard cuts the blooms in the field until their arrival at the upstate wholesaler who buys all of his flowers. They are the first crop to bloom as late spring temperatures trend northward.

In fact, he recalled one year when his wholesaler wanted a rush order of all-white peonies. While watching a WGN-TV news broadcast days later, he saw an item about Oprah Winfrey hosting an all-white party and figured out where his blossoms had gone.

A popular flower, peonies bought by the stem from a florist can be pricey. A quick Web search found prices ranging from $2.50 a stem to $27 for prized varieties. Hilliard noted that his flowers end up retailing for about $10 a stem.

It's also largely a one-person operation, at least until cutting starts around late April to early May for a hectic four or five days requiring Julie's help.

Propagating the plants is not complicated. While he admits his first experience with peonies was as a boy accidentally running over them with the lawn mower, Hilliard does have a routine he follows.

As the buds develop, he makes three passes past each peony to pinch off secondary shoots and encourage growth of larger flowers. A more mature plant may have as many as 10 buds, but he will cut only four or five of them to put less stress on the plant in the future. He stops mowing in July to promote undergrowth as a cover. Each fall, the patches are fertilized and burned off.

"I enjoy the work. It's quiet. I don't mind it at all," he said.

karen.binder@thesouthern.com / 351-5080