Bermuda’s icon of spring, the Easter lily, brought a surprise bounty to the garden of retired taxi driver Quinton Binns, with a giant flower that the lifelong gardener reckons is “a record breaker”.

“It’s like nothing I’ve seen, and I’ve been around for a long, long time,” Mr Binns, 82, said of the roughly 50 blooms that sprang from one determined lily in the yard of his North Village home.

Mr Binns and his wife, Marie, marked 50 years of marriage this December, and their children called the spring surprise a fitting tribute to their time together.

Gardening is Mr Binns’s “joy”, and the yard overlooking Pig’s Field off The Glebe Road in Pembroke is full of his handiwork going back 25 years, from the palm trees to the vegetable patch.

But there was no secret behind the supersized lily, which Mr Binns spotted two years ago in an ordinary patch of flowers off Secretary Road in St George’s. “I always carry a little shovel in my car and I dug up a few bulbs,” he said. “This year, this baby came up.”

One plant yielded three stems bristling with lily buds, heavy enough to require props to keep it upright.

“There were no special ingredients, no fertiliser or anything like that,” Mr Binns told The Royal Gazette this week. “Just my loving touch.”