‘The first to plant them commercially on the Island was Albert Inglis at the Upper Stocks Farm during 1886—93. — EA McCallan, “Life on Old St David’s”

By Dr Edward Harris

January of this New Year 2014 has come and gone, marked by a lot of rain, but with some days of radiant sunshine that gives a wonderful light about the island, as only obtains in winter months.

In days of old, visitors would have been in relative abundance, for they considered the best time in Bermuda to be the months of winter up north, that is to say the place to escape the blizzards and snows of those climes.

Unfortunately, we have allowed the visitor season to become the sunburned months, though certainly given the bad weather in the Northeast this winter, it would have been difficult to get on a plane, given the new monster of the Digital Age, the dreaded ‘Polar Vortex’.

The PV not withstanding, signs of Spring are all about us, as a succession of wild flowers burst from their annual slumber to fight their way through the grass to reach for the sun.

Paperwhites, freesias, Bermudianas and in due course the largest of them all, in stalk and bloom, the ‘Bermuda Easter Lily’ rise up and interfere with the suburbanite view of many and are consequently mowed down before they can ‘do their thing’, which is to flower and add beauty to the landscape and our lives.

Of those mentioned, only the Bermudiana is to Bermuda born, ‘endemic’ to the place as the botanist would say.

Freesias (Freesia refracta) are endemic to the sector of eastern Africa, from Kenya southward to Cape of Good Hope; Paperwhites are from the Mediterranean, noting the papyrus of the area in their Latin name Narcissus papyraceous, while the lily associated with the feast of Easter slipped invasively past Immigration after a voyage from Japan, about 1853.

According to one account, ‘our’ lily is something of a deviant: ‘A variety of it, L. longiflorum var. eximium, native to the Ryukyu Islands, is taller and more vigorous.

“It is extensively cultivated for cut flowers. It has irregular blooming periods in nature, and this is exploited in cultivation, allowing it to be forced for flowering at particular periods, such as Easter.

“However, it can be induced to flower over a much wider period. This variety is sometimes called the Bermuda lily because it has been much cultivated in Bermuda.’

Not satisfied with that variation, St David’s Islander, Howard Smith developed a superior variety, which was ‘placed on the market under the trade name of L Howardii’, likely on his farm around the historic Carter House (which survived the devastation of St David’s Island during the building of the US Forces’ Kindley Field and Fort Bell in the early 1940s).

The bulbs for the lilies were planted in early autumn, the other variety being named for an American marketer as L. Harrisii.

Howard’s lilies bloom between December and May, while the Harris’s are later in April and May.

For his contributions to the lily trade (‘for the past 50 years’) and Bermuda horticulture in general, Howard Emmett Dunscomb Smith was appointed MBE in the New Year Honours List of 1948.

Part of an announcement about this award stated that “lilies are now blooming in Bermuda from January to June. The shipment of lily buds and bulbs to the dollar area is Bermuda’s major material export trade”.

That trade in 1883 was a mere 62 cases, but the figure rose to 14,000 exported by 1896.

In these less flower-full times, the only export of Lilium longiflorum of whatever variety is the bouquet sent annually to Her Majesty The Queen at Buckingham Palace.

In a few previous years for which records exist, 67 percent of the Bermuda acreage devoted to lily cultivation in the years 1937—41 was on St David’s and Cooper’s Islands: ‘It is beyond dispute that the most successful growers were located on the [St David’s] Island in 1941, and the loss of their fields was a severe — though not a lasting — setback to lily growing’.

However, during the Second World War, such produce imported direct from Japan to the US was cut off, so that lilies continued to be a major export item from Bermuda to the East Coast of the United States in the years of conflict which ended in 1945.

After the war, the lilies went the way of some of the other Bermuda economic engines, that is to say, they became an extinct trade, like that of potatoes and arrowroot, the ubiquitous onion and ‘what Bermuda farmers called green vegetables, that is, beets, carrots, celery, lettuce and parsley … In 1926, 284,000 crates were shipped’ in refrigerated holds on the Furness Bermuda Line vessels to New York.

Nowadays, few in the Big Apple are known to be munching on a Bermuda carrot.

Nowadays, you are lucky to find Bermuda Easter lilies or other flowers, except where they have managed to survive in the wild, or have been preserved on private properties.

What a difference a profusion of such flowers would make to the beauty of Bermuda in the late winter and early spring months, when we need to encourage visitors: our National Parks could be awash in such flowering, as could many of the roadside verges, now mowed to death to look like American suburbia.

While the lilies have vanished, others have also gone extinct as economic drivers: let us count some of the ways we have lost the means to import money.

The tobacco, shipbuilding, salt trade, the carrying trade and palmetto-plaited hats (wildly popular) largely went the way of the dinosaur before the American Revolution.

After the Revolution, the economy in British military at the Dockyard and the forts, and the early tourism trade that came first on the ‘crop steamers’ (as we were the ‘winter garden’ for New York), also eventually went extinct.

After the more recent war, the US Forces were the source of much foreign currency and their Kindley Field allowed tourism to flourish as never before.

As they began their slow decline in the later years of the Cold War, ‘International Business’ entered a flagging economy, to great benefit all around.

However, blunders of considerable magnitude were made several times after 1980 and the once-beautiful Bermuda tourism economy should perhaps be put on the ‘endangered species’ list, possibly followed by the addition of the IB variety of Lilium of our economic drivers.

Lilies and visitor destinations have much in common, as their main point of sale is in beauty, and for the latter that includes the beauty of the inhabitants, not so much physical like the lily, but mentally, as a welcoming group of enduring courtesy and friendship.

While the extinction of some of our earlier economic drivers was in part, or mostly, their negation by uncontrollable outside forces, the survival of our species of tourism is largely in the hands of every Bermudian: the cultivation of which by all of us is more fundamental than the setting up of a new ‘Authority’ that will attempt to preserve and enhance the species.

Edward Cecil Harris, MBE, JP, PHD, FSA is Director of the National Museum. Comments may be made to director@nmb.bm or 704-5480.