enlarge Courtesy Maplecrest Lilies

A mass of mixed Asiatic lilies.

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Yelloween Oriental

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LA Bestseller Asiatic

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Loreto Asiatic

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Black Jack Asiatic

enlarge John Ewing/Staff Photographer

Maplecrest Lilies in East Parsonsfield sells lily stems wholesale to florists as well as retail to the public, either at flower shows or online. Manager Kelynda Johnson holds a blooming Blackout lily with a bunch of budding stems.

enlarge John Ewing/Staff Photographer

Janet Berger of Parsonsfield cuts an armload of the budding Yelloween stems destined for a wholesale buyer.

TO PURCHASE LILIES

TO REACH Maplecrest Lilies, call 1 (877) GET LILY or 1 (877) 438-5459, or visit www.maplecrestlilies.com

ORIENTAL BULB prices online are $19.95 each for sets of 15 Stargazer, Casa Blanca, La Reve or mixed bulbs.

ASIATIC BULBS are $19.95 for sets of 15 pink, red, yellow or mixed.

CUT LILIES cost $39.95 for seven Asiatic stems, $54.95 for seven Oriental stems and $62.95 for seven cut Casa Blanca stems.

PRICES AT the flower shows and Whole Foods would be less.

TOM'S TIP

IT BEING JANUARY, I have given you permission to look through your garden catalogs.

BUT BEFORE you do, go to your stash of leftover seeds and see what you already have.

I MAKE MISTAKES both ways – ordering seeds I already have and forgetting to order seeds that I thought I had and turns out I don't.

ANYTHING THAT IS older than two years I usually throw out. It might be good, but I don't want to take a chance.

An East Parsonsfield company brings a taste of summer to New England all winter long. It does it all summer, too, but that doesn't seem like quite as big a miracle.

"Our business doesn't change from January to July in that we are in constant production," said Kelynda Johnson, manager of Maplecrest Lilies. "Every day we cut lilies and every day we plant lilies."

Mark Christoforo bought the existing business 18 years ago after living in Newfoundland, working as a meteorologist for the oil companies, providing forecasts for the oil rigs off the Newfoundland coast. He wanted to get back to Maine but figured he wouldn't fit into an office, saw a small classified ad for the lily company and purchased it.

"We've doubled the size of it since then," Christoforo said.

The operation is actually two companies. Greymark Farms grows lily stems for sale wholesale to the florist and cut flower market throughout New England, and its sister company, Maplecrest Lilies, uses the same facilities to sell lily stems as well as lily bulbs and other items online, by phone and at flower shows throughout the Northeast, "anywhere within an eight-hour drive," Christoforo said.

Most cut flowers now on the market are shipped to the United States from tropical climates in Central and South America, but Maplecrest is able to compete for a number of reasons, Johnson said.

"We do well because lilies don't travel quite as well as roses," she said, "and we sell a high-quality product that isn't trucked halfway around the world."

In addition, she said, by growing only lilies, they have gotten super-efficient at what they do, producing and selling about 10,000 lily stems a week with five employees.

Christoforo said he put in a wood boiler for the six greenhouses in 2006, and that has saved a lot of money – although with the recent drop in oil prices it is now closer to a break-even proposition. They burn about 70 cords of wood a year to heat the only large, glass greenhouse of about 11,000 square feet and five smaller ones of about 3,000 square feet each.

Christoforo said that about 75 percent of the company's lily stems are sold wholesale through the Greymark Farms business, but as far as cash income goes, it is closer to 55 percent for Greymark and 45 percent for Maplecrest.

Johnson said the company sells its lilies at Whole Foods as sort of a mix between wholesale and retail, with a separate display of Maplecrest lilies.

The company sells both Asiatic and Oriental lilies. Asiatic lilies are not fragrant and come in a wide variety of colors, including orange, pink, yellow, white and peach.

Oriental lilies are the large, fragrant varieties that come mostly in pink and white, although Johnson said they have a wonderful yellow Oriental, as well. Stargazer, a pink bicolor Oriental, is the best-selling lily at the company both as a stem and a bulb, with Casa Blanca, a white Oriental, coming in second.

Christoforo said he buys his lily bulbs from Holland, and the bulbs he sells to his customers are the same ones that he uses to produce the lily stems.

"We get about a half a million bulbs a year, very good quality bulbs," he said. "The bulb growers sell the biggest, best bulbs to the stem growers, and the retailers tend to scoop up bulbs after the growers get the ones that they want."

That means that the bulbs you buy from Maplecrest are likely to be larger and produce more flowers than a bulb you buy from a retail shop, he said.

In addition, Christoforo said he keeps his bulbs frozen before they are wrapped and shipped to their customers, so they are not allowed to dry out. He said that when bulbs dry out on store shelves, they are not likely to do as well in the garden.

Johnson said that the bulbs are soaked in the pesticide Merit before they are shipped to their customers, so they will be resistant to the lily-leaf beetle for at least the first...