Growing Flowers For Pleasure, Therapy And A Little Bit Of Money

Scattered along the South Fork’s meandering country roads are honor system flower stands, a bucolic reminder of the area’s agricultural past. “I get IOUs and U-Owe-Mes” said Diane Miller, 59, proprietor of a flower stand on Ocean Road in Bridgehampton, where customers can help themselves to a bouquet and leave the payment in a small green lock box. Ms. Miller, who took the business over from her sister, Maria Semkus, more than 25 years ago, estimated that 90 percent of her customers are honest.

“It says a lot about people,” she said. “I think people like being held accountable.”

An accountant by trade, she raises the flowers in a former potato field behind her grandparents’ house, where her parents now live. “I could have 50 people coming in and telling me how beautiful the dahlias are,” she said. “How often do you have your boss saying that?”

Nearby, in Water Mill, a quaint, whitewashed stand sits off Scuttlehole Road next to a patch of flowers that are nearly in bloom. Robert Bubka, 44, who has his own landscaping and gardening business, manages this stand with his uncle, Stanley Yastrzemski. They sell an array of flowers and mixed bouquets, but Mr. Bubka’s favorite by far are the dahlias.

His grandfather, also named Stanley Yastrzemski, who had planted the same variety of dahlias since the early 1950s, died in 1999. Dahlia tubers won’t keep in storage for a whole year, so whatever are on hand must be planted in the spring of that year. When Mr. Bubka started working with his uncle, he planted the dahlias they had “just to save the bulbs,” he explained.

In the early 2000s, the dahlias were hard to find in gardening stores, he recalled as he absentmindedly hoed the ground not far from his crop. Now the spiky, bright flowers are one of his most popular varieties. What began as a way to keep his grandfather’s legacy alive is now a cornerstone of his stand’s business.

At other small stands, whose owners often hold other jobs, maintaining a family legacy is large part of their motivation.

“The farm stand started as a card table with a coffee cup for money,” said Jo Ann Comfort, sharing the story of her husband, Robert Comfort’s, forebears, the Babinskis.

Mr. Comfort, 55, a third-generation farmer, operates his business, Comfort Farm, on 15 acres in Bridgehampton, 10 of which he owns. In addition to flowers, he sells an array of produce from squash to tomatoes to raspberries at his stand on Lumber Lane. He hopes one day to pass the business along to his daughter, Uma, who is 12.

Although they have had a few instances of theft over the years, the Comforts like keeping their business on the honor system. “It is basic and simple, the way things used to be,” Mr. Comfort said.

He operates the stand in addition to his 9-to-5 job, admitting that he’d “rather do this, but it just doesn’t pay the bills.”

Melissa Dombrowski, 60, a former Foster who’s descended from a whaling family, got her start in the flower business on a whim. After receiving a little less than an acre from her father to build a house on, she wasn’t sure what to do with the extra yard space that was left. “My mother said, ‘Why don’t you grow flowers out there?’” Ms. Dombrowski recalled.

Tucked onto Head of Pond Road in Water Mill, Ms. Dombrowski sells her colorful bunches for $7, using a picnic table to display her wares. Now a devotee, she said, “I love watching them progress. The birds, the butterflies, the hummingbirds. Its just amazing what they attract. It is all in the chain.”

Others growers appreciate their time in the fields, even if growing flowers is not the most lucrative business. “When I get up at 5:30 to go cut flowers, the moon is just setting, the sun is up, the birds are out,” said Mr. Bubka. Describing the work as therapeutic, he admitted that the business is a labor of love more than anything. “I’m not getting rich with it,” he said.

“I love being around the flowers. It is something to keep their memory alive,” Mr. Bubka said of his predecessors. He recalls going on nighttime zinnia-cutting sprees with his grandfather, and being in charge of running the clipped flowers out to the car.

Walking through her vibrant rows of Mexican sunflowers, blue ageratum, snapdragons and zinnias, Ms. Dombrowski clipped at the spent heads of flowers—deadheading—as she explained the cycles of her small plot of land.

“It is a lot of work after a while. I don’t know if a lot of ladies would want to do it,” she said, pointing out the dirt under her fingernails.

Ms. Miller also finds cutting flowers to be a “working meditation,” noting that the business encompasses a lot more than spending time in the fields. She had to learn about irrigation, machinery, fertilizing, essentially “the whole life cycle of the plant,” as she calls it.

She recalls going into the fields after a rainstorm and having to right the sunflowers, one by one.

“It’s the plight of the farmer,” she said. “You can do everything right and the weather doesn’t cooperate.”