Budding in cold weather almost as if their furry little catkins were a warm coat to protect the flowers inside, pussy willows are a sweet harbinger of spring.
And no one celebrates the coming of spring with pussy willows quite like Chesapeake resident Carolyn Lilley. Lilley creates airy pussy willow wreaths made with several varieties of pussy willows, accompanied by graceful curving contorted mulberry branches and maybe even other early budding branches, such as flowering apricot.
From Valentine's Day on, a pussy willow wreath on your door can give visitors a springtime greeting to your home. But the wreaths last a lot longer than spring flowers. I gave my daughter one for Easter last year and it lasted so long, she put Christmas bows on it in December.
Lilley, a Chesapeake artist whose business is called The Lonesome Gourd, is known for oversized, richly dyed fruit and Indian bowls that she creates from gourds. Now she also is becoming known for her wreaths and cuttings.
Late fall and winter are Lilley's busy times, because her creations are wonderfully seasonal. She not only uses pussy willows and other early bloomers in late winter, both for wreaths and bouquets, but she also creates Christmas wreaths with a variety of greens and sells decorative items like luscious huge bunches - perhaps 4 feet tall -of winterberry covered with red berries.
Folks in the know, who attend the Williamsburg Farmers Market winter markets, coming up on March 8 and April 12 and the Maymont Flower and Garden Show this weekend in Richmond, among other events, line up to buy her cuttings and wreaths. Lilley also will sell wreaths from the Chesapeake farm shed where she does her work if you call her on her cell, (757) 435-2085.
Lilley's wreath and cutting business grew out of the family's wholesale tree nursery, Lilley Farms and Nursery in Chesapeake. Once a typical Hampton Roads farm where corn and soybeans grew, Lilley Farms began to diversify a couple of decades ago. Now the business has over 200 acres of trees, as well as a pick-your-own strawberry crop in May.
At first Lilley was making her wreaths and bouquets from cuttings gathered when the nursery trees were pruned. Now her business has grown so that rows of pussy willows - red Japanese willow, fantail willow, white snake willow and scarlet curly willow - are there just for her. So are the contorted mulberry trees and the winterberries.
"We started raising plants for fresh cuts alone," Lilley said.
The pussy willows are all already pruned back, none too early this year, it seems. She had to scramble to get her cuttings. The plants were budding earlier than usual because of the moderate winter.
"We try to cut the pussy willows real tight," she said, "but it's been so warm."
The contorted mulberries in the fields are also cut back. Their thick bases grow as gnarled and crazy as their graceful curving branches.
"They look like the trees from the 'Wizard of Oz,' " Lilley said.
Now that some of the nursery trees are designated as trees for cuttings, it doesn't mean that pruned branches from other trees in the nursery, such as dawn redwoods, red maples and flowering apricots won't also make their way into the wreaths and bouquets, too. And at Christmas, Lilley has a choice of greens from variety of unusual cedars, firs and other nursery trees for her holiday wreaths.
Though Lilley makes hundreds of wreaths and has some help from workers on the farm, she usually mans the wreath making machine and fastens bunches of pussy willows and other plants around the metal wreath frames herself. She likes the creative aspect of making sure there are a variety of plants in each bunch and that maybe a piece of fantail willow, say, may show itself off by gracefully dropping into the center of the wreath.
"The more whimsical they are, the more people like them," Lilley said.
The 12-inch metal wreaths are called twig rings and the pedal-operated wreath machine presses down metal fasteners on the ring around bunches of plant material. Lilley is planning on selling a plain wreath with more pliable pins soon to folks who want to try and make their own.
But you would be hard pressed to compete with Lilley's vision of spring.
Mary Reid Barrow,
barrow1@cox.net