A funeral had just ended on a cold, rainy day when the church services committee of Takoma Park Baptist received a shipment of 45 Easter lilies. The mood seemed to lift as the women placed the white-trumpeted plants in the sanctuary of the 87-year-old stone church in Northwest Washington.
"We can put three per window this year instead of two," committee chairman Betty Jones said.
Leroy Tompkins carries Easter flowers as Behnke Nurseries, which has a warehouse in Largo, tries to meet holiday demand. Top, a lily brightens Takoma Park Baptist Church, which recently received a shipment of 45 flowers.
(Robert A. Reeder -- The Washington Post)
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Most of the flowers were donated by Bob and Alberta Faulkner, church members who after Easter will give them as thank-yous to people who transported the retired couple to medical appointments after an automobile accident 17 months ago.
The Easter lily, Bob Faulkner said, is "a symbol of new life."
Easter, which most Christians will observe today, is adorned with all kinds of flowers, as evidenced by a parade of colors last week at the Behnke Nurseries Co. warehouse in Largo, where workers scurried to fill 277 orders. On Wednesday, the first frenetic delivery day, multilevel metal carts were filled with plants waiting to be placed onto trucks, each plant identified by the church, hospital or retirement home that had placed the order.
There were thousands of Easter lilies, and yellow daffodils; blue, pink and white hyacinths; pink, red and white azaleas; blue and pink hydrangeas; and pink, red and yellow tulips. White, yellow and lavender chrysanthemums, typically identified with fall, contributed to the display.
But the Easter lily -- traditionally seen as a sign of purity, as well as of resurrection and rebirth -- remains the favorite Easter flower of churches throughout the area, said local wholesalers, florists and garden center workers.
The Rev. James D. Watkins, pastor of Immaculate Conception Church in Northwest, said his parish would adorn the altar area with Easter lilies, daffodils, ferns, ivies and white hydrangeas.
As with other Roman Catholic and many Protestant churches, Immaculate Conception waited until yesterday, after the gloom of Good Friday, the day observing Jesus's Crucifixion, to arrange the plants.
"All flower decorations are a sign of celebration and rejoicing meant to enhance the senses and lift them up to assist in prayer as much as the music does," Watkins said.
"The story for all of this decorating at Easter is to replicate in some way the garden of the tomb where Jesus rose from the dead," he said, adding that the practice is traditional rather than divinely directed. "There's no biblical record that says, 'Thou shalt decorate the sanctuary at Easter.' "
There's also no rule that the flower of choice must be the Easter lily or that it be the kind familiar to most Americans, Lilium longiflorum. That species performs well when planted in many U.S. gardens -- including those in the mid-Atlantic -- which enhances its popularity, said John Peter Thompson, Behnke's chief executive and a frequent lecturer on the history of the Easter lily.
The lily most known in this country is not the lily that appears in Renaissance art, such as the one held by the archangel Gabriel in Botticelli's "Annunciation" (circa 1490), he said. Gabriel's lily is the Madonna lily, Lilium candidum, which has smaller flowers and which Crusaders probably took from Asia Minor to Europe.
Native to an island chain south of Japan, L. longiflorum made its way to Bermuda in the mid-19th century and eventually to the West Coast of the United States, which produces 95 percent of the world's Easter lily bulbs. Madonna lilies are "very temperamental" and require hot summer dry spells, like those of their Mediterranean origin, said Ron Chiabotta of Kensington, a flower-bulb aficionado and past president of the North American Lily Society.
