Maine news, sports, weather from Waterville Morning Sentinel

Flowers for mom

Greenhouse sees brisk business before big day

By Betty Adams badams@centralmaine.com
Staff Writer

AUGUSTA -- Red geraniums bursting from deep green leaves.

click image to enlarge

MOTHER AND DAUGHTER: Mildred Smith, left, and her daughter Elaine Doucette, both of Benton, shop for flowers on Saturday at Black-Eyed Susan’s in Augusta. There were several mother-daughter duos shopping at the greenhouses on Stevens Road.

Staff photo by Joe Phelan

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Plum petunias spilling over baskets.

Salmon impatiens reflecting the sun.

Flame-tinted yellow begonias. Dainty purple verbena paired with lemony petunias.

"Mothers Love Hanging Baskets," said the sign at Black-Eyed Susan's greenhouse on Stevens Road.

And these flower baskets were going to some lucky mothers. The dozens of hanging baskets and numerous other potted plants at the back of one greenhouse bore yellow tags with the buyers' names.

Susan Morrill, the greenhouse owner, kept the plants warm and watered until pickup on Saturday and today.

The flowers for mom, along with candy, breakfast in bed, dinner or brunch out, some new slippers and clothes, jewelry, a ride to the coast and, at the very least, a welcome phone call, are all part of a Mother's Day tradition celebrated each year in the United States on the second Sunday in May.

In 2008, there were some 85.4 million mothers in the United States, according to statistics presented on the U.S. Census Bureau Newsroom site. And in 2010, the same site notes, there were 5 million stay-at-home moms, a drop of 100,000 from the previous year.

Jerry Miller, of Augusta, left Black-Eyed Susan's with no fewer than a dozen plants. The bleeding heart was destined for his wife, Kathy.

"My food tastes better when my wife gets flowers," he joked. He was heading next to the lobster pound.

A basket of purple and white petunias was for a mother with young children, and he and his wife would be distributing the smaller plants to women in their South Belfast Avenue neighborhood, he said.

Brenda Richards of West Gardiner was inhaling the sweet scents and reveling in the splash of color as she and her daughter Sharon Palmer wandered through the herb section. Richards had already gotten a bouquet of lilies from one of her three children.

"You might be getting some from another child," Palmer told her.

"I love flowers," Richards said.

A Benton mother and daughter pair, Mildred Smith and Elaine Doucette, made their selections, and their husbands carried them off to pay for them.

"We usually go flowering every spring," Doucette said.

Morrill said the sunny periods this week caused buyers to bloom as well as flowers.

Betty Adams -- 621-5631

badams@centralmaine.com