-<_ — 
Daffodils are Harvested at River's Edge Farm 
Reprinted from the Richmond Times-Dispatch, April 1, 1951 
Mrs. Selina Hopkins, of River 
Edge Flower Farm, shows a basket 
of her choice daffodils gathered from her fields. 
BY—HAMILTON CROCKFORD 
Times-Dispatch Staff Writer 
NUTTALL, VA., March 31 — Mrs. 
Selina L. Hopkins just about aban- 
doned housekeeping a couple of 
weeks ago and took to gathering 
posies. Lunch will continue to be 
{rregular or missing for three weeks 
yet. 
It wasn’t simply a walkout, or just 
Spring fever — although that had 
something to do with it: 
The daffodils had it. Here in Glou- 
cester County they were bursting in- 
to bloom again. (The daffodil show 
at Gloucester is on tcday and to- 
morrow.) 
Everybody in Gloucester County 
has a daffodil patch. Mrs. Hopkins 
has some 15 acres of them. 
Bread and Beauty 
And since they supply her table 
with bread as well as beauty, picking 
posies in March for her has only an 
incidental resemblance to gathering 
nuts in May. 
So, beauty being fragile, business 
on her “River’s Edge” flower farm 
here, a couple of miles east of the 
court house, is bustling these days— 
everywhere except the kitchen. 
Every clear morning the pickers 
show up at her fields. Every after- 
noon a truck shows up at her pack- 
ing house for a shipment to go 
somewhere. 
And every day, all day, an elderly 
widow turned business woman gets 
about to all corners of the place to 
supervise the operations from pick- 
ing to packing. 
If it’s a frosty morning, the daffo- 
dils will have their heads down, and 
there’s no picking then. But when 
they look up and dance in glee like 
Wordsworth’s, beside the North 
River here the nimble-fingered pick- 
ers must move fast. 
Money for Pickers 
[There’s money in it for the pick- 
ers, while it lasts, at 2 cents per 
bunch of a dozen, 25 bunches to the 
basket, and some people picking 20 
baskets in a day’s working time, the 
owner observed. ] 
The job must be done by noon, if 
possible, Mrs. Hopkins noted, to leave 
enough time for cooling the flowers 
to stiffen their stems, and for pack- 
ing before the truck comes, She 
drives her car out into the fields to 
direct the work. 
The baskets go into troughs of 
water to stay until the stems are 
“cool to the hand.” Then the pack- 
ers take over, gently placing them 
30, 36 or 50 bunches to the box, ac- 
cording to the size of the flower var- 
fety, and bracing it to be sure the 
blossoms don’t bruise. 
While this is going on, the phone 
may be ringing with a long distance 
order from somewhere, and Mrs. 
Hopkins will be off into the house 
to take it. 
A daily broadcast of prices in 
New York is also “must” listening 
for her or her son-in-law and 
daughter, Mr. and Mrs. C. H. Ham- 
mer, who live with her, and grow 
more daffodils of their own. 
Market Perishable 
The market can be as perishable 
as a daffodil, if there’s a temporary 
glut in one place: The New York 
price dropped from 50 cents a dozen 
on a Saturday to 10 cents by the 
next Thursday, they noted. They 
A Field of Daffodils on River’s Edge Farm 
Mrs. Hopkins Superintends Packing of Daffodils 
shifted destinations accordingly, just 
before truck time. 
Mrs. Hopkins, who moves un- 
ruffled through this melee, got into 
flower farming on her own rather 
later than most. 
An aunt of actress Katherine Hep- 
burn, she was born Selina Hepburn, 
the daughter of a Hanover County 
Episcopal minister, in 1878, and 
married N. S. Hopkins in 1900. 
From general farming on _ his 
family’s old place here, “Waverly,” 
first owned by Philip Edward Tabb, 
he went into bulb growing seriously 
about 1922. He developed a couple of 
varieties himself. Meanwhile, Mrs. 
Hopkins observed with a smile, gen- 
ealogy and Gloucester County his- 
tory were her chief occupations. 
But when her husband died in 
1937, and her four children wondered 
what she ought to do, she decided 
simply. “It was the only living I 
had,” she said. She turned to daffo- 
dils. 
She’ll be 73 on April 9, but it’s 
easy to agree with her own sum- 
ming up, that “getting outdoors with 
the flowers agreed with me.” 
She sells a dozen or so commercial 
varieties and a few boxes each year 
of an estimated 100 other varieties. 
And while she’ll be getting back to 
a little more housekeeping after 
about April 20, she won’t tarry long 
at a time. 
Has Bulb Trade 
She’s worked up a bulb trade, too, 
and does about as much business 
selling the increase of her bulbs in 
the Fall as selling flowers in Spring. 
Selling only to home gardeners 
and florists rather than large whole- 
salers, she’s shipped them now to 
every State except Montana, she 
said. (Everything goes out with a 
tag noting the bulbs were State- 
inspected and found free of the 
plaguish ellworm and narcissus bulb 
fly. Hammer pointed out.) And she 
“grades bulbs with the boys all 
summer.” 
They have to be dug every one to 
four years, she noted, and where 
they grew, the fields must be planted 
alternately to soybeans and Winter 
clover, sometimes for two years, and 
these turned under, until the ground 
is right for bulbs again. 
After cleaning, drying, chemical 
treating and curing, the bulbs for 
replanting go back in the ground 
from September to Christmas. It’s 
a year-round business. 
“The only time I get any peace at 
all is when I get them all patted 
down in the ground in the Winter,” 
Selina Hopkins said—‘And then I 
have to work on my income tax.” 
But she was smiling at a cluster 
of her “Magnificence’ when she 
said it. 
