The calendar says it’s a spring day, but still a cold drizzle pelts the long crushed-shell road leading to Zieger Floral, a flower cutting farm near Eastville, Va. Up ahead, two massive greenhouses emerge, ghost-like, from the mist.

Running to greet me as I pull up is Eve, a mixed black Lab, with a slight growl followed by frantic tail wagging. “She won’t hurt ya,” calls out wiry, fifty-nine-year-old Tom Zieger, owner of Zieger Floral, the only large scale flower farm on Virginia’s Eastern Shore.

The Zieger family has been raising specialty cut flowers on the shore for more than a quarter century, all year long, regardless of the season. There is a bounty of green things growing here, with blossoms enough to soothe the most spring-starved soul: snapdragons, Gerber daisies, sunflowers, alstromeria, irises.

If you’ve bought a bouquet anywhere in New York, Connecticut, Washington, D.C., Pennsylvania, or Maryland, it probably held a Zieger bloom.

Tom oversees the operation at Edgehill Farm from a no-frills concrete office in one of the maze of buildings that makes up the farm complex. His son, Adam, treasurer and general manager, and Adam’s wife, Willow, the office manager, are crammed into the small space with him. Tom’s wife, Linda—who is buzzing around everywhere within the plant—is Zieger Floral’s sales manager.

Robust in appearance, yet more laid-back than his dad, Adam, thirty-one, returns a handshake with a quiet greeting. He commences the tour with the twenty-five-by-fifty-foot bulb refrigerator room. Here among buckets of blooms, open boxes of lily bulbs, which arrive in a deep freeze from Holland, South America, and New Zealand, defrost as they await planting. We stroll across to a connecting concrete building, where the bulbs are brought to be “trayed up.” Several workers, hunched over long tables, plant the lily bulbs back in the original plastic trays they arrived in. They use the Ziegers’ own field soil mix, which the family describes as a fertile concoction of “Eastern Shore sand, dirt, and pine bark.” Next, the bulbs head to the cold room, where they are kept at fifty degrees for three weeks. Then, a week in the farm garage—with its milder temperatures—helps them adjust to the seventy-five-degree greenhouse.

By this point, the lilies will be just breaking through the soil. They grow up through wire and bamboo slants supporting their stems. (They can get up to three feet by harvest time.) It takes roughly three-and-a-half months for the lilies to grow from soil to spectacular. Up and down the rows are plants in various stages of growth, from itty bitty to yard-high.

Even when it’s not the Easter season, lilies are the mainstay of Zieger Floral. But it wasn’t always so.

Green thumbs run deep in this bloodline; Tom and Adam are the third and fourth generation of Ziegers to work the family flower business. It was Tom’s grandfather, Ernst, a determined immigrant, who left his father’s Hamburg, Germany, greenhouse business around 1876 to come to America.

As an indentured servant, Ernst’s passage to America was paid by H.J. Heinz, whose ketchup empire was just getting off the ground. The immigrant worked off his debt, but afterwards declined to stay with the company; he wanted to return to his first love, flowers. After heading back to Germany for a while, Ernst opened his own business in 1910, buying a neglected greenhouse operation in the Germantown section of Philadelphia.

“His customers were rich people who would have a gala and need something like a thousand roses,” says Tom, who only knew his grandfather through his father’s stories. Eventually it became Zieger & Sons, when Tom’s father, Herman, and his uncle, Wilbur, joined the business. In 1924, the brothers expanded the business, opening a large rose growing operation in Willow Grove, Pa.; and over the years adding wholesale operations in Allentown, Reading, and Harrisburg.

Up until the 1990s, life for the Ziegers was literally a “bed of roses”—the long-stemmed beauties were their signature crop. (Hence the farm road’s apt moniker, Rosebud Lane.) But competition from South American roses, combined with continually sinking prices, prompted Tom to phase out the regal blooms. By 1997, he had replaced them with more exotic Asiatic lilies.

“Dad went with lilies on a whim, even though our wholesaler wasn’t too happy about it,” explains Adam.

The hunch worked, and later they brought in other more interested wholesalers to join their longstanding outlets. But Tom’s boldest move occurred decades before, when he decided to transplant his branch of the family business. In 1979, he moved south from Willow Grove to the Eastern Shore in an attempt to cut escalating heating fuel costs.

“With the Bay on one side and the ocean on the other, this is a more tempered climate for growing things,” he explains.

Adam was ten at the time, but the move to more rural surroundings suited him. “Then it was a thirty- minute drive just to get to a McDonald’s,” he says. “But I like the Eastern Shore lifestyle.”

Springtime is the busiest time for Zieger Floral, and it shows inside the balmy greenhouse, where the ceiling appears as a glassed extension of the sky. The air has the sweet clean smell of dampened earth and growing things. The chill outside is forgotten in this “endless summer,” where rows and rows of slender stemmed, closed-bud lilies fill the gigantic 120-by-410-foot indoor “pasture,” poised to release the flowers’ beauty. But that’s not something the Ziegers want to see.

“It’s a fine line to know when the buds are ready to be cut,” says Adam. “You don’t want them to perform [bloom] until they get to the customer.”

Today, as we enter the packing room, a couple of women, two of the fourteen full-time staffers, stand along a long table quietly “grading” flowers by variety and quality. Then they trim the stems to an even length, and wrap them in plastic sleeves. Many of the too short or single flowers will be grouped together, marketed, and sold in bouquets.

Within forty-eight hours, one of the company’s three refrigerated trucks will whisk the colorful harvest to other wholesale distributors, who sell them to retail florists before their beauty fully emerges.

In 2003, Zieger raised a million-and-a-half lily bulbs, and another 50,000 in assorted varieties. It takes more than a full year for the farm to switch to a new flower crop, but that rarely happens. They do testing of new blooms, trying out varieties here and there.

Trying to keep up with the ever-changing whims of consumers is tough, says Tom, especially when you think you have a handle on the flower market. “Then you get a Martha Stewart type who puts a certain flower in her bouquet, and everybody goes ape.”

What does change per season, Adam notes, is the demand for certain colors. Spring calls for white, yellow, and pink, while in fall florists want yellow and orange shades. Red and white, naturally, are Christmas’s popular hues.

Though the Ziegers’ crops are more colorful than the average grain or produce farm, they share the universal plight of farmers. “This is a seven-days-a-week job; there is always a problem— insects, fungus, harvesting too much product or not enough,” says Tom.

“We’re no different than the guy down the road who grows wheat,” adds Adam. “Like them we gamble, too [on our crops]. It’s all a gamble.”

We head back to the refrigerator room, filled with buckets overflowing with a rainbow of blossoms that warm the heart despite the cold surroundings. Adam talks about flowery trends as I’m reminded of the cheer and comfort they bring to so many of life’s big moments. Fall, he says, is becoming a more popular time for weddings. And let’s hear it for Mom. Mother’s Day has gotten as big, if not bigger, than Valentine’s Day.

“They say you might forget your sweetheart or your wife, but not your mother,” chuckles Adam’s mom, Linda.

Before I leave, I thank the Ziegers for a “sunny” break. Tom admits that even though the flower biz isn’t always rosy, it’s hard to get too jaded.

“I enjoy growing things, the challenge,” he admits. “And it feels good when our customers take pleasure in our product.”

And it’s not just the customers. Even after a lifetime spent in the blossom business, Tom Zieger still brings flowers home every day.

Edgehill Farms, Zieger Floral, Inc., 7483 Rosebud Ln., Eastville, Va. 757-678-7235.

Donna Bozza Packer writes her flowery prose from her home in Cape Charles, Va.