Wednesday was the biggest day of the year for Marian Miller.
"The Flower Lady," Marian Miller, 92, is all smiles after her vase of dried flowers won a blue ribbon
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New Holland 'Flower Lady'
The 92-year-old firecracker has entered flowers in the New Holland Farmer's Fair nearly every year for the last half century.
Wednesday was judging day and once again, the 4-foot-6 woman dubbed "The Flower Lady" showed she's a titan in the flower world.
New Holland 'Flower Lady'The great-great-grandmother's 22 entries garnered five blue ribbons, nine seconds and two thirds.
But ribbons can't tell the love story of Marian and her flowers. Prizes can't measure the mother-like nurturing she gives them or the joy and sense of purpose they give back.
"It keeps her going," her son, Glen, said simply. "It is uplifting."
Marian talks to her flowers, even scolds them when they don't listen.
"So, you don't want to go to church," Marian tells a rose or lily that wilts right before snipping time for her Sunday bouquet.
Marian puts flowers at the front of Pilgrim Bible Church in New Holland every week before Sunday school starts.
"People say her flowers have to be artificial," said Marian's daughter, Phyllis Witman. "So they pinch them and say, 'Well, no, they're real.'"
Witman said she didn't inherit her mother's green thumb.
"If I get a plant, I call her and tell her to come plant it for me," she said.
Marian knows her problem:
"She doesn't pay enough attention to them," she says.
Marian actually never received any formal horticultural training. She just learned by trial and error.
"My grandmother had flowers and I always loved her flowers," Marian said. "She had beautiful dahlias."
At her South Custer Avenue home in New Holland, she fills every nook and cranny of her flower beds with pink and white zinnias, orange and white dahlias, Chinese lanterns, silver dollars, orange Nasturtium, pink shrub roses — well, you get the idea.
She'll tell you roses are her favorite, but Witman said the size of the flowers is what really matters to Marian.
"The bigger the better," Witman said.
Marian insists she loves all flowers.
"Even the ones that stink, like spider plants," she said.
She laughs when she remembers when a woman at church brushed against one of her spider plants and thought a skunk had sprayed the building.
Marian doesn't like it that her home is near a cornfield.
"Pinch bugs, Japanese beetles — If I see bugs, I spray them."
Wind also can be a problem at times.
Marian entered flowers at the New Holland Fair for the first time in the late 1950s.
"The first year, I won a first prize," she said. "I was so tickled."
Many more blue ribbons followed at the fair — the only place she exhibits her flowers. But Marian keeps track only of the cream of the crop.
It takes her a minute to figure out the years in which her seven children were born, but she can tell you right off her first Best of Show win was in 1969 and that she's won eight more since.
Marian is competitive when it comes to flowers.
She has put an umbrella over a flower before the fair so it would bloom at the perfect time.
Don't ask her how she got an Easter lily to bloom in October this year for the fair — she's not telling.
Two of her sons enter produce at the fair. Glen enters single flowers as well.
"He tries to compete with me," Marian quips, though she enters bouquets, arrangements, single flowers, cacti — you name it.
Glen has gotten more than 100 ribbons from the fair since he started exhibiting in 1963. He said his mother has gotten too many ribbons to count.
Another son tells Marian she doesn't need any more flowers, but she can't wait until her next visit to one of her favorite area greenhouses.
Why do all the work?
"I guess I'm a silly lady," she said. "It makes me feel good. I'd rather do it than housework."
A few days before the fair, Marian carefully snips her babies and brings them all into her kitchen.
It's not a time for you to stop by.
"I have to be alone while I work," she said. "I don't like visitors that day. I have to keep my mind in what I'm doing."
It takes her about a day and a half to put all her entries together.
"We always look forward for your dahlias," Ruth Pankuch, founder of the garden club that conducts the fair competition, told Marian on Wednesday. "They are the size of dinner plates."
Wednesday, Marian carefully read judges' comments left with her flowers and asked whether she entered one flower in the right category.
Witman said that after her father, Roy, died in 1974 and her sister, Shirley Anne Eaby, died in 1997, Marian did not stop growing and loving her flowers.
Nowadays, Marian said her saddest time is when the New Holland Fair, and flower season, ends.
What does she do in the winter?
"I look at seed catalogs. I used to knit slippers but I gave that up."
Witman said she's heard one refrain from Marian for decades now:
"If I'm still around next year, I'm going to do this" with the flowers.
Staff writer Ryan Robinson can be reached at rrobinson@LNPnews.com or 481-6032.
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