The zen of lilies

FARMINGTON – For some people it’s knitting. Or airplane models. Or maybe it’s repurposing old barn boards into end tables and headboards.

For Bill Moloney, it’s lilies.

“I didn’t do it for anything more than to have an addiction that wasn’t obstructive,” he said.

Moloney has been growing day lilies for the last thirty years. And growing is putting it mildly. He spent years breeding different varieties of the flower- teaching himself how to manually pollinate, track and store the Hemerocallis. He throws around giant, technical terms like rose petals, side dropping precise temperatures or number of days for germination.

The learning curve was a steep one- especially considering this was before YouTube tutorials or a quick google search, not that Moloney would have relied on that anyway. He spent entire winters reading about the plant. He spent entire months carefully collecting pollen, labeling and storing, only to be knocked down again and again by mishap, mistake and mother nature.

Moloney recalls storing bundles of lilies in the gas oven, where the warmth of the pilot light set a perfect temperature, only to have them go up in smoke when someone went to use the oven unknowingly.

“Another year I planted 27,000 seedlings. It took a week a half. As soon as I was done we had the biggest thunderstorm of the year,” he said.

When he went out to his fields he found the 27,000 seedlings in disarray, ripped from the soil by the heavy rains.

“It was one of my first zen moments. I realized I had two choices: I could be angry at what had happened, or I could put in another week of effort to recuperate the flowers and not waste the work I had already done,” he said.

So he got to work repairing and replanting the tiny flowers.

While learning the ways of lilies has been difficult other things have come naturally to Moloney, like methodically building rock walls, collecting strangely shaped pieces of drift wood, or floating in his kayak on the Sandy River. Keeping up with his 50 acres of farm land, and a thoroughly aged New England farmhouse, has come easily for Moloney, too. He attributes his capabilities to one small decision more than 30 years ago: getting his electricians license.

“I was smart, but I didn’t know how to work,” Moloney said, referring to his days before becoming an electrician.

Now Moloney does everything by hand: the rototilling, weeding, planting and mowing, as well as the rock, drift wood and plant collecting, and all the upkeep on his home. The work gives him a focus he said, and represents a piece of him that he will someday pass to his children or grandchildren. Nothing that Moloney makes or grows is sold for a profit. Occasionally he’ll trade things with friends, but he prefers to just give them away.

“I really don’t know what I’m doing. I’m just a steward. We can’t own anything that is alive or beautiful anyway,” he said.

Just like the pieces of pottery found on the banks of the Sandy River, or the hundreds of unique rocks that Moloney has collected over time, the zen moments have found their shelf in his life too, and along with them the lessons that have shaped Moloney’s days.

“We verify our stories by what we see and what we believe we see, but we need to be more aware. We need to be less controlled by our stories and the narrowness of them. I know this, but I don’t know how to employ it,” he said. “If you’re not a bird watcher, you won’t see the bluebirds.”