THOROUGHLY MODERN LILIES; GREENHOUSE GROWERS HAVE EASTER'S FLOWERS DOWN LIKE CLOCKWORK.

Byline: Mary Otto Knight Ridder Tribune News Wire

Inside the greenhouse glass, a warm and perfected nature is humming. Like clockwork, a thousand, ten thousand, a quarter-million lilies are ripening as one.

Henry Mast Jr. spreads his hand over them, every waxy bud poised. ``That's a pretty sight,'' he says. ``I like the uniformity. `'

Outside the glass, snow blankets the flat country, and the cold, steady wind has the bite of nearby Lake Michigan. Within, a premature spring of Mast's own making labors to persuade flowers to bloom before their time.

The Easter lily business is a strange and demanding one. Ancient symbols of rebirth are raised in computerized greenhouses, wrapped in purple cellophane, rushed away in refrigerated trucks in time for Easter. They stand for eternal life, yet they are marketable for just two weeks a year in accordance with the vagaries of an archaic lunar calendar.

As Mast speaks, automated windows open and close, fans whir quietly, stirring the lilies. His new Dutch irrigation system can water and fertilize them, he explains, ``with the flick of a switch.''

His lilies were planted in mid-October, and since then he has orchestrated every hour of their lives. Every moment of cooling and warming, the carefully regulated rooting, sprouting, budding, leafing. All in an inexorable push toward Easter morning.

Michigan is the largest Easter lily grower in the nation, producing, by latest count, 1.5 million potted lilies in a year. Henry Mast and his clan, three cousins who have neighboring greenhouses, are responsible for growing at least half that many.

Together, they grow nearly as many lilies as Pennsylvania or as California, the states ranked second and third in a business that has an annual wholesale value of $38 million.

As usual, people will arrive at church Sunday craving the sudden sweetness, the pale radiance of resurrection. Evidence of miracles. Lilies.

Playing with time

Left to its own devices, the Easter lily, Lilium longiflorum, would bloom in late May or early June. The commercial grower uses skill and artifice to synchronize the time of flowering with Easter, a holiday that can fall on any Sunday from March 22 to April 25.

Henry Mast's lilies have never missed an Easter. It would be a disaster if they did.

The lilies that will bloom this Easter were dug up amid the torrents of rain and hail that lashed the Pacific Northwest last fall.

Ninety-eight percent of the nation's Easter lily bulbs come from 10 farms on one remote bench of land set above the redwood forest on the border between California and Oregon. It is a small place in the rain forest with the rare and exacting microclimate needed: a southern exposure and winds from the Pacific blowing 53 degrees all winter, 63 degrees all summer.

The bulbs look like artichokes. Peeled apart, each scale can spawn another plant. It takes three or four years to grow a bulb to market size, and it needs to be handled dozens of times, minded by workers lying on creepers that look like motorized ironing boards.

After a frenetic harvest in late September and early October, the final drive to Easter begins. The bulbs are shipped to growers who unpack and pot them.

The bulbs are kept moist and warm for two or three weeks while they develop roots. Then they are moved to huge coolers, subjected to a synthetic winter that lasts six weeks. Many growers bring them back into the warm greenhouses as soon as the poinsettias are shipped out for Christmas.

Temperature is key

Fine adjustments in temperature help pace the plants' growth. When Easter is late, the soil might be kept at 60 to 62 degrees; when it's early, 63 to 65.

By late January, when the plants are 4 to 6 inches tall, growers look at the shoots under a microscope for signs of flower buds. They monitor the unfolding of the leaves to determine the rate at which the plants are developing, when the buds will become visible. To get the crop out on time, every lily grower knows the buds should be visible by the first day of Lent.

``We are very religious here,'' said William Carlson, professor of horticulture at Michigan State University. ``On Ash Wednesday, we look right down into the plants. We have to be able to see the little buds with the naked eye. Then you know you are on schedule for Easter.''

The growth rate is kept in sync with the progress of Lent through careful control of the greenhouse's day and night temperatures.

As the lilies' buds become puffy and ready to bloom, the plants are removed from the greenhouse and stowed in a dark, cool warehouse. Kept at 38 degrees in a state of suspended animation, robed in their wrappers of purple, packed six to a box, they await shipment. Sometimes they go to florists, often to the nation's discount stores, where a plant grown from a 65-cent bulb may sell for $6.99.

Although the lilies should be unpacked right away, they sometimes languish in their cartons, stacked up like sneakers or barbecue grills. ``Then somebody pulls them out and sits them on a shelf,'' says Lee Riddle, a horticulturist who mans the lonely Easter Lily Research Station at Brookings, Ore. ``It's kind of funny what you have to breed for.'' Each plant still needs to look like a lily, still needs to look like Easter.

Grower's reality

Henry Mast doesn't garden in his spare time. He golfs. He is tan and sleek in his leather jacket, smoking occasionally. He doesn't seem to harbor a deep passion for flowers. Not for the 6 million geraniums, though he seems fond of the quiet conveyor belt that moves them tirelessly from place to place. Nor the poinsettias he grows for Christmas. Nor the Easter lilies, which should be gone before they bloom.

``It's amazing how little people here get to enjoy them,'' Mast said. ``We are always shipping them out at the bud stage.'' To him, a lily flower is a failure in calculations.

Ask him what his favorite crop looks like. ``It's empty benches. I know it's in the bank.''

The truth is, there was a time when this man almost let the red poinsettias of Christmas, the geraniums of Mother's Day, the lilies of Easter destroy his own family.

That was 15, 20 years ago, back when he was in his 30s and his son and daughter were very small. ``I had a business going 180 miles an hour and two kids I never got to care for,'' he says. His wife, Connie, told him if he didn't slow down, she'd leave and take the children with her.

``It hit me like a two-by-four,'' he says. ``We got it back together.''

They did it with the help of a church.

It wasn't quite the strict, formal Dutch Reformed church of his youth, where he grew up, enduring three services every Sunday, the last one in Dutch. Like his father's greenhouse, he fled church when he was old enough to have a choice. Yet, somehow, as with the greenhouse, there was something there he needed.

So, on the Saturday before Palm Sunday, when the final rush is on, Mast may have 40 trucks lined up outside his warehouses, waiting for lilies. But he always holds back a few dozen plants.

And he takes them to his own church, Sunshine Christian Reformed.

Where he prays for good weather. A man with 11 acres under glass never takes the sun for granted.

CAPTION(S):

2 Photos, Box

Photo: (1--Cover--Color) On the cover: Lily courtesy of Green Thumb Nursery & Hardware in Canoga Park.

David Crane/Daily News

(2) Henry Mast Jr. turns out 240,000 Easter lilies a year at his greenhouses in Michigan, the top-producing state.

George Gryzenia/Knight Ridder Tribune Photo Service

Box: EASTER Lilies

Sources: Easter Lily Research Foundation, Agriculture Department; research by Judy Treible

Knight Ridder Tribune Graphics Network