During the brisk and blustery month of April last year, Krishana Collins planted hundreds of thousands of flower seeds at Tea Lane Farm in Chilmark, filling one long greenhouse on her property. Inside, endless rows of worktables were laden with trays of tiny starters with a zillion names: butterfly flowers and cosmos, lupine and nasturtium, alyssum and ageratum, bells-of-Ireland and lisianthus, cherry vanilla and more. Some of the seedlings were only one-quarter-inch tall but straight as soldiers; others were still buried in soil, fat and barely visible. The baby phlox were “soaring like little rocket ships,” she said.
Collins had estimated that these fledging plants would need her indoor cultivation for anywhere from six weeks to two months. Pots of older and larger plants sat in groups on the floor: zinnias, dahlias, the winter-blooming hellebores, with which she was planning to enlarge a shade garden near her house when they were ready. In a corner, a large germination chamber she called “the magic trick” was reserved for very tender plants that germinate slowly and grow best in their first months in temperatures between 65 and 75 degrees.
Collins was quiet as she walked around the greenhouse, checking on her charges as if they were children. She hovered over items she tested, such as the dahlias she was growing from seed instead of tubers. She checked the mobile hose on wires suspended across the room, spraying here and there with a fine or heavy touch. “I love being in a room full of growing things,” she said. “Everything here wants to grow; you can feel it.”
Collins has not always been a grower of flowers, but she had long wanted to be a farmer. After her childhood in Pensacola, Florida, she left Antioch College in Ohio for a farm job in Vermont, where she grew vegetables and salad greens. “I loved to see greens in a bunch, which looked as beautiful as a bouquet,” she remembered, revealing the creative eye that seemed to come to her naturally. “I loved trying to incorporate an herb like chervil, or the airy blossoms of an onion, into a mass of garden flowers.”
In the mid-90s, she moved to the Island and started working for Andrew Woodruff’s Whippoorwill Farm in West Tisbury, then eventually returned to Florida to start a small farm on her mother’s land. It was in Florida where her passion for flowers began to take hold. When her mother died from leukemia in 2002, she told herself that all she wanted in the world was a big field of flowers. Two years later, she moved back to Martha’s Vineyard and arranged to use some of Woodruff’s fields to make her dream come true.
“I would pick a bouquet for myself and sell the rest,” she said, describing her first experiences at the West Tisbury Farmers’ Market. “I still have dreams about this place and this first and sudden happiness. I didn’t have a plan then and I didn’t care if I had a dime. I believed in life again. I just planted my flowers knowing that life can go on without you and you just helped them with daily progress.”
It’s been a little more than two decades since Collins came to live full-time on Martha’s Vineyard. She found her future in the benevolence of the Chilmark Select Board, which in 2012 awarded her the opportunity to live on and create a flower farm at the ancient property known as Tea Lane Farm. As part of the arrangement, which was intended to keep the land as a working farm, she bought the small house and barns for a dollar. She paid an additional $20,000 for three acres of land, which are leased through the town for seventy-five years. Given the age of the house, which dates back to the 1700s, she was required to maintain its exterior historically but could alter the interior. From the day Collins first arrived at the farm, new friends came by to help with repairs. One of the first chores was to winterize the drafty old house, which had been insulated with seaweed.
Josh Scott, a young Island farmer and tree expert, encouraged her plans. He helped clear bamboo from the land with his pigs, restored fencing in the pastures, and from time to time has brought his cattle or black-eared lambs to graze in the hills and keep her company. Amy and John Weinberg, who would go on to buy and renovate the nearby Beetlebung Farm in 2018, came by to offer her a needed front door. The couple became her friends and explored with her the ways to know an old farm. Together they attended conferences and classes around the country. “If I could save a farm with them and it works out with Tea Lane too, then I will have saved two farms,” she said with a wide grin.
Collins’s farm came with its own Island backstory, which has been passed down and is still alive after hundreds of years. The best known of these tales is the story of whaling captain Robert Hillman, who visited the family-owned farm in the days before the Revolutionary War and brought contraband tea from London, which he hid in the barn for his ailing aunt. The farm always smelled of tea, the neighbors would say, and the authorities from Edgartown came by many times to search, never to find the stashed tea. More than a century later, the story of the tea would be retold in a poem entitled “The Ballad of Tea Lane,” which was published in C.G. Hine’s The Story of Martha’s Vineyard (Hine Brothers, 1908). The telling word “tea” has been attached to both the farm and the lane since this tale was first told.
Today, Collins is very happy in her life at the aptly named Tea Lane Farm, grateful for the gift of quiet that comes with growing flowers, and engaged by the old tales that are part of the house and bring to life early Island history. Days at the farm are long and increasingly demanding as she moves through the seasons, from the early spring planting in the greenhouse to the later transplanting to beds out-of-doors. In summer, with the multitudes of flowers in bloom, her workload shifts to include the many weddings for which she provides bouquets, table arrangements, boutonnières, and more, as well as the flower arrangements she takes to the West Tisbury Farmers’ Market on Saturdays, and some Wednesdays. She comes alive there, helping customers enjoy the flowers. If they wish to create their own bouquets, she likes the interaction and engagement of their conversations. “I always learn from them and the flowers they like,” she explained.
Having been a part of the market scene since her arrival on the Island, she speaks with admiration and gratitude of early mentors, such as Susan Silva, the previous owner of Arrowhead Farm in West Tisbury, who helped her through that first uncertain time on her own. Collins now has her own crew of assistants, which begins with a young Island farmhand named Scott Simkins. He effectively tends to her whole property, from caretaking to carpentry, and has earned the title of “guardian angel” from her. Last fall, after Collins and Simkins had decided to move 10,000 young plants from the greenhouse to the field, Simkins was further anointed as her right hand when, checking the grounds at 2 a.m., he discovered that the air temperature had unexpectedly dropped to 24 degrees. He quickly rescued the young plants with a rapid infusion of lifesaving 54-degree water.
During the summer, Collins adds to her crew a summer staff of three or four helpers who work together on the eve of market day. They gather in the old barn, which is supplied with buckets of flowers and tables and scissors as well as a collection of vases, jars, and assorted containers that fill nearby shelves. Last summer, the barn doors were open, and the happy sound effects that seemed to come from the flowers spilled out into the yard. Sometimes friends wandered by to watch the handful of busy girls who were also learning. Music was in the air.
“Flowers are really the rage now,” Collins said, describing the scene. “Not too many years ago, it was a pioneering effort, but now it is a land full of pioneers.” The next morning, Collins transported several carloads of flowers to the Agricultural Hall in West Tisbury to sell at the farmers’ market.
On summer afternoons, Collins likes to sit outside on her porch and enjoy the perspective on her property. “Perhaps because I am southern,” she explained. Her view looks down on the grand and vast field of flowers that runs alongside Middle Road and is visible to anyone walking or biking or traveling by car along the road, which is the way she planned it. On her property across the road stands a magnificent red dogwood tree that seems to be there to honor the field.
In recent years, the field itself, which is larger than a football field, has become Collins’s gift to the Island, for it is her very personal portrait of the wonder of flowers. She plans the field for many months, choosing her most beautiful and beloved flowers according to their variety, shape, and colors, and then, slowly and carefully, begins to assemble them all into a composition that pleases her.
Towards the beginning of last summer, she began to transplant a dazzling selection of red, white, and pink scabiosa to the front two rows of the field, followed by multiple rows of zinnias, lisianthus, cosmos, and almost a dozen other varieties assigned to separate fields that are planned not only for sequential blooms during the long summer, but also for maximum viewing from Middle Road. The theme Collins chose for her show last year was the nasturtium, which had a central place in the field, framed by a backdrop of dahlias and lilies. The many thousands of flowers bloomed well into the fall, when the fields were cut and quietly faded into the sleep of winter.
