Mums get day in sun

Behold the humble mum, workhorse of the hothouse. It is autumn’s pompom, the squat, flowering plant best known for sitting vigil at Thanksgiving, for filling in at budget weddings, for standing ready, at the grocery, to bail out a remorseful son who just remembered, at 11:30 p.m., his mother’s birthday.

Yet every fall, the Mum Man gives chrysanthemums their moment.

On his family farm in Anne Arundel County, Md., Bill Doepkens turned 1,500 of them into a sweeping, strutting rooster one year; 1,300 became an exultant sunburst another fall; 2,500 mums, planted across his “green canvas,” became, this year, a paisleyed peacock’s tail. Last year, a massive watering can. Two years ago, an enormous swan with cattails and a setting sun.

Each display is like a gigantic, needlepointed pillow, and each is embroidered by Doepkens, a 48-year-old farmer who, for 11 years, has found himself in the grip of this great, flowering obsession.

“It’s ‘plant-by-number,’ ” he says, modestly playing down the creativity behind these mum marvels: He sketches, plots, blueprints and color-codes, and every Memorial Day weekend he, a few friends and his mother, who is now 80, plant a third of an acre of mums, in an oversize grid. “We do!” he insists and shrugs. “We plant by number.”

He was born and grew up here, on the 200-acre Doepkens farm. When Doepkens finished high school, he returned to the farm – the only one of the five Doepkens children to do so – to work alongside his dad, William the elder, who also grew up here. “He got all his education from his father, handed down,” says his mother, Marjorie. And “he’s like his father,” Marjorie Doepkens says. “If he’s interested in something, he puts his full effort into it. He can’t do anything halfway.”

Take, for example, the bugs. In frames marching around a room off the farmhouse kitchen hang hundreds of neatly pinned insects, each carefully preserved by the father. Or take the trees. When a cloverleaf was built about a quarter mile from the Doepkens’ farm, his father spent years in the 1960s surrounding on- and off-ramps with tens of thousands of trees.

“Every time, coming home on the highway,” Bill Doepkens says, “when I see the trees, it’s like, ‘There’s Daddy.’ “

Until 1992, tobacco was the farm’s main cash crop, but a stroke had sidelined Doepkens’ father; the farm’s longtime workers were getting old, and Doepkens himself suffered from nicotine poisoning: Working the fields got his clothes “covered in black tar” and made him “sick at night.”

So he began shifting the farm toward flowers. He now makes his living from “sunflowers, glads, Oriental lilies, zinnias, coxcomb … You name it” as cut beauties in the summer. He sells fresh eggs from about 100 laying chickens. In the fall he’s got dig-your-own and already-dug mums, plus pumpkins, gourds, Indian popcorn and dried gomphrena and statice, and for Christmas there are apple gourds and wreaths. He raises hay on 40 acres and owns 48 head of Red Angus beef cattle.

But he’s always been more than a farmer. “We know when Billy’s out on the tractor because he’s singing all the day long,” his neighbors used to say, and today he sings tenor in the Kennedy Center’s Washington Chorus.

Mini-strokes affected his father throughout the 1990s – and affected the son. “We were inseparable,” he says, “so it was really hard seeing him get sick.” Willie Doepkens did see Bill Doepkens’s first mural, in 1995, when a sunburst spread across their back field. His father “thought it was really quite extraordinary,” Doepkens says. “He got a certain look – I can’t explain it. We communicated without talking.”

His father died in the spring of 2000, at 84, and that year’s mural memorialized him with an abstract design of rings and rays, and a great red heart inside a circular white background, all centered on a white cross.

This fall, for the first time, Doepkens went 3-D, and “it’s the best we’ve seen,” crows one of Doepkens’ neighbors, Henry Stoehr. Doepkens wanted to do a peacock, but not like the NBC cliche. Near the barn rises a tall, regal neck and head concocted from feathery bamboo painted blue. The body is cornstalks laced onto a pipe frame. The tail is all mum: a downhill sweep of 95 varieties of 2,500 mums total – swirls that include yellow (official color, Erica), and red (Regina) and deep, deep maroon (Raquel).

“They are executions of just a thought,” Doepkens says quietly.

He doesn’t mourn the mural’s inevitable fade. In sepia-tinged death, Doepkens sees art: “It almost looks like a negative,” Doepkens says, “or a silver print.”

And when winter’s snow arrives and dusts the murals with a whole new palette, he’s already thinking about next year,” he says. “That’s the problem with me.”