The Family’s Flower

“This is the world’s largest planting of garden mums,” says 80-year-old Jack Paschke. “I’ll always say that until somebody proves to me that it’s not.” He’s talking about his nearly 10-acre multicolored plot of chrysanthemums, located on the eastern edge of the small Concord grape-growing town of North East, Pa., within spitting distance of Lake Erie.

Jack inherited the farm from his father, D.C. Paschke. Cherries, berries, peaches, pumpkins and other fruits and vegetables are grown and sold from what Jack calls “the stand.” It’s a rambling one-story building just a few feet off the highway resplendent with hundreds of pots of mums hauled in from the fields during the relatively short growing season, from mid-August until the first killing frost descends upon the mums in late October or November.

Jack’s father, who died in 1990 at the age of 101, began the enterprise in 1932, unaware of what he was starting. He purchased a few mums and planted them in front of his farmhouse. He liked the effect so much that he kept adding to them a few at a time. Before he knew it, he was selling to passersby.

Mums had become a passion — and a business.

Massive plantings soon took over acres and acres of the Paschke farm, as its fame grew by word of mouth and, later, from local and national media attention.

Jack’s father, a tireless entrepreneur and promoter, used bold marketing techniques to popularize his product. On one noteworthy occasion, he named a new mum variety after the legendary American singer Kate Smith, flew to New York and carried the plant to her radio studio, where it was dedicated to her during her weekly show before her nationwide audience.

Jack’s father later dedicated another new variety to the Erie Catholic diocese’s most famous prelate, the late Bishop John Gannon, founder of Gannon University in Erie, Pa. The gesture triggered false rumors that the Paschke family, staunch Methodists, had converted to Catholicism.

Jack says his father consulted and corresponded with horticulturists at Harvard and Cornell universities, and became acquainted with growers around the country, most of whose mum farms no longer exist. Over the years, thousands of visitors from all over the world have come to see Paschke’s mums.

Jack says he now grows 50,000 to 60,000 plants a year, somewhat fewer than the farm’s heyday back in the ’50s before Interstate 90 cut through the mum fields, taking away acres of arable farmland.