After midnight, the Taconic State Parkway is eerily quiet and utterly dark. You’ll hardly encounter another soul on the road, except maybe flower farmer Blake Hill heading south from Pine Plains with high beams aglow, on a mission to wholesale his stems, still sleeping in the back of his U-Haul.
Like many farmers Hill is early to bed, early to rise. His days are dictated by the cycle of the sun, with every second of light a precious moment for nurturing crops. But the way Hill conducts his business requires him to be up twice a week at 3 a.m. — the witching hour — to take his yield down to a concrete jungle which, to the uninitiated, seems like the least flowered place on earth: the heart of Manhattan.
(Tristan Geary/Special to The New Pine Plains Herald)
Hill, who lives in Pine Plains, has a 3.5-acre flower farm off of Route 82 in Livingston. He grows tulips, ranunculus, foxglove, narcissus, peonies, and much more. He rented and eventually bought the land from the Columbia Land Conservancy in 2024, and named it Husmann Hollow, drawing from the Norwegian word for a social class that farmed rented land, working for the landowner. The name is an homage to his family, who farm in Norway to this day. Hill proudly continues this family tradition in the Hudson Valley, and runs the Husmann Hollow with the help of his partner and two part-time employees.
“I planted 15,000 tulips in there,” said Hill, 40, pointing to one of three high tunnels he built. While his days are filled with the sweet-smelling, albeit back-breaking work of tending to the flowers, his nights (on Tuesdays and Thursdays) are spent on the deserted Taconic in a rented van.
“It’s pretty cruel,” said Hill, mourning the loss of a regular sleep schedule as he hit the road in late April. Nonetheless, the reliable delivery of his flowers each week to the historic New York City Flower Market on West 28th Street is the key to his livelihood. “It’s hard to give up,” he said. “It’s the only way that I’m face-to-face with people that I sell flowers to.”
With a van full of tulips and narcissus, two popular spring flowers, Hill passed fields of dewy grass in Columbia and Dutchess counties before reaching the urbanity of Poughkeepsie, Peekskill, and eventually Westchester, where the Taconic began to fill with early-morning commuters.
It was the first big haul of the busy harvest season, which lasts until around Thanksgiving. Various annuals and perennials are in high demand not just for individuals but also for professional flower designers, wedding planners, restaurants, and hotels, requiring Hill to stay in the know about emerging floral demands from the hospitality and event industry. “There’s trends — like in anything — in the flower world,” he said. “Reds and yellows were not in vogue for a while, but now everyone wants big bright bold colors.”
After two hours on the road, the twinkling lights of the New York City skyline appeared on the horizon. Hill breezed down the West Side Highway, turning onto 28th Street around 5:15 a.m. The block between 6th and 7th Avenues was already a hive of activity, with flower stores receiving incoming product from across the country. Hill dropped off his yield at his main client, 28th Street Wholesale.
With crates, bundles, and dollies of fresh flowers being carted in, 28th Street Wholesale was already bustling. “What we deal with is primarily all local stuff,” said Ryan McInerney, who works at the store and whose family has been in the flower business for 90 years. “The local stuff comes in every single day from Long Island, Upstate, South Jersey, a lot of driving back and forth.”
28th Street has been the city’s go-to flower market for over 150 years, pioneered by European immigrants and coexisting with other historic streets in New York such as Tin Pan Alley, also on 28th Street between 5th and 6th Avenue. Mac McInerney, one of the co-owners of the store and Ryan’s father, has seen the market change over the years. “It’s not nearly as big as it used to be. Every store on the block used to be a flower related business,” he said. “There’s maybe a dozen stores now.”
Originally from Milwaukee, Hill has resided in Pine Plains since 2022. “There’s a good group of younger farmers who live there,” he said. Hill started as a vegetable farmer in both Philadelphia and Humboldt, Calif., where he was enrolled in an agricultural VISTA program. But with ambitions to start his own farm, he found that flowers were a much more viable option.
“There’s just a lot more variety,” said Hill. “I’ve spent so much time in my farming career just picking kale for hours. It’s not as fun as flowers. With flowers, you can make it work with a lot less space.”
Hill’s biggest expense is his bulk order of seeds and bulbs. He’s about to place his order of tulip bulbs from the Netherlands for 2026, and expects it to cost around $12,000. His overhead also includes his employees’ salaries and the U-Haul. But it’s nonetheless lucrative, with a van full of tulips and narcissus netting him around $4,000 each trip. In New York City, flowers are a hot commodity. “That almond [blossom] goes for $35 a bunch,” said Mac McInerney. “Peonies can go for $8 a flower.”
Hill also does business closer to home. The Hudson Valley Flower Collective, based in Red Hook, is a one-stop-shop for event planners and flower designers in the Hudson Valley. Hill was a founding grower. “Blake has just the most amazing tulips,” said Ellie Limpert, the collective’s founder.
With its team of 10 growers on farms from Poughkeepsie to Ghent, the collective allows local designers to skip the commute to 28th Street — and has even prompted designers from New York City to go directly to the source and make the pilgrimage north to Red Hook. “We are just bursting at the seams with orders,” said Limpert.
For Hill, flower farming doesn’t leave a lot of time to stop and smell the roses. In June and July, tulips and narcissus will give way to cosmos and digitalis, which give way in August to amarantha and hydrangea (to name just a few). With dozens of dead-of-night road trips to 28th Street ahead of him, Hill will show his clients in both New York City (and the Hudson Valley) a product that shifts with the season.
At the same time, he must think ahead. As with vegetables, Hill avoids planting the same flower in the same spot multiple years in a row, transforming his farm into a Rubik’s Cube of ever-changing, multicolored genera.
With the tulips and narcissus safely delivered, the hard part of Hill’s day was over. After unloading the van swiftly, Hill collected his check, bantered with the McInerneys and within a half hour was ready to drive back north. As the skyscrapers, bunched and sturdy-stemmed, cast their shadows across 28th Street, Hill dozily headed back to Pine Plains, hoping to catch a few hours of sleep before another busy day of harvest.