On Windmill Meadow Farm in Fredericksburg, Texas, Paul and Nancy Person were growing a life after retirement. When death arrived one day, only the flowers had words for how to face another season.
Story by Stephanie Burt | Photos by Matt Taylor-Gross
February 14, 2023
It’s a cold, gray morning in Fredericksburg, Texas. High, dull clouds block the sun that usually illuminates the short live oaks dotting the drive up to Windmill Meadow Farm. The trees, shaped and buffered by the breezes and dry conditions of the Hill Country, are always green, often contrasting with the scrubby native grasses and rust-colored field beyond the 1888 windmill that marks the entrance to this farm.
Although daytime temperatures this time of year can occasionally meet sunrise hovering around the freezing point, Windmill Meadow Farm never truly goes to sleep, the cycle of the growing season varying for each of the beautiful, unusual varieties of flowers Paul and Nancy Person bring to blossom. Cloudy morning light shines through a window in the grow room where Paul sits, placing small seeds into trays under fluorescent bulbs.
His hands have seen years of outdoor conditions, his nails short and neat but buffed by the water and the soil they encounter daily, and his fingers tremble ever so slightly in concentration as he carefully plants 128 seeds per tray, patting the grow medium down at just the right depth for each seed. When he plants and how deep he plants each seed depends on the schedule he and his wife have created in the office for the 100 different flowers they have on the farm: 12 to 14 weeks before last frost, or four to six weeks, or, in the case of Canterbury bells, one month in the grow room and one month in the greenhouse before going into the Texas dirt.
“Seeds will go bad on you,” he says. “They’re living things, and if you keep them for too long, they’ll go bad; they won’t produce.”
So he plants, each one a promise of a bright bloom when the breeze over the ridge is a hug, not a pinch, and the days lengthen. This time last year, he could feel those internal seed clocks ticking as he sat still in this room for three weeks, looking at that square of morning out the window despite the schedule in the office. That stasis remains just around the corner in his muscle memory, but he turns away from it, returning purposefully to the seeds and the task at hand. There’s always a task to keep his hands busy.
He and Nancy had years of tasks raising their two boys, Keller and Casey (although if he’s honest, a lot of those tasks fell to Nancy, since he was on the road with the railroad), but he loved planning and taking them on trips to fish, from annual saltwater trout tournaments in Texas’ Baffin Bay to a once-in-a-lifetime excursion to the Panama Canal. The boys have long since been out of the childhood home, and anyways, he’s now known as the “flower farmer” in town, not the railroad man, and it’s a moniker he’s started answering to when he’s in Fredericksburg in his red pickup truck.
The forsythia is not yet budding, and there are not many visitors yet, but from spring through October, the Fredericksburg Visitors Center welcomes more than 34,000 tourists, some making their way up to Windmill Meadow Farm to take a natural-dye class or a tour where Paul explains the Victorian Language of Flowers. This antiquated dictionary of meanings for flowers is an odd thing for a lifelong railroad man to quote, but then again, he never expected to be sitting inside a grow room high in the Hill Country, planting a seed that his elder son would never see flower.
Nancy had always loved that Hill Country feeling. Beginning in the ’80s, her parents had a place in the area, and she loved all the native plants: varieties such as scarlet buckeye, orchid tree, coralbean, and honey locust. She helped her daddy plant annuals around the property’s oak trees. And she took picture after picture of the flower markets when she and Paul traveled to Sante Fe, or to Europe. “But we didn’t really plan to start any of this.” She just wanted to keep planting flowers.
Initially, being in this landscape where the loudest noise might be the bark of his dog Stella or the buzzing of bees in chorus on a row of hellebores was, to say the least, an adjustment for Paul. Throughout his career, he had at least nine different jobs with the Union Pacific Railroad, his most lauded, manager of environmental field operations. It was a clean name for a dirty job, a fixer’s job, the job of making wrecks and derailments disappear. He’d get a call and arrive in the middle of the night — it always seemed — in rain or deep bone cold, or both, and walk into a scene with a bunch of too-bright lights illuminating gashes and twisted metal and the faces of people standing around overwhelmed at how to begin. Paul always knew how to begin, and just when to bow out of town, too, and it made him one of the best in the business, a best that came with a price.
“The railroad was a real mean industry,” he says. “You got your way by being aggressive. I fell into that railroad model, and although I tried not to bring the work home, I was always on call.”
He blew his stress and those scenes out of his mind by riding motorcycles fast, something he’d done his whole life until 2011, when he spent weeks in a coma in the ICU after breaking his back in three places. When he got out, he and Nancy began the process of changing their life. Paul retired, and the couple moved from San Antonio to Fredericksburg in 2012, their two sons mostly grown but still close in Bexar County and San Antonio proper.
Paul learned this new life little by little, as slowly as seeds germinating. When Nancy asked him for “more dirt” for her flowers outside the 30-by-30-foot garden plot the previous owners had designated, he grudgingly agreed and prepared new rows. Nancy became a certified florist and dreamed of their own table of flowers at the Fredericksburg Farmers Market. She and Paul clipped zinnias and put them in buckets, then built bouquets and carried them in old Dr Pepper crates in their truck to the market each week. His rough hands began to shape bouquets; the couple went to agricultural extension classes together; he began to read everything he could on flowers.
“The cockscomb are some of my favorites,” Paul says. “No two are alike. They can take the hot weather and the July heat,” he continues, pride in his voice. Lisianthus is their mutual favorite (which they fondly call lissys), but there are also the smaller, darker varieties of sunflowers, the eucalyptus, hollyhocks, and the Turk’s-cap lily.
He and Nancy know a lot about flowers now. In addition to being a trained florist, Nancy is now also a certified Master Naturalist and Master Gardener, and Paul is a Master Naturalist. They have accounts at restaurants, a weekly flower delivery service, and still that table at the farmers market.
The seasons pass, and sometimes the sunset sky lights up like a campfire of orange, briefly licking flame into the dusking sky behind the house. Then the calm and the tiredness of having hands in the dirt that they try their best not to track into the house envelops them like a weighted blanket. Other times, there’s talk of rain but no sight of it, and that same sun cracks dry places in the field, so that no matter how much they irrigate, the flowers struggle not to buckle under the heat and the hot wind that whips over the hills.
The memory of both the sun and the satisfaction keeps them going as they start seeds during the winter, because no matter how hard it is, or how hard it will be, “we’re out there together,” says Nancy, Paul facing away from her toward the horizon but much closer than those days away making things right for the railroad.
“It is hard work, but I’ve learned it’s therapeutic to dig in the dirt,” he says. Despite the pandemic, the flowers were popping and the growing season was great. Fredericksburg and its wide open spaces felt better to some, and some of those people still wanted to visit the farm. Paul and Nancy spent the off-season buying dirt, ordering seed, and dreaming of unusual blooms and the scent of flowers as they cut and filled buckets.
Then, just at the beginning of the 2022 growing season, around this time last year, they got a call that their elder son had overdosed and died at his home in neighboring Bexar County.
“Keller bought $300 worth of tools the night before he died,” Paul says. “It wasn’t deliberate, and he didn’t think he was going to die.”
Keller was the dad of a 4-year-old daughter. He’d loved fishing since those days of family trips and had tackle boxes of fluorescent, glittery plastic worms and twirling lures with iridescent fins. And his death was one of thousands of unintentional fentanyl deaths in Texas after he ingested a horse tranquilizer laced with fentanyl that was shaped to resemble Xanax.
According to the Texas Department of State Health Services, 97 percent of unintentional synthetic-opioid deaths are related to fentanyl in the state, and 72 percent of those who die are male. Nationwide, the CDC reports that overdose deaths involving synthetic opioids — the most common of which is fentanyl — occurred 18 times more often in 2020 than they did in 2013. Although fentanyl is approved for treating severe pain, most recent cases of fentanyl-related harm, overdose, and death in the U.S. are linked to illegally made fentanyl. It is sold through illegal drug markets for its heroinlike effect and is often mixed with heroin and/or cocaine as a combination product — with or without the user’s knowledge — to increase its euphoric effects.
Now Keller’s memory hides underneath a statistic like a too-heavy row cloth obscuring the budding life beneath it. While it’s unclear where the investigation stands between Bexar County’s sheriff’s office and the Drug Enforcement Administration, both were unwilling to comment. A train wreck with its gashes and collisions and unrecognizable chaos has come to the farm, and it’s now Paul who doesn’t know how to begin to put his hand on it, make a plan, clean it up. There’s nowhere to go with the anger at the overwhelm of the system, the overwhelm with the futility of bright flowering petals of pinks or reds that seem frivolous now, the overwhelm of decades of raising and tending a child to end here in this pain. So he sits.
Nancy is the planter of the seedlings, and so she goes as she always does, out to the dirt, kneeling on her planting stool, leaning over the row, and making a space with a tool called a dibbler. It presses through the soil and creates an emptiness to place the seedling plug. It’s there that each seedling has somewhere to start a new life.
“Keller loved reggae music, so sometimes I listen to it when I’m out there,” she says, her voice slightly cracking beyond her steady demeanor. “He was wanting to move back here and help us run the farm.”
She planted a 4-foot angel outside the grow room, anchoring a memorial garden for Keller that she fills with things that will grow in the shade, such as dusty miller and Gerber daisies. Paul rouses; he needs something to do, something to maintain his sanity, and “Nancy is better at keeping records than I am,” Paul says. “The plants will tell you when it’s time.”
It’s beyond time, and he just has to keep moving, and so they both do. The flowers begin to grow, the days lengthening, then shortening, as he completes his tasks of repairing irrigation lines or spreading compost or delivering flowers in town. He takes to pitching extra seeds in Keller’s garden as he walks out the grow room door, with no ceremony, just to see what will take, what will grow, and soon, the small garden begins to fill in.
Sometimes he tells tours about Keller’s garden, and sometimes he doesn’t, instead just squinting into the sun while allowing them to take their Instagram photos. He waits to hear more from the DEA, and then doesn’t wait anymore. Sometimes he wants to help fight this epidemic, but mainly he doesn’t.
“It’s real, and I’m not the only one who’s lost someone,” Paul says.
Most days find him content to stay on the farm with Nancy and Stella, and he says that there is a lot of good that’s come of this place. Designers from Dallas have found the farm, as well as plenty of brides looking for bouquets and other flower lovers needing growing advice or just wanting to get their hands in the dirt.
“I’m not great, but I’m OK, and I’m believing in tomorrow,” he says. And tomorrow he’s ready to welcome more people to the farm. He and Nancy always greet them, sometimes with a pitcher of cocktails underneath the shade structure in front of the house, in this little place under a big Texas sky. Sometimes the visitors are people who just like the view, but sometimes, like him, they need to find the language of a little beauty in their lives to grow again for another season.
Stephanie Burt is the host of “The Southern Fork” podcast and a writer based in South Carolina. Her work has appeared in numerous publications, including Saveur, The Washington Post, CNN's Parts Unknown, Conde Nast Traveler, and The Bitter Southerner. She shares the magic hiding just around the corner through stories of makers and growers, and when she's off the road, she works on perfecting her roast chicken recipe.
Matt Taylor-Gross is a food and travel photographer originally from Austin, currently living in Brooklyn. His work has appeared in Saveur, Bon Appetit, WSJ, Food and Wine, Vogue, and Garden & Gun. He's deeply offended by people who put corn in their salsa.
