Most mornings from May through November, Ben Trione steps outside his Daphne home and looks out over thousands of zinnia blooms in colors that shift from deep orange to hot pink, with towering sunflowers rising behind them. He is not a commercial grower in any ordinary sense. He does not sell to wholesalers, and he does not keep the profits. His crop leaves the farm a different way: in pint-sized mason jars, loaded into volunteers’ SUVs, and delivered to nursing homes across the Eastern Shore.
Trione, who descends from one of the first Italian families to settle in Daphne, calls the effort “Flowers for Smiles.” The mission is simple and stubbornly consistent: grow hundreds of thousands of zinnias and sunflowers every season, get them into vases, and put them in front of people who need brightening. By his own description, the operation exists for one reason. “I do this for the smiles,” he says.
It Started With Nine Bouquets and One Aunt
The flower operation began, as many good things on the Gulf Coast do, with a family obligation. Roughly a decade ago, Trione’s Aunt Helen Calloway was a resident at Villa Mercy, part of Mercy Medical’s care facilities, and once a week Trione would bring her a jar of fresh flowers from his property.
Other residents noticed. They wanted bouquets of their own, and Aunt Helen made sure her nephew understood the assignment. “The other residents were jealous, so Aunt Helen said I needed to bring some to them as well,” Trione recalls. “I took 9 bouquets and that’s how all this started.”
From those nine bouquets, the project grew into something that now spans multiple planted fields, a weekly volunteer corps, and a delivery route that covers 15 nursing homes on the Eastern Shore. What started as one man carrying flowers into one facility has become a small agricultural institution, run on donations, reinvested proceeds, and a great deal of manual labor.
A Working Farm Hidden Behind the Blooms
Ben’s U-Pick Flowers sits just off Highway 54 on River Road in Daphne, at 23187 River Road S. It is easy to drive past and never realize what is growing behind the tree line: several plots with multiple rows on Trione’s own property, plus two more on a neighbor’s land.
The growing schedule is engineered for a long season. Trione plants in March, replants in July, and staggers new plantings roughly every five weeks so that the fields stay productive for about seven months of the year. Zinnias are the workhorse of the operation, and cutting them actually helps. Each stem that gets clipped encourages the plant to produce more blooms, which means every u-pick visitor’s bouquet is an investment in next month’s nursing home deliveries.
The work is constant. There is ground to prep, rows to plant, weeds to manage, and irrigation to keep running through the Gulf Coast’s summer heat. Trione’s farming instincts come honestly; his ancestors were farmers, and he has an evident talent for coaxing spectacular volumes of flowers out of Baldwin County soil. On a good morning, the fields hold as many as forty thousand blooms at a time, drawing butterflies through the spring and photographers the rest of the year.
Wednesday Evenings Belong to the Volunteers
Every Wednesday evening, from 4 to 6:30 p.m., volunteers gather at the farm to pick flowers and build bouquets. The assembly line is simple but effective: blooms are cut in the field, arranged into hundreds of bouquets, and loaded into racks that hold pint-sized mason jars. The jars are sized specifically so that volunteers can fit large numbers of them into ordinary SUVs and pickup trucks.
Thursday morning is delivery day, when those bouquets fan out to nursing facilities across the Eastern Shore. The operation has grown to the point that roughly 250 to 270 bouquets go out in a typical week, and the demand keeps climbing.
Trione says he has relied heavily on a core group of six retired teachers who have helped for the past two years, but he is the first to say he needs more hands. More locations want bouquets than he can currently serve, and the workload of maintaining, planting, picking, and delivering never really pauses during the season. He is glad to host school service groups, such as Key Clubs, that need volunteer hours; the work is outdoors, genuinely useful, and, by all accounts, a pleasant way to earn them. Local schools are sometimes beneficiaries of the bounty as well, receiving deliveries alongside the nursing homes.
Pick Your Own for Five Dollars
While the mission of the farm is charitable, Trione opens it to the public. For $5, anyone can walk the rows and pick their own bouquet. A five-gallon bucket of flowers runs $25, an option popular for events, tables, and porch vases. Visitors who call ahead can even have Trione pick a bouquet for them in advance.
Nobody is getting rich here. “I don’t make any money on this project,” Trione says. “All the proceeds go into buying more seeds, gas for the tractor, fertilizer, and mason jars.” The u-pick fees and donations form a closed loop that keeps the operation self-sustaining.
Professional photographers have become part of the ecosystem too. Sunflower fields are irresistible backdrops, and photographers who want to bring clients for photo sessions among the blooms are welcome by appointment, with donations accepted to support the mission. The property’s rows of vibrant yellows, oranges, reds, and pinks have proven as photogenic as they are generous.
A Daphne Life in Several Chapters
Trione’s connection to the community runs deep. Born and raised in Daphne, he worked at the family store, Trione’s Grocery, until the family sold it in 1984. He then opened Ben Trione’s Meat Market on Highway 98, eventually bought the original store back, and relocated the market into it.
In 1998 he switched careers again, moving into outside sales. It was only later that growing flowers became his true calling. His son pushed him to tell the community about the flowers on Facebook, a platform Trione admits he had never even seen before. He figured it out, the word spread, and the farm now draws visitors and volunteers who found it online.
What Comes Next for Flowers for Smiles
The wish list for the farm is practical and people-shaped. Trione has planned wheelchair-accessible rows so that visitors with disabilities can come pick flowers themselves rather than only receiving them. He would like another golf cart so that people who have trouble walking the fields can still ride out to see the blooms. He is preparing rows for the next March planting and hopes to border some plots with plants that attract hummingbirds and butterflies, plus build a small sitting area where patrons can watch the pollinators work.
Mostly, he needs volunteers: people to help maintain the gardens, make bouquets on Wednesday evenings, and deliver on Thursday mornings. For a project that has grown from nine bouquets to hundreds every week, the math is straightforward. More volunteers mean more smiles.
Anyone interested in helping can reach the farm through its Facebook page or by calling ahead to arrange a visit. The fields on River Road will be quiet through the winter, but when the ground warms in March, the planting starts again, and by May the first ten thousand zinnias will be opening over Daphne, waiting for their Thursday morning deliveries.
It is an unusual kind of harvest, one measured not in bushels but in expressions on the faces of nursing home residents. By that measure, Ben Trione’s fields may be the most productive acres on the Eastern Shore.