Taiwan Today

Just north of the capital city, calla lily farms are proving a big draw for admirers of the elegant flower.

In spring, Zhuzihu, an area nestled in Yangmingshan National Park north of Taipei, is especially vibrant with tourists. It is the Festival of the Calla Lily that draws people to the spot, which rests at an altitude of 670 meters and is surrounded on three sides by higher mountains. This year’s festival ran from March 23 to April 29. “People grow the flowers elsewhere in Taiwan, but only here can you see a cluster of calla lily farms,” says Lee Bing-cheng (李秉城), a specialist from the Beitou Farmers’ Association, the organization commissioned by the Taipei City Government’s Department of Economic Development to hold the festival.

The event featuring white calla lilies is roughly scheduled between Taiwan’s numerous cherry blossom festivals in February and March and the Hakka Tung Blossom Festival that begins in mid-April. It has run for more than 10 years and involves the majority of calla lily farms in Zhuzihu, Beitou District. “I decided to do a sideline by opening a restaurant to cash in on the event nine years ago when I saw the crowds of people coming for it,” says Tsao Chang-cheng (曹昌正), the chief of Beitou’s Hutian neighborhood, where the festival takes place. Although Tsao mainly works as a landscape gardener, he took cooking courses held by the Bureau of Employment and Vocational Training, a central-level government agency, and went on to obtain a chef’s license.

Prior to the tourism boom in Zhuzihu, calla lily cultivators there just harvested the flowers and transported them to markets in Taipei for sale. In the mid-1990s, operators changed their business model one-by-one to include opening their farms to allow tourists to pick the flowers by themselves. The strategy obviously has worked. About 120,000 people were drawn to the festival in 2002, creating revenue of around NT$60 million (US$1.73 million) for local businesses. The number of visitors had increased five times by last year, generating some NT$116.8 million (US$3.9 million) in total. According to the city government, about 20 calla lily farms in Zhuzihu with a total area of 13 hectares have opened to tourists, although there are several less accessible farms in the area that remain closed to the public. “Only 40 percent of the revenue comes from the sales of the flowers, which means the festival’s economic ripple effect is huge,” says Huang Chi-jui (黃啟瑞), commissioner of Taipei City Government’s Department of Economic Development, in reference to visitors’ patronage of local cafés, restaurants and other businesses.

“I make more money than when I focused solely on flower cultivation,” says Lu Zhu-cheng (盧柱成), who also runs a café serving guests at the calla lily farm he has owned for more than 20 years. “This year saw even more visitors than before. I think that’s because the festival has become better known by the public,” he adds.

Zhuzihu, literally “bamboo lake” in Mandarin, did not always look as it does now. “The area was originally covered with bamboo. When it was windy, the bamboo waved just like ripples on a lake,” Lee says, explaining the name. In even earlier times, the site was a barrier lake that was formed about 350,000 years ago after lava from volcanic eruptions cut off a creek. Over time, the lake emptied as water flowed through an erosion-induced opening. The legacy of local volcanic activity is still visible today, however, notably in the sulphur fumes that rise all year ’round at Xiaoyukeng, one of the major scenic spots in Zhuzihu.

For a long time, Zhuzihu was mainly known for its bamboo forests and today tourists still can see vendors selling freshly harvested bamboo shoots. A major change to local agricultural activity came during the Japanese colonial era (1895–1945), when rice paddies became a common sight in the area. The shift to rice cultivation owed much to Eikichi Iso (1886–1972), a Japanese expert in rice research who came to Taiwan in 1912. During his 45 years in Taiwan, Iso devoted himself to improving the quality of the island’s rice, which was considered unpalatable by most Japanese. In the 1920s, Zhuzihu was chosen as the test site for cultivation of a chewier rice subspecies that was introduced by the Japanese scholar and later became known as japonica rice. Zhuzihu is accordingly referred to as the birthplace of the rice variety, which is now predominant in paddies throughout Taiwan.

As japonica rice spread in Taiwan, however, Zhuzihu ceased its role as the testing ground for rice cultivation. Instead, local farmers began to grow vegetables for consumers in Taipei and parts of northern Taiwan. Agricultural activity in Taiwan took another turn, according to Lee, with the improvement of Taiwan’s transportation system, notably the opening of the country’s first freeway in 1978, which made it convenient to truck fresh produce to the capital from central and southern parts of the island. Zhuzihu thus lost its edge as a center for vegetable growing and farmers began to cultivate flowers, which gradually evolved into “leisure farming,” or farming combined with tourism, a sector the central government started to promote in the late 1990s.

One major figure in the development of leisure farming in Zhuzihu is Kao Yu-hsuan (高于玄), who opened his flower farm to visitors in 1995, making him the first to do so in the area. The farmer still remembers his father growing rice in the mid-1970s, but today the calla lily has become the focus of his efforts. His operation consists of a restaurant and a farm on Calla Lily Avenue, the liveliest section of the loop road through Zhuzihu, along which flower farms are open to visitors. “I’m just too busy to answer phone calls from curious people asking for information on the festival,” Kao says of the hectic hours on clear weekend days when his business is especially good.

Humble Beginnings

The reputation of Zhuzihu’s specialty flower began growing when farmers started selling calla lilies to the public on occasions such as the annual spring Yangmingshan Flower Festival, an event that focuses on flowers like azaleas and blossoms from cherry and plum trees that grow in another area of the national park. The Taipei City Government played an increasing role at Zhuzihu as activities there grew in visibility and developed into a major event. “The government stepped in to help growers transform their operations,” city government official Huang Chi-jui says. “We encouraged the move toward high-end farming,” he adds.

The city government is now the festival’s major financial supporter, offering nearly NT$2 million (US$66,700) this year, with the remainder of the budget supplied by the Cabinet-level Council of Agriculture and the Beitou Farmers’ Association. Equally important is publicity provided to enhance the event’s name recognition. More convenient public bus services to the site also help draw tourists.

To add to the experience, the city government finished reconditioning a hiking trail at the end of 2011 that passes by an old rice-husking mill, the area’s most important vestige of the days of rice cultivation dating back to the Japanese era. Guided tours organized by the farmers’ association also enable visitors to gain a deeper understanding of Zhuzihu’s historical background as well as its fauna and flora, in addition to the experience of picking calla lilies.

New ideas continue to boost the economic value of the festival. In 2010, for example, participating farms started to offer a home delivery service through a company commissioned by the Beitou Farmers’ Association “so you can easily send the flowers to your friends around Taiwan as gifts,” Lee says. “Besides, the company has since helped market the event,” he notes. Currently, flowers picked by customers on the farms sell at NT$100 (US$3.30) for eight stems; the price triples for the same number of flowers if visitors choose to have them delivered.

As the first farmer to allow visitors to Zhuzihu to pick calla lilies themselves, Kao was ahead of the curve again in 2010 when he started to cultivate the flowers for viewing only. Kao says he made the change in order to offer something different from his peers, and also because he resented visitors picking and then discarding flowers indiscriminately—a common complaint among farm operators. “I also thought about how to make money from tourists from outside Taiwan,” he adds. He has found that tourists from mainland China, Hong Kong and Japan, who sometimes account for as much as one-third of the total number of visitors to his farm, rarely pick flowers as they cannot take them home. For now, Kao’s farm is the only one that charges an admission fee in Zhuzihu and he is happy about the financial benefits since implementing the change. Lee notes that the move is not necessarily applicable to other farms, however. “Kao’s farm is comparatively large, and size matters when you are trying to impress people visually,” he explains.

Meanwhile, locals are addressing the gap between the tourism high season—roughly the period from January to May, including the month-long festival when the calla lilies are at their peak—and the rest of the year. “The contrast is rather sharp,” Lu says of Zhuzihu’s difficulty in attracting visitors outside the festival. The grower adds that he relies on a separate farm to provide year ’round sales of other kinds of flowers at a weekend market in downtown Taipei.

In response to the need to generate more income throughout the year, Tsao, the neighborhood chief, also plans to market Zhuzihu as the home of japonica rice. “The harvest time of rice is in fall, so we can have another event for tourists after the calla lily season,” he explains. To that end, early this year 20 local residents including Tsao leased a tract of land on which to cultivate rice, with the first harvest of the grains expected in autumn this year. “People come to the home of japonica rice but see no rice paddies. Isn’t that weird?” he asks. A little museum on local rice farming and the region’s history in general is being developed in a former military building nearby.

Other challenges for Zhuzihu include the soft rot disease that seriously affected the growth of the flowers in 1995, just months after Kao opened his leisure farm. New seeds resistant to the infection were sown after that and the flowers began to regrow, but farmers are afraid that the disease could attack the plants again. In response, the city government was to organize a group of experts who would be responsible for detecting early signs of the disease and proposing preventive measures against its comeback. Related fieldwork is scheduled to start later this year.

Other concerns are the changing climatic conditions associated with global warming, which is expected to affect the growth of the plants. The longer the lilies are exposed to low temperatures, the more beautiful the flowers will become, says Lee. According to Kao, 20 years ago cool or cold weather in Zhuzihu lasted for as long as eight months, from September to April of the following year, compared with an average of barely five months today. Although that climatic trend is thought to be irreversible, this past winter was surprisingly long and cold, which was a boon for Kao and other calla lily growers.

“Farmers once doubted how long the flower festival could last in the long term, but this winter was quite different,” Lee notes. Given the unpredictable nature of the climate, lovers of the flower of purity and elegance might want to make sure they visit the Calla Lily Festival soon.

The Colorful Cousins 

The calla lily originated in South Africa and is also known as the “pig lily” abroad because pigs and boars feed on its bulb. The plant is divided into seven species under the genus Zantedeschia. One of those is the white species introduced from Japan around 1970 and grown in Zhuzihu in the mountains of Taipei. There is another white calla lily, although with a different shape from that found in Zhuzihu, with the remaining five species taking various other colors.

The plants can be divided into two categories according to whether they grow in wet and cool or dry and warmer fields. Those in Zhuzihu belong in the former group. The Zhuzihu blooms account for about 80 to 90 percent of all such calla lilies grown in Taiwan. The other six species are found mainly in central Taiwan, which is less rainy than the island’s northern region. In the early 1990s, Taiwanese growers started to import colored species, but they failed to grow well on the island. Over time, the farmers improved their growing skills and understanding of the plant and today the area of farmland in Taiwan devoted to growing the colored species measures around 20 hectares. The colored flowers, which fetch a higher price than their white cousins, are available on the domestic retail market and are also exported to destinations including Japan. The farms in Zhuzihu have yet to export their flowers or grow the colored blooms. “Colored species are more prone to soft rot disease. Tourists come into direct contact with the plants, and can easily damage them and make them sick,” says Liu Ming-chong (劉明宗), a researcher from the Taiwan Seed Improvement and Propagation Station of the Council of Agriculture. Liu says this is one major reason why leisure farms have not featured the colored species.

In 1999, Liu’s agency started to cross-breed colored species introduced from the Netherlands, New Zealand and the United States in the hope of creating cultivars adapted to Taiwan’s sub-tropical climate. Eight years later, the researchers succeeded in developing two such varieties, one red and one orange. The two new types of calla lily were ready for large-scale cultivation early this year. Farmers could apply to the agency to acquire seeds and undergo training to grow the varieties as of April. “They’re the first native varieties of colored calla lilies, and can’t be found anywhere outside Taiwan,” Liu says.

—Oscar Chung

Write to Oscar Chung at mhchung@mofa.gov.tw