For over 100 years, the Charlotte Street entrance to the Saint John City Market was home to the city’s most unique spring ritual.

From at least 1908 onward, vendors from Mi’kmaq communities in Nova Scotia took the Digby ferry to sell thousands of bunches of mayflowers, ringed by green moss, ferns or cedar cuttings, and wrapped in wax paper

It is hard to overstate how fervently Saint Johners looked forward to the sight and smell of these delicate pinkish-white blooms. Today’s advanced greenhouses and supply chains allow us to enjoy fresh flowers all year, but back then, mayflowers were a tangible sign of spring as Saint John shook off a long winter.

Most vendors came from the Shubenacadie Band, now known as Sipekne’katik First Nation, but gathered the flowers from many parts of Nova Scotia, passing on knowledge of the best growing areas through the generations. The reason they travelled such a distance is that the Shubenacadie and Annapolis valleys are more temperate than Saint John, making the mayflowers emerge a few weeks sooner. Saint Johners were likely so sick of winter that they would pay a premium to enjoy the mayflowers a few weeks early.

In addition, newspapers noted that over-picking and urban growth had diminished the once abundant mayflowers around Saint John. As one 1919 article put it, “Those of us who have gathered the springtime favourites will never forget the joy of discovering them, a joy which grew rarer and rarer each year as the country became more thickly settled, and "the pale flower tinted like a shell” was torn up by the roots by thoughtless hands”.

By 1953, mayflowers at the Market sold at 50 cents a bunch, a significant increase from prior years. The Telegraph-Journal noted that while “consumers grieve the advanced cost”, they eagerly bought them as a “welcome assurance that in spite of a return to cooler weather spring holds sway and summer is just around the corner.”

The flowers sometimes came as early as April 1st, but in 1967 they didn’t arrive at the Market until the last days of May. That year, Mary Elizabeth Bradley noted that she had been visiting the City Market from Shubenacadie for over 60 years, and that Saint John was her family’s only sales destination, since no other town had the same interest in buying mayflowers. Despite the late start, sales reached at least 7,000 during that year’s visit. At the time, the city had about 25,000 households, meaning that perhaps a quarter of Saint John homes were brightened by a mayflower bunch.

Eventually, in the late 20th century and early 2000s, the visits from Shubenacadie stopped and pickers from communities in New Brunswick came to sell mayflowers instead.

The sale of mayflowers in the City Market speaks to the resourcefulness of Maritime First Nations through the 20th century, when they had lost access to many of their traditional hunting and fishing territories and were facing forced centralization into more restricted land bases. To survive, they crafted ash baskets for farmers, sold fiddleheads, and travelled through the year to pick blueberries, apples and potatoes for wages. In this way, First Nations played an important role in supplying many of the goods sold at the City Market.