At Gardens of the Blue Ridge in Newland — the oldest licensed nursery in the state — visitors encounter humble, unassuming plants, but each native species carries on the legacy of this land.
Most of the time, dead plants fill the Gardens of the Blue Ridge greenhouses. At least, that’s what a lot of visitors think. Rob Fletcher sees people pull into the nursery’s gravel parking lot to poke around. If they stop in on a whim, they usually leave in a matter of minutes.
“You go into a regular garden center, and everything’s in bloom,” he says. “But with native plants, you’d have to come every two to three weeks to catch something flowering.”
Many of these potential customers, disappointed that the nursery doesn’t offer the flashy color show of annuals, wonder how the nursery stays in business. They would be surprised to learn that Gardens of the Blue Ridge is the oldest licensed nursery in North Carolina. At least one member of Rob’s family has operated the Newland business since 1892, when his great-grandfather began selling native shrubbery, sending shipments to the Northeast via rail. Rob and his parents, Paul and Katy, now handle daily operations, with the help of other family — including two members of the company’s fifth generation — during the busy seasons in spring and winter.
The nursery specializes in wildflowers and shade plants that thrive in the temperate rain forests of southern Appalachia. Many customers use native plants to start woodland gardens, Rob says. It’s a term that brings to mind English tea sets and fairy-tale wonderlands. Given this imagery, it’s surprising to find that his shade houses look like graveyards of plastic planters. This is where Rob keeps mountain laurel and ‘orange flame’ azaleas. But there’s no flame in sight.
He picks up a black planter for inspection. It holds a small cluster of brown straws that stand at attention like a miniature petrified forest. “Imagine what you might think if you ordered a lady fern and got this,” he says, holding it up to the light pouring through an open doorway. “If I ship that to someone who’s not knowledgeable, they might look at it and say, ‘It’s dead,’ but our plants are used to the cycle of seasons. They have to rest in order to thrive.”
Rob flips the container, and a clump of dark earth falls into his hand. He nudges it gently with his finger until he uncovers a tiny sprout in a spindle of roots. “It might look dead,” he says, “but I can see new growth. It’s here. You just have to look carefully.”
He gestures toward the sleeping flora surrounding him. “These plants have got three or four weeks to bloom, and after that, they’re gone again,” he says, snapping his fingers. “You’ve got to appreciate them while they’re around.”
A deeper understanding
When Rob began working with his grandfather, who ran the family business in the 1980s, Gardens of the Blue Ridge still gathered most of its plants from the surrounding forest. It took some finessing to convince his grandfather that propagating and planting are important for the future of the nursery and its mountain environment. “Back then, wild plants were plentiful,” Rob says, “but that’s changed. Development is threatening them. We have to be careful.”
Sometimes, Rob’s work leans more toward conservation than cultivation. Soon after he came to work at Gardens of the Blue Ridge, Rob was called to the future site of a Duke Power dam, where an endangered species, Shortia galacifolia, grew in great quantities in an area scheduled for submersion. He didn’t have much time to strategize about collecting the plants or transporting them to the nursery. The flood was coming. Fast.
He worked alongside students from North Carolina State University to save as many plants as he could. “It only grows in a few counties in the whole world,” Rob says. “It’s the most endangered plant we sell.” Three of those counties — Transylvania, Jackson, and McDowell — are in North Carolina, and the state regulates every plant the nursery births from those original rescues.
“We didn’t get 10 percent of what was out there,” Rob says. “I don’t know if anyone else was allowed in after we left.” He glides his hand across the air as if smoothing a tablecloth, imagining all that was lost when the waters came. “It was beautiful. I’d never seen so much of it in one place. It’s a ground cover, and it was everywhere. It’s almost inconspicuous, but it’s special. You have to have just the right conditions for it to grow.”
Rob now stands in one of his sun-friendly greenhouses, a space filled with the sweet smell that trails summer lightning storms. His eyes scan the floor until he hones in on a homely bit of greenery with dull, broad leaves. “That’s a cardinal flower,” he says. “It’s got a bright red stalk in fall. The hummingbirds love it. It’ll bloom in August and last until September.” To an untrained eye, its leaves resemble those of a crouching, everyday dandelion that hasn’t begun to bloom.
Rob knows that many people see the plants he labors over as common weeds. Once, while consulting as part of the Gardens of the Blue Ridge landscaping program, he went to a woman’s house, and she directed him to spray an area of lawn with herbicide. When he looked at the patch of ground the homeowner described as weedy, he found trilliums, lilies, and ferns growing in a living carpet. “I told her I wasn’t going to kill those plants,” he says. “Finally, after we had talked for a while, the reality of what she had sunk in. She was going to mulch it, but she ended up leaving it just as it was.”
Rob’s family tree is firmly planted in the western North Carolina soil — his great-grandfather E.C. Robbins planted a stand of pines in the shape of his initials, a living signature still visible from the air. More than 30 years of studying and caring for southern Appalachia flora make Rob sensitive to his surroundings. “Where most people just see weeds along the side of a road,” Rob says, “I see mayapple, creeping phlox, chicory.”
Pride and honor
The temperature of the nursery’s cellar workshop is a relatively consistent 40 degrees, thanks to the chilly evening air pumped in via fans. Buckets of peat moss and aged bark fill the space. Rob walks over to a wooden shelf to check on his beloved Shortia. “For every one I sell, I try to take two to three cuttings,” he says. “It hates the greenhouse. I always have to work with it outside.” He pinches a small cluster of the waxy plant’s fragile stems between his thumb and forefinger to take a cutting. Then he holds his hand over the palm-size container. “After four or five years, we’ll go from that little clump to a plant about this size.” The pride in his tone indicates that this is an extraordinary feat, but the school-age plant still doesn’t cover more than four inches of ground.
Shortia hasn’t been on the nursery’s list of offerings since a drought threatened the species’ health a few years ago. “I don’t want to sell my parent stalk,” he says. “I want to make sure it’s protected for the future.” He sets the Shortia down and tenderly touches a pale blossom that’s a quarter of the size of his pinkie thumbnail. “It blooms really pretty little bell flowers.”
Shortia has a ghostly beauty, but the Cypripedium calceolus, or yellow lady’s slipper, gets just as much, if not more, attention from Gardens of the Blue Ridge customers. In fact, a fellow from Asheville just called to let Rob know that he plans to pick up one of the native orchids later in the day. “He told me that he’d seen some when he was a kid, and he was desperate to find them again,” Rob says. “They’re kind of rare, and they’re difficult to propagate and grow. We usually limit one per person, so we can spread it around.”
The majority of the nursery’s business is mail-order, but it has quite a few local customers. Over the years, Rob developed an honor system that allows people to take what they want after hours, leaving payment in a mailbox full of inventory forms and pencils. Occasionally, visitors leave notes saying that they’ll call during business hours with their credit card number. The Fletchers have yet to meet a customer who failed to make good on a promise. “We think people who like wildflowers tend to be good people,” Rob says.
Priceless plants
A fading lady’s slipper photo, cut out of a magazine, hangs on a board in the nursery’s shipping area, where Rob packages hand-picked plants for individuals and clients, including the Smithsonian Institution. As he makes his way back into the main office, shuffling by plywood worktables, he pauses to study the image. “Pretty, isn’t it?” he says. “You don’t see those much in the wild anymore. They’re not protected, but I think they should be.”
The lady’s slipper is one of the nursery’s most expensive plants, priced not because of its size or beauty, but because of how difficult it is for Rob to grow. He’s almost apologetic about the plant’s cost, $50, but it’s a low number considering the years of effort he puts into cultivating the species. “The harder it is to grow, the rarer it tends to be in the wild,” he says. “People seem to want the things that are the hardest to find.”
The orchid he’ll part with today will soon be on display in a carefully tended garden somewhere within the Asheville city limits, a fragile, petaled reminder of what’s at stake in the natural world. The lady’s slipper, like the Shortia, is a living piece of the Fletcher family’s legacy, as well as the region’s natural history, and it’s impossible to put a price on that.
Visit
Gardens of the Blue Ridge
9056 Pittmans Gap Road
Newland, N.C. 28657
(828) 733-2417
gardensoftheblueridge.com
Hours vary depending on the season.
Leigh Ann Henion’s debut book, which explores some of the world’s most dazzling natural phenomena, is forthcoming from Penguin Press. Visit leighannhenion.com to learn more about her work. Leigh Ann’s most recent story for Our State was “Apple Brandy Beef” (July 2011).
