At Carolina Home & Garden, Brian and Stephanie Watson, with daughter Logan Blake, relax in the sunroom, an event space furnished with chairs and pothos vines. photograph by Baxter Miller
In the sunroom at Carolina Home & Garden in Newport, hundreds of pothos vines weave their way across the ceiling and drape downward, mirroring the antique chandeliers that hang nearby. Owners Brian and Stephanie Watson and their family display their vast collection of vintage light fixtures all over the five-acre garden and event venue — even in the greenhouses and bathroom stalls. Birds-of-paradise emerge from cutouts in the floorboards and reach four or five feet up the shiplap pine walls. Just outside the sunroom’s French doors, an employee pours bird feed into her hands as eight doves fly around her, enjoying their midmorning snack.
“My wife got [the doves] for weddings so they could be a part of the setting when people are getting married,” Brian says.
The sunroom, just like the rest of Carolina Home & Garden, is full of life. It’s hard to imagine that just about five years ago, the place where doves nest and vines stretch was a pile of drowned rubble, a greenhouse and event space that had been wiped out by Hurricane Florence. “The whole greenhouse was mangled and just destroyed,” says Logan Blake, the Watsons’ daughter.
The family had been in business for about 25 years by then, expanding from a small garden center that served the needs of the community into a gathering space that housed a coffee and cocktail bar, petting zoo, kids’ adventure park, and even an arcade room outfitted with working antique pinball machines and video games.
After the storm clouds had cleared, the family assessed the greenhouse damage. Among the gnarled roots and nearly unrecognizable fiddle leaf figs and palms, Brian still saw hope. The family sourced fallen pine trees that were knocked down during the storm and got to work building the sunroom. The Watsons’ youngest son, Jacob, crafted the trim in the room, and Logan and Stephanie designed the space, which was ready for its next wedding in just five months.
And if you walk through the sunroom’s back doors and into the “green room” — the business’s smaller event space with a rounded roof, cedar shake siding, and a grass-like carpet — you’ll find resurrected fiddle leaf figs and palms stretching toward the ceiling, nearly to the string lights and glass chandeliers, where they keep on growing.
Carolina Home & Garden
4778 NC Highway 24
Newport, NC 28570
(252) 393-9004
carolinahomegarden.com
North Carolina is known for many things, but nothing more important this week than the qualities of endurance, resilience, and hope.
By day, this adventure park in the Triad is a fall festival to die for. By night, the undead come alive for Halloween tricks. Welcome to one man’s vision of year-round merrymaking.
North Carolina’s border dances across the mountains as it traces four different states. Life here can be more remote, but good neighbors are never far away.
The Blue Ridge Parkway stands out among America’s national parks: Unfurling across six Appalachian mountain chains, it connects dozens of rural communities and binds together generations of families through shared memories.
