On the back porch of her childhood home in Winston-Salem, Marty Cook looks out over the sprawling garden filled with wildflowers that her mother spent nearly 40 years cultivating — but all she can think of are her mom’s shorts. “She didn’t dress up too many places, but she had these shorts,” Cook says with a laugh as she describes the green-and-white gingham shorts that her late mother, Emily Allen, wore on some of the hottest days in the garden. Into her 80s, Allen donned these shorts in sweltering summers as she cared for her collection of 500 wildflower species. “She was out working unless it was pouring rain or freezing cold,” Cook says. “She was in this garden every day of her life.”

For Cook, being in the garden — now owned by the Piedmont Land Conservancy as the Emily Allen Wildflower Preserve — reminds her of all she learned beneath its leafy canopy.

As a child, Marty Cook learned about both hard work and wonder from her mother, Emily Allen (pictured), in whose garden wildflowers like white trillium — whose petals turn pink over time — still bloom. Photography courtesy of Marty Cook

Cook gestures to the bricks that weave their way down the sloping yard to the creek. These bricks taught her hard work. When her great-grandparents’ home on Bethabara Road was torn down, her mother was just starting her garden. “She had a big old Buick Wildcat with the most enormous trunk you’ve ever seen, and we loaded the bricks [from the home] into her trunk, came up here, and unloaded them,” Cook says, remembering the arduous task. “She believed in child labor, I’ll say that. My sister and I can attest that we’ve done our bit.”

There are other lessons, plenty of them. The beech trees at the back of the property that Cook climbed with her sister, Betsy Hood, taught her to be adventurous. The constant weeding and mowing and planting taught her how to do a job well. The garden also showed her wonder and joy. “You have to be a hopeful person if you’re going to garden,” Cook says. The bridge where Allen hosted picnics for her girls taught Cook that little moments can make a great mom.

Peering through the trees, Cook can still see the spot where the garden’s first lesson emerged. It took the shape of a single orchid.

• • •

Allen grew up on Reynolda Road in the 1930s, and her family owned about 50 acres nearby. As a child, she walked the property with her father, who taught her to respect this land.

After graduating from Meredith College with a music degree, she married O.G. Allen, a Davidson grad who ran the Hine-Bagby Company store downtown. Her father gifted her some land, where the couple built their forever home. In 1954, they moved in with their two young daughters, and Allen started to create her dream garden. “Just like all the young housewives, she wanted marigolds and zinnias and all those things, but she had so much shade here,” Cook says.

One day, when Allen was in the bottomland near the creek, a single showy orchid with purple and white petals caught her attention.

Visitors to the Emily Allen Wildflower Preserve stroll beneath a leafy canopy, where they can spot more than 500 species of wildflowers. photograph by Joey Seawell

Allen extracted the orchid and took it to Sears — at the time, the only garden shop in town. There, she met the first of many wildflower friends, May Reade Plaster, who worked in the garden department. Plaster explained to Allen that she must have rich soil to have this species pop up. “It’s just one of those ‘fingers of God’ kinds of things,” Cook says of the encounter.

The discovery put Allen on a mission to learn everything she could about North Carolina wildflowers. She joined what is now the NC Native Plant Society and later served several terms as president. “She reminded me of a robin, bright-eyed and curious. She liked having her fingers in the dirt,” Cook says, glancing at the garden. “I still think her spirit is out there in that dirt, because she put her whole being into it for so many years.”

“I still think her spirit is out there in that dirt, because she put her whole being into it.”

For her 50th birthday, Allen gifted herself a botany course at Wake Forest University. By this point, she’d collected plants from across the South, but she would sit in class with the younger students, fascinated. “She never stopped learning,” Cook says. Her mother even offered to host classes in her yard.

In 1979, grad student Kenneth Bridle came to Allen’s garden for a botany class, and the pair became friends through the Native Plant Society. Allen was determined to collect more plants from western North Carolina, and Bridle was eager for a career in plant physiology, so they struck a deal: Bridle would drive, and she’d pay for his lodging. Together, they visited the Smokies, the Balsam Mountains, Nantahala National Forest, and beyond.

Bridle remembers a particularly precarious trillium-hunting trip: “I was driving on this dirt road, switching back up the hill. All of a sudden, I hear the door slam, and Emily had jumped out of the car while it was still moving. She was probably 65.”

During her plant-hunting excursions with Kenneth Bridle, Allen expressed her hope to preserve her garden for future generations. Today, Bridle helps to fulfill that dream. photograph by Joey Seawell

After graduating, Bridle became involved with the Piedmont Land Conservancy (PLC), a nonprofit that protects a variety of natural lands, family farms, and waters across central North Carolina. Bridle and Allen worked together to put the land into an easement through the PLC. “She very much wanted to share it with everybody that she could,” Cook says. Allen knew the PLC would protect her plants and use them to educate others.

Allen died in 2015 at age 89 after a yearslong battle with Alzheimer’s disease. In her final days at a memory care unit, Bridle gave her a watercolor painting of one of her favorite trilliums. Cook and her sister visited often, along with many friends. “She called her garden ‘the friendship garden’ once it really got going,” Cook says. “Well, that was two-pronged. There were friends planted out there in the dirt, and then [there were] all the people who came.”

• • •

A decade after Allen’s death, the garden is once again full of friends. A group of outdoors enthusiasts meanders beneath the canopy. They hold the yellow petals of Carolina buttercups and the purple faces of wild geraniums toward the light. They’re here for a plant identification workshop, one of the many educational offerings at the preserve. Bridle, now the PLC conservation adviser, is leading the workshop to teach people about native plants.

Cook still comes to the garden, too. She sits on the management committee and lives just a few miles away, where she tends a garden of her own — stocked with some of her mother’s favorite blooms. She also volunteers to help maintain the garden. “I’ve worked in this garden since I was a child, and I’m still working here,” she jokes.

Wildflowers, like columbines, change over the seasons, so visitors to the preserve can expect new sights with each visit. photograph by Joey Seawell

With time, Cook developed a deeper understanding of what a blessing her childhood in this garden was. “When you’re close to something, you don’t appreciate it like you do when you’re older,” she says. She’s now able to see the lessons that her mother, dressed in her little green shorts, taught her between the brick laying and the constant weeding. “It’s a philosophy of living,” Cook says. “Don’t ever stop being curious, being in awe, being joyful — and always share.”

Click here to book a tour of the garden.