When Sarah Scott first started work at Haywood County Cooperative Extension in February 2015, planning for the 2016 Haywood County Garden Tour was one of the first items to come across her desk. Untold hours of preparation later, the horticulture extension agent and horde of volunteers working with her are days away from showing hundreds of people the best of Haywood’s gardens.

“Haywood County has some very talented gardeners and some very beautiful gardens,” Scott said. “I enjoyed going out and seeing so many of them. It was terrible to have to choose only a few.”

Adam Bigelow bears down on the gas pedal of his biodiesel-fueled Jetta, urging it up the steep contours of the Blue Ridge Parkway in search of higher ground. It’s a gardener’s car, through-and-through, the dash covered with dried plant parts, the floorboards papered with garden-related fliers and catalogues. 

The only thing that’s missing is a live plant, and even that’s not too far-flung a reality. It wasn’t that long ago, Bigelow recalls, that he looked down from his seat to see a little pea plant growing up, apparently having received just the right amount of water from some mysterious source to take root in the car.

A half-hour into the morning, Carol Larson has the gleaning operation smoothly underway at Skipper Russell’s farm in Bethel. A trio of tarps, topped with cardboard boxes neatly arranged in rows, sits on the grassy buffer between field and road. Beyond the tarps stretch rows — long, long rows — of cucumber plants.

Clad in his signature overalls, Joe Smiley leaned on his rake, taking in the tranquil late-summer scene: pie-pans strung among the corn stalks twisted in the breeze, daisies dipped ever so slightly under the weight of a welcome bee, a wheelbarrow gently rumbled its way down the garden path.

Sharing food can be a simple thing. Like passing a bag of trail mix to the hiking buddy who forgot to pack lunch, or ladling an extra bowl of chili for the neighbor who stopped by at dinnertime.

June Johnson’s foray into the world of gardening began in the dead of winter. A sunny January day last year inspired her to venture outside, and her walk brought her to the path behind Maggie Valley United Methodist Church and the grassy lawn surrounding it. The sight made her pause.

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“Having grown up around farming, I thought, ‘Why don’t they have a church garden?’ and roamed into the back of the church,” recalled Johnson, a retired teacher and native of Haywood County.

Taking a walk with Ila Hatter is the outdoors equivalent of sitting beside a scrapbooker as she pages through the family photo album. Every step is a story, a meeting with a plant bearing its own history and its own place in the present. 

“I think stories help you remember,” Hatter said. “They give you something to hold onto as you’re learning plants.”

This time of the year is perhaps the best time to enjoy flowering plants in a home garden. Many of the larger and showier species are just now coming into full bloom and will remain so into fall. 

Several evenings ago, I came home tired and sat on the deck with a glass of iced tea, and the dogs and I just watched the plants. That was sort of therapeutic. Every once in a while, it seems the perfect thing to do. Just sit down and watch the plants.

This is a special time of the year for beekeepers in Western North Carolina. It is the time they prepare for the sourwood honey flow.

Beekeepers in this area collect two types of honey from their charges: a spring wildflower mix made up of nectar sources such as locust, blackberry, poplar, apple trees and more, and then the summer’s sourwood.

Sourwood comes from the sourwood tree, or Oxydendrum arboreum. This tree, in my opinion, is underutilized in landscapes. During the summer it has a lovely white bloom, followed in the autumn by flaming brick red or scarlet leaves, making it a very choice ornamental indeed. Besides, what could be better than planting a native tree that helps feed our honeybees?

By Shannan Mashburn • SMN Intern

Gardeners, wannabe-gardeners and those who simply appreciate a fine garden can catch a behind-the-scenes peak of some of the best gardens in Haywood County during the upcoming Haywood County Garden Tour from 9 a.m.-4 p.m. on Saturday, June 23.

The tour of six private gardens hosted by the Haywood County Master Gardener Volunteers will begin at the historic dairy barn at the Mountain Research Station at 265 Test Farm Road. The Research Station is located across Raccoon Road from the N.C. Cooperative Extension Center in Waynesville.