Sep. 17—Everybody reacted to Helene damage in their own way. For Pam McCracken, surveying the soggy ground around her house after the Pigeon’s waters finally receded, the response was oddly-placed rage.
Thousands of dollars in damage to her house on the very edge of the storm’s Clyde high-water mark was one thing. The swamping of her precious dahlia garden was another thing entirely.
It started out simply enough. The 34-year Haywood County resident has been gardening since childhood, thanks to a green-thumbed grandmother who passed along a deep love of the soil. And when McCracken saw a chance to plant a few dahlias, she couldn’t pass it up. But she wasn’t expecting much.
” I bought (my first dahlias) from a lady in Montford. She had them for sale on Facebook Marketplace. And I thought, ‘Oh Lord, these probably won’t do anything,'” McCracken said.
But those first plants settled in nicely, for whatever reason, stretching up under the blue Carolina sky until they took over McCracken’s fence line.
“Maybe it’s because this soil has been farmed so much,” McCracken said, hazarding a guess as to why dahlias seem to do so well on her little patch of Haywood. “Maybe it’s because we’re so close to the river. I’m not really sure. It’s really good ground.”
Now, years removed from those first purchases, she’s sitting at a patio-style table a few feet from a verdant cacophony of blooms. It’s a riot of colors — lush oranges, apple-ripe reds, creamy peaches, sunny yellows. Pollinators flit among the plants in almost as great a variety as the blooms themselves: Bees, butterflies, moths, hummingbirds, nectar-drunk and having a blast.
McCracken, too, is having a blast talking about her flowers. She’s got a Haywood gal’s syrupy drawl offset by the surprising inclusion of curse words every now and then, just for seasoning. Needless to say, she turned that aforementioned good ground to her advantage, adding plant after plant until the dahlia garden became more of a dahlia forest.
Winging it
Dahlias have uniquely recombinable genes, a trait that leads to shocking diversity in flower coloration and shape. But the plant, native to central America, isn’t known for easily thriving in frost-prone zones. They require some care here in the mountains. Some folks around this part of the world dig up the tubers and move them inside every year when the season turns.
And while dahlias enjoy a good watering every now and then, the soaking McCracken’s flowers got during Helene was beyond the pale.
“Look what that bitch did to my flowers,” she remembered saying.
More was at stake than the loss of last year’s blooms. Dahlia tubers want a well-drained soil, which is certainly not what the storm left behind in Clyde a few hundred feet from the Pigeon. The tubers were in danger of rotting. After seeing to the immediate needs of her house — no easy task, but again, McCracken stressed, she was luckier than many in her neighborhood and across the county — she dug up her precious dahlia tubers and moved them inside, crossing her fingers.
When spring rolled around again, back into the soil they went. And McCracken didn’t really know what to expect. Would anything poke up through the flood mud? If it did, would it bloom?
Yes and yes, was the summertime answer. Enough so that McCracken and her long-time friend, Denise Seay, who helps out with the garden, garnered some prizes at the Carolinas Dahlia Society 36th Annual Show, held in Cashiers a few weeks ago.
“I had never competed before. Nobody helped us. We were up there, we were, of course, novices, and we got no directions. We winged it, and we won a blue ribbon,” McCracken said.
The winning flower was a pure white specimen with subtle shades of cream fading in toward the base of each petal. In the photo McCracken shared with The Mountaineer, the flower wears its blue ribbon like an Olympian wears a gold medal. The caption read “that’s first place, babe.” And McCracken included the fingernail painting emoji in that caption too, just for good measure.
Lost in the rows
Every now and then, somebody from McCracken and Seay’s growing online circle of dahlia friends will make a pilgrimage to Clyde to take a peek at the flowers. And not just Western North Carolina folks. Some are coming from out of state.
“It’s joy. It’s sheer joy,” Seay said. You’re able to take a few minutes just to watch people have a great time. Watch people have fun, watch people enjoy beauty, being out here in the sunshine with the bees.”
“Everybody that comes here is happy,” McCracken said, echoing her friend. “They’re not upset about nothing. They’re not mad about anything. They love wandering around and getting lost in them.”
That’s how both McCracken and Seay recommend enjoying their forest —by immersion. Stepping between the rows, carefully moving aside the fragile, hollow stems, it doesn’t take long to lose sight of McCracken’s tidy little house.
Inside the garden, things are not tidy. It’s slightly too warm under the late-summer sun, a claustrophobic blending of shades and tints and inebriated bees bumping about. The experience is made all the more notable by the lack of flowery fragrance.
Most dahlias don’t have a noticeable scent. They are bright and unabashedly ostentatious. That’s all they need to be to attract pollinators to their doorstep.
In the absence of perfume, the olfactory experience is simple and powerfully earthy. The smell of things growing. A green and brown smell, as mild as sunshine on a leaf.
And underneath that, rising from the soil, just the faintest hint of river water — ever-present.
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