Blowing Rock Hydrangeas

And their Greensboro roots

By Ross Howell Jr.

If you’re planning a fall foliage trip to the mountains, you might want to add an earlier excursion to your calendar.

By late August, the Hydrangea paniculata in Blowing Rock reach their peak. These white, cone-shaped beauties — along with their ball-shaped relatives (Hydrangea macrophylla) — are abundant in neighborhoods and gardens throughout town. (A fan of North Carolina native plants, I’ve landscaped our place with Hydrangea quercifolia.)

Greensboro textile magnate Moses Cone and his wife, Bertha, were serious conservationists who played a major role in this visual delight.

In 1900, the Cones began to plant a variety of native and non-native plants on the grounds of Flat Top Manor — their 3,400-acre estate overlooking the town of Blowing Rock.

According to the National Park Service, among the shrubs and trees the Cones planted were “PeeGee” hydrangeas (Hydrangea paniculata “Grandiflora”, or PG), imported from Japan — popular with American landscapers in the 19th century.

Some of the Cones’ original hydrangeas can be seen on the southern side of Bass Lake, one of the water features of the estate, now Moses H. Cone Memorial Park.

For the blossoms of these century-old shrubs, we can thank the Blue Ridge Parkway Foundation and volunteer Bob Stout — now chairman of BRPF.

Moving from Charlotte to the mountains after his retirement from a 40-year career in food service, Stout says, “I needed something to do.”

And do he did.

Working with the National Park Service as a volunteer under the direction of now-retired NPS interpreter ranger Chuck Robertson, Stout and other volunteers — like my Blowing Rock friend, Greensboro native Eric Miller — began to clear the Bass Lake hydrangeas of the wild shrubs and pines that had overgrown them.

The clearing process was followed by careful pruning of the hydrangeas and, later, soil improvement.

“I’ve personally counted some 460 of the original PeeGee hydrangeas,” Stout proudly adds.

But you can find hydrangeas all around the Blowing Rock area.

Susan Sweet has lived with her husband, David, in Greystone — a neighborhood outside Blowing Rock that overlooks the eastern continental divide — for the past 16 years. There are many hydrangeas in Greystone, but Sweet, a past president of the Blowing Rock Garden Club, insists she doesn’t know anything about growing them.

“I just sit back and enjoy the show,” Sweet says.

And she always takes note of a PeeGee in a neighbor’s yard.

“It’s always so full of blooms,” Sweet says. “Some are as big as a good-sized water pitcher!”

While she may claim ignorance about cultivating hydrangeas, Sweet knows plenty about preserving them.

For years, she harvested hydrangea blossoms for the Blowing Rock Women’s Club. Members collected hydrangeas late in the season to create dried arrangements, selling them at Blowing Rock’s “Art in the Park” events to raise money for local students’ college scholarships.

“You have to cut the blossoms at just the right time,” Sweet explains, “when they’ve turned pink, but haven’t started to turn brown.” She and fellow volunteers gathered hydrangeas in bunches of about five, hanging them upside down under shelter.

“You want stems at least two feet long,” she adds. “The blossoms dry out in about a week and hold their color beautifully.” The dried arrangements will last for an entire winter.

Sweet’s fellow women’s club member, my mountain neighbor, Jane Meyers, remembers another tradition, the “Hydrangea Ball” at the Blowing Rock Country Club. Meyers moved to town with her late husband, Mark, from Coral Gables, Florida, in the late ’80s.

Meyers tells me when she attended her first hydrangea ball in 1994, she and her husband realized that “these people really know how to party!”

Mandy Poplin, director of membership, marketing and communications at BRCC, says the hydrangea ball was always “the last big, formal party of the summer.”

BRCC member Valerie Purcell is a physician who lives in Blowing Rock’s historic Robert O. Colt III house with her husband, Peter, also a doctor. She tells me that the ball, a black-tie event, was “very, very successful for many years.”

Poplin adds that the party is now called the “President’s Ball.”

“We still incorporate hydrangeas into the ball decorations,” Poplin continues. “When those blooms start showing tinges of pink, we know winter’s coming.”

So don’t you miss the tradition of Blowing Rock’s hydrangeas this season. They never disappoint.  OH

Ross Howell Jr. is a contributing writer to O.Henry magazine. Please send your garden or history ideas to ross.howell1@gmail.com.