Among the Wildflowers

AMONG THE WILDFLOWERS

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Among the Wildflowers

A 1950s Sunset Hills charmer blooms anew

By Cassie Bustamante   •   Photographs by Betsy Blake

Making your way toward downtown Greensboro along Friendly Avenue, a burst of fiery red and vibrant purple might catch your eye as you pass through Sunset Hills. Wildflowers — poppies and Larkspur, to be exact — bloom along the fence line of a 1950s rancher. The seeds were sown just last year, although this particular house has been a colorful source of comment for years. In fact, if you drove by five years ago, its teal-and-purple exterior would have surely grabbed your attention.

Formerly, the single-family house was a duplex, says Rachel Azam, who currently shares the home with her husband, Najib, their 3-year-old daughter, Zaara, and her 18-year-old stepson, Khalil, who attends the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics and will head to UNC-Chapel Hill in the fall. And let’s not forget Sophie, the family’s blue-eyed Aussie, a glutton for belly rubs. Originally from Pleasant Garden, Rachel recalls often cutting through Sunset Hills when she was a child. “I grew up watching this house change color,” she muses.

In August 2020 at the height of the pandemic, the once likely Charlotte Hornets-inspired home was sold, flipped into a fresh, gray-and-white, clean slate, and put on the market right after the New Year holiday. Almost immediately, the Azams put in an offer.

Rachel, barefoot, stands in her bright, white kitchen, wearing relaxed, barrel jeans and a cropped white T-shirt. Her chocolate-brown eyes peer out from underneath a Duke baseball cap, her thick, brown hair hitting just below her shoulders. A warm, homemade breakfast quiche, fresh from the oven, fills the home with a toasted, buttery, come-hither smell. A bowl of oranges sits on the island counter next to a vase filled with fresh flowers in oranges and pinks. “We have a dance party in here every morning per Zaara’s request,” says Rachel.

As if on cue, Zaara twirls into the room, dark curls bouncing, and shouts, “Play ‘Cruel Summer!’” Rachel notes that most mornings it’s Broadway tunes, Wicked or Taylor Swift.

“T. Swift don’t miss,” quips Najib with a glint in his own brown eyes. He’s on his way to the Research Triangle, where he works in risk control for UBS, an investment banking company, but not before giving his wife and daughter each a kiss. “Bye, Zaari!” he says as Zaara demands a second hug from Daddy.

While the couple originally met as high schoolers training to be counselors at North Carolina for Community and Justice’s Anytown camp, they didn’t really get to know each other until much later. Najib, who grew up in nearby Jamestown, attended undergrad at UNC-Charlotte and went on to earn his law degree from UNC. Rachel graduated from UNCG with a B.S. in nursing. Mutual friends brought them together eventually. Nick, Najib’s best friend from college, is the older brother of Rachel’s own childhood best friend, Sarah. But Rachel remembered Najib, who is a couple years older than her, from those teen years at camp because his name was unusual. And he’s told her, she says, “I definitely remember you, wink wink.”

In the fall of 2018, the couple first exchanged vows right here in Greensboro. “We are a multicultural household,” says Rachel. Najib is Arabic and his family hails from Bangladesh, “so we had our big Bengali ceremony and reception in October 2018.” Less than a year later, in June 2019, the couple, with photographer Ellie McKinney and their loved ones, hopped the Atlantic Ocean and held an Irish ring ceremony, honoring Rachel’s heritage, in the seaside town of Galway, Ireland.

While still in their honeymoon phase in November 2019, Rachel took a new position working in pediatric endocrinology, specifically in diabetes, within the Duke University healthcare system. The work was particularly meaningful to her. At age 11 while studying dance at the UNC School of the Arts, she was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes. Although she returned home after the diagnosis, dancing has always held a special place in her heart. Granted, the job meant a big commute from their Charlotte condo, but Rachel loved the work.

Soon after starting her new position, the medical world was turned on its head when the COVID pandemic descended upon America in March 2020. Rachel began working a hybrid model, often doing telehealth appointments with patients and caregivers. Thankfully, she says, the technology has come a long way from when she was a child living with diabetes. Now, remote monitoring is available. “My senior year of high school was when I got my first insulin pump. It was life changing.”

Suddenly, in 2020, both Rachel and Najib — like most of the world — found themselves at home much more often and in need of an outlet, and, she quips, “You can only do so many at–home workouts.” Rachel, who’d arranged her own wedding flowers both stateside and in Ireland, found joy in floral design. Still in Charlotte, she’d visit her local farmstand and would come home with “buckets of blooms.” A seed was planted and, before she knew it, grew into Flower Barre, a bespoke floral design company named with a nod to what she calls her first love, dance.

To get a change of scenery, the Azams ended up taking an extended stay at Najib’s parents’ Jamestown home, often wandering through Greensboro neighborhoods as a diversion. Though they’d seen themselves as never returning to the area they grew up in, the more they walked, the more they thought, “We could live in this area.”

And when the adorable 1,600-square-foot house situated on the corner of East Greenway and Friendly popped up on Redfin, they wasted no time. That offer they submitted was readily accepted.

As it turns out, the timing was impeccable. Just a week after going under contract, the couple found out they were expecting. Naturally, the first room they tackled was Zaara’s nursery, which has since transitioned into her “big-girl” room. The walls are a soft, ballet-slipper pink, the windows are flanked by tonal pink, floor-length drapes, and the bedding features blooms in rosy pinks and golden yellows with stems of sage green, lady bugs scattered here and there. On her corner bookcase, overflowing with board books, a vase holds a bouquet of dried wildflowers, special to Rachel because they’re from the arrangements she made for Zaara’s first birthday, where the theme was “Wild One.”

While the home was a move-in ready, blank canvas, the landscaping was a clean slate — there wasn’t any. The couple poured their time and energy into their front yard. Rachel’s “jack-of-all-trades” dad, who raises beef cattle on a Pleasant Garden family farm, shared his skills and knowledge. With Najib, he carved out a pea-gravel pathway and installed French drainage.

The couple began planting beds, amping up the home’s curb appeal. Next came the backyard. “It was a bamboo forest,” Rachel quips. She has plans to keep adding here and there, year after year, starting with hydrangeas and echinacea this year.

Inside, they’ve put their personal stamp on their home bit by bit with splashes of color, mostly blue-greens. Rachel says those shades remind her of the ocean; they have a calming effect.

For the kitchen bar area, Rachel selected a blue-and-gold wallpaper featuring whimsical stems of wildflowers. She found sturdy wooden shelves on Etsy. Najib installed both the wallpaper and the shelves. But the nook’s pièce de résistance is framed artwork, swirls of red with splashes of green and purple. “That’s one of Zaara’s first little finger paintings,” says Rachel proudly.

Rachel’s most recent touch to the home interior is a bold and vibrant floral wallpaper hung by the back door. The colors mimic that of Zaara’s bedding, though more saturated and with hints of Rachel’s second-favorite color, magenta. She painted the adjacent door in a dark teal shade, though, she notes, “It’s got some scratchies because of the dog — you know!”

A drop zone already existed near the back door with hooks and cubbies for shoes, but next to it was a blank wall — wasted space in a small home. Rachel reached out to her pal, Emma Millard, who, she’d noticed, was offering design work in addition to working in real estate. The two had met at the first big wedding Rachel had done as a florist, where Emma’s best friend was the bride. Emma and Rachel, both pregnant, bonded quickly and their daughters were born just a month apart.

That once blank wall is now a functional built-in. Emma maximized the limited space, designing cabinetry custom-made by Greg Van Wyk, owner of Foxbury Woodworks in Oak Ridge. Greg installed and painted it — blue-green, naturally.

From here, Zaara can be heard singing along to Moana 2. She dances in front of the TV screen, lost in her own Hawaiian reverie for the moment, but happily takes a beat to show off her modern dollhouse in the corner of the living room, where goldenrod pillows add a warm touch.

Sophie expectantly sits nearby, whimpering for attention, her little bum wiggling in anticipation. Rachel translates: “Hi, I am here, in case you forgot about me. And this is my toy basket.”

In the entry, a painting of a woman wearing a blue-and-white striped dress holding a little girl’s hand as they walk through a field of poppies and larkspurs hangs in a gilded frame. The artist’s initials? “N.A.”

“This is Zaara and I,” says Rachel wistfully. “Najib painted this for me for my birthday.” The family had visited Dogwood Farms, a you-pick flower farm in Belews Creek, and, unbeknownst to her, Najib had snapped a photo to use as his inspiration. Rachel is in awe of how he can use both sides of his brain, though she herself toes the line between science and artistry on a regular basis, too.

As a high schooler, it turns out, Najib took lessons from local artist Anne Kiefaber. During the pandemic, she opened her home studio to budding artists as long as they wore masks. Like Rachel, Najib had needed his own outlet. “So he and Khalil started going together to art class once a week,” says Rachel. Now, almost five years later, he’s still going and currently working on a piece for friends of theirs.

A moss-covered fairy house decorated with purples and oranges sits on a table below the painting. Najib’s friend, Nick, gave Zaara the kit for Christmas. “It’s just too good to put outside,” quips Rachel, “so it’s just part of the home decor!”

“We love fairies, don’t we?” she asks her daughter.

“There are three little girls down the street who had a couple of fairy houses outside in the front yard,” she says. “We couldn’t walk past the house without stopping to play with the fairies.” The little girls took notice and began writing letters to Zaara from the perspective of River Lily, the fairy who lives there. This year, the girls have expanded into an entire fairy village that has little Zaara enchanted.

Back in their own yard, they’re working their own magic. Soon, the poppies and Larkspur along the fence — her cutting garden — will be replaced by new flowers. Last year, she planted heirloom zinnia seeds “and they actually worked!” She was able to supplement purchased stems with blooms from her garden.

Of course, there are a few blooms that hold a special place in Rachel’s heart. She loves vibrant blossoms that lend to her style, which she calls “a little wild and a little funky,” naming Dahlias — “most of them look like an amazing firework — and lisianthus. “I love the poppy,” she says. “They’re quite magical in that they come up and they are super, super tight in their pod and then they just emerge and they have these beautiful flow-y petals and really dynamic shape.”

These days, Rachel buys most of her blooms through a Winston-Salem wholesale company that supports North and South Carolina farmers. Where she expected to face competition, she has been pleasantly surprised. “We all pitch in and are helping each other,” she says. She even rents space occasionally from fellow florist Joneswell Flowers, which happens to be conveniently close to Zaara’s preschool.

And Zaara, whose name means “blossoming flower” in Arabic, loves working at the shop by her mom’s side, plucking green leaves from stems or sweeping up petals. Rachel daydreams of a future where they can work side-by-side as Flower Barre florists. “It may sound silly, but her little creative brain and the way her mind works, it would just be amazing to be able to create with nature as art with her.” The seeds are planted. And now, she waits, she waters and she watches as her own blossoming flower unfurls.

The Kids Are Alright

THE KIDS ARE ALRIGHT

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The Kids Are Alright

High school cool kids conquer all, even Carnegie Hall

By Billy Ingram

Photographs by Bert VanderVeen and Becky VanderVeen

Not long ago while attending my high school reunion, discussions with former (resisting using the word “old”) classmates inevitably circled back to how fortunate we were to have had an abundance of high-caliber teachers at Page, back in what is euphemistically referred to as “the day.” There was Jean Newman, an English teacher who instilled in me a love for creative writing. Without her encouragement, you wouldn’t be rolling your grapes over these words right now. Elizabeth Bell’s art class taught fundamental artistic methodologies and rendering techniques that, a decade later, proved crucial for a career in the arts that didn’t exist when I graduated high school. So many influencers . . .

There’s an infamous malapropism uttered on the 2000 campaign trail by the world champion of the slipped lip, George W. Bush: “Rarely is the question asked, is our children learning?” Recalling that quotation a quarter of a century later prompted me to pondering . . . is our kids learning today?

To quell that query, I made an appointment to see Principal Whitney Sluder at Weaver Academy for Performing & Visual Arts and Advanced Technology (granted it’s not your typical high school). Welcoming its first students in 1978, Weaver Academy (originally Weaver Education Center) offers an opportunity for public high schoolers to explore multiple artistic avenues and grow proficient in specialized, in-demand skills that typical schools don’t usually have room or resources to tackle.

“Generally speaking, we are an open campus downtown and I love our location,” Principal Sluder tells me as I’m ushered into her office. “We can walk everywhere. The art scene is very much present downtown, which I love. That’s grown even in the last 15 years since I was here as a student.”

Principal Sluder graciously leads me on a tour of this buzzing hive and, honestly, if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, I might not have believed it. I see kids running to class. No one is YouTubing on their iPhones. Every classroom we dropped in on, students are fully engaged, wide-eyed and awake, displaying an obvious yearning for learning. Did I inadvertently overlook a Red Bull concession in the lobby? Turns out, populating a learning environment with young people who actively want to be present, smaller class sizes and teachers just as enthusiastic as the students leads to wondrous results.

Weaver’s curriculum is divided into two distinct disciplines. PVA (Performing and Visual Arts) students attend Weaver for the entire school day, where, in addition to their chosen creative focus, they also study traditional academics like math and science. CTE (Career and Technical Education) attendees are bussed in part-time from their districted high schools to master more conventional skills like culinary arts, carpentry, drafting and diesel technology.

I’m introduced first to Masonry instructor Dean Lamperski, who is busy teaching proper methods for framing homes using cinder blocks. “It’s the biggest thing now in the industry,” he explains about an increasingly popular approach that mitigates damage caused by severe storms. He likens it to construction in Florida, “where you build houses out of block then put whatever exterior material you want on it.”

Rounding the hall, James Adkins is teaching Construction Technology and Carpentry in a cavernous workshop that opens up to the outdoors. Previously a general contractor, Adkins’ teaching toolbox is packed with practical knowhow. “I got into commercial construction, ran my own business for 15 years, then I retired. That did not go well at all.” His wife, a school counselor at the time, suggested he look into teaching “because I was lost. That was 17 years ago and I’ve loved every minute.”

Masonry, carpentry and HVAC students graduate with an NCCER (National Center for Construction Education and Research) certification. “We also do OSHA 10 certification,” Adkins points out. “So they can leave here and go into the GAP [Guilford Apprenticeship Partners] program or go straight into the workforce.” Plus, he says, a lot of his graduates head to Guilford Technical Community College or East Carolina University to study construction management. Of his charges this year, “All of mine are high flyers. Almost all of them have a plan for what they’re going to do next. These last few years, I’ve been very impressed, I could leave them alone and they’ll just keep on working.”

Each year Adkins’ students assemble two tiny houses, one for Tiny House Greensboro and another, funded by GCS CTE, is assembled atop a trailer. These projects involve substantial collaboration between other Weaver curricula. For instance, “Drafting is involved in the design,” Adkins says. “Our trailer is built by Kevin Crutchfield’s Diesel Technology class. It goes over to Collision Repair, where they’ll paint it, and then we frame the house upon it. Heating and Air will do the HVAC units.”

“We used to build an entire house,” Principal Sluder explains as we walk further. “We haven’t done that for quite some time. It’s hard to move a large house — that takes a lot of time and permits. The kids get excited about the tiny houses because everywhere you turn, there’s a TV show about it or they see them in their communities.” Internships over the summer between 11th and 12th grade are made available so that when Weaver students graduate, they can enter a high demand field at a greater rate of pay, thanks to certifications and years of experience already behind them.

Traversing the hallways, Principal Sluder greets each passing student by name, stopping to ask how studies are going before we enter another enormous workspace, this one overseen by Ray Dove. Dove has been teaching Automotive Repair at Weaver for almost two decades. His domain consists of a fully equipped vehicular maintenance facility spilling out onto a garden-sized salvage yard with cars and trucks in various degrees of disassembly.

“We’ve got some cars sitting out here now that, when I’m finished with the instruction,” Dove explains, “and we’ve kind of worn them out, I’ll give them to Mr. Del Vecchio so he can use them in Collision Repair, taking doors off or maybe doing window glass installation.” The automotive program at Weaver is ASE Education Foundation accredited, and these students, too, finish their education earning multiple certifications.

In what serves as an occasional cafeteria, Chef Marion Osborne teaches Culinary Arts and Hospitality in the Guilford County School System’s only fully equipped commercial kitchen for students. After college, Osborne began working in restaurants and hotels with an eye towards becoming a chef, deciding instead that what he really wanted to do was to teach. Chalking blackboards as a Language Arts instructor during the day, he says, “I went to culinary school at night then went back to working in restaurants. Then, through a fluke, this job opened up and I got very lucky.” That was 17 years ago. “There’s not another school I would teach in.”

Osborne grew up in a small coal-mining town in Southwestern Virginia, where, he says, “I was cooking all the time.” His first restaurant position was as a pastry chef “and I got hooked. I worked at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Atlanta with one of the greatest pastry chefs in the world, Jacques Torres.” Here at Weaver, his pupils are baking and broiling for three rigorous hours. “It’s a program designed to train people to work in the restaurant industry — it’s commercial cooking.” Culinary grads can transition to a fine-dining establishment, but, Osborne notes, the more motivated “will go to either Guilford Tech, Johnson & Wales University or the Culinary Institute of America. We’ve had students go to all three because they want that associate’s degree. It sets them up for more success.”

Located above Weaver’s circular lobby, PVA students are abuzz in the theater preparing for the upcoming spring musical, The Prom, adjusting lighting, rehearsing dance numbers and testing digital backdrops where graphics will serve as the set, no need for canvas-and-paint mise-en-scènes.


Growing up in Pennsylvania, Theater department head Keith Taylor maintained a lifelong desire to mentor. “I acted in high school and in college,” he says. “That’s where I caught ‘the bug,’ but I always knew I wanted to work with students.” He taught theater elsewhere for 20 years before his son, who was attending UNCG’s Theatre Education program, steered him towards Weaver. That was 18 years ago. “I love it here. I tell people there’s no place like it really.”

PVA applicants face a more rigorous road to acceptance as opposed to CTE hopefuls, who merely sign up for courses at their districted schools.

“We have a three-part audition,” Taylor explains about sliding into a theater-side slot. “They come with a memorized monologue to show us what they can do.” That is followed by a quasi-cold reading with unfamiliar dialogue. “We call it a lukewarm reading because we send them out of the room with a script and one of our current students. So they get to practice and play with it a little bit.” When applicants return to the room, he quips, “Then I just mess with them. I’m like, ‘Do it like it’s the best day of your life.’ ‘Now do the script like it’s the worst day your life.’ We see if they’ll take direction, make choices and take chances.” The third hurdle is an interview. “We just talk about why you want to be at Weaver and what your life goals are and how do you see theater fitting into it. So it’s a long day.” Many arrive already experienced in local productions. “So we get a lot of kids that come in and have some chops and kind of know what they’re doing. And a lot of them with beautiful singing voices, too. I’m blown away.”

The skills these drama students acquire have practical applications across a number of more conventional disciplines. Carpentry, painting, event sound and lights, front of house, ticket sales, audio recording, and video editing are de rigueur. “When COVID hit, so many folks left the business, especially in tech,” Taylor says. “We always tell our kids you can get jobs in tech, and a lot of students find real jobs in construction. If you can build scenery, they’re hungry for you.”

Over almost two decades, Taylor has witnessed his students attain success in the business. Isaac Powell comes to mind. “He was Tony in West Side Story on Broadway and he’s done a lot of HBO, Netflix. He was in American Horror Story. Grayson Frazier works for Saturday Night Live in hair and makeup and did Aladdin.” Jonathan Cobrda wowed audiences in Frankenstein: A New Musical off-Broadway.

Howie Ledford teaches one of only four music production programs in the state at Weaver. A 2012 grad, sound designer Matt Yocum just this year won his second Grammy (for the Kendrick Lamar Not Like Us video) and scored a second Golden Reel Award. In 2024, he took home an Emmy for Best Sound Editing on HBO’s The Last of Us.

Music alumni Smith Carlson is a Los Angeles based Grammy-winning, multiple platinum-selling songwriter, producer and music engineer known for his work with Lil Jon, Beyoncé and Taylor Swift. “He’s constantly asking, ‘What do you need? What can I give you equipment-wise, money?’” Principal Sluder declares. “We have two Grammy winners, an Emmy winner and a Tony winner. So all we need is an Oscar and we have an EGOT. We’re very proud of that. Students who leave here really do attribute much of their success to their high school experiences and the opportunities they have at a place like this.”

An airy, mirrored rehearsal studio is where Donna Brotherton, conductor of the award-winning Weaver Academy Chorale, leads her young vocalizers in a rendition of “John the Revelator.” Her bona fides are a mile long, including a master’s degree in Music Education. She’s been at Weaver since 2005.

Brotherton’s love of music began as a toddler in Fairfax, Va. “We had a piano and my parents showed me how to play and it just went on from there. Piano lessons, clarinet lessons, violin lessons, voice lessons, singing in shows, in operas, theater classes, everything.” During her high school days, she was first-chair bass clarinet for Virginia’s All-State Band for two years. “Teaching has turned out to be a complete delight in my life, I love it so much.” Seems to be a common thread at Weaver. That and loyalty to purpose.

Last summer, the Weaver Chorale was selected by WorldStrides to be a part of its National Youth Choir for a concert at Carnegie Hall. In addition to being part of that grouping, the Chorale was asked to return to Carnegie Hall to perform a 15-minute solo set of songs the students and teacher selected and prepared. “It was amazing. The kids were ecstatic,” Brotherton says. For most vocalists, that experience is an unattainable dream. “We got to see a Broadway show. We got to do a workshop with one of the musical directors of Wicked. And then our own special solo performance. It was absolutely thrilling — they were in tears.”



“I’ve had a lot of really successful students over the years,” Brotherton says about Weaver’s warblers and tech whizzes. “It’s an honor, and students know about what our graduates are doing and they want to do that, too. It’s a joy every day,” she insists. “I would do this job if they didn’t pay me.” (Given the current trajectory of education funding, be careful what you wish for.)

Sluder herself is an alumni of Weaver’s dance program. “It’s a unique perspective being an administrator here,” says Prinicipal Sluder. Her title was preceded by “Vice” until 2023, and, before that, she was the academy’s dance instructor. “It’s a humbling opportunity every day when I walk through the doors that I don’t take lightly. It really is a pleasure to serve our students and families on a daily basis in a place that really built me.” In moments when she feels overwhelmed by admin distractions, she comes back to her why: “I know what brings me joy and it’s the students.” She may venture into the dance studio to join in a routine or drop in on Brotherton’s class. “She’ll say, ‘OK, we’re going to stop practicing sight reading for a minute and we’re going to sing for Ms. Sluder.’ Sometimes I’ll sing with them and it’s just really special. I get rejuvenated then get right back to it.”

Long after my tour through Weaver, I think back to something Mr. Adkins offhandedly remarked when we were trekking through his carpentry cave: “It’s been challenging, but I’m thinking I’m leaving things better than I found them.” I suspect it’s more significant than that.

One of my guilty pleasures is that 1996 Tinsel Town tearjerker, Mr. Holland’s Opus. The film focuses on a recalcitrant high school music teacher with a dream to conduct the symphony he rather selfishly spent the better part of his adult life composing. In the end, the titular character, portrayed by Richard Dreyfus, finally figures out what teaching is all about, but only after several decades worth of former students surreptitiously take the stage, instruments at the ready to lift his notes above the sheet. He should have realized far earlier that an educator’s true legacy is manifested quietly inside those impressionable creative cortexes he’s helped cultivate, carefully or unconsciously, by way of an enthusiastic commitment to passing along knowledge and wisdom.

On a daily basis, opuses are writ, note-by-note, by Weaver Academy’s staff and educators. Everyone I met is intently invested, personally and professionally, in best possible outcomes, whether they’re played out on the stage, under the hood of a car or by sturdy hands wielding hammers.


Growing Season

GROWING SEASON

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Growing Season

Under the Bertrand family, a 42-year-old flower farm continues to flourish

By Dawn DeCwikiel Kane   

Photographs by Becky VanderVeen

The Bertrands’ home can be busy, and sometimes a bit cramped and messy, much like that of any other young family.

“This is our life currently,” Carrie Bertrand says, as she walks through the living space she shares with husband Patrick and their children Ayla, 12; Silas, 10, and Ellie, 6. 

The family of five, plus three cats and a dog, live in a camper on Maple Grove Flower Farm, which they own and operate. (And let’s not forget the family’s pet frog, who doesn’t enter the camper, but resides in a terrarium in a building next door.)

For now, home is a 2008, 38-foot Cedar Creek Silverback, a heated and cooled fifth-wheel camper. It’s large enough for Ayla and Silas to have separate, small bedrooms, while Ellie’s bed is in another area of the camper. There’s also a primary bedroom.

They hope to soon replace it with a newer, larger living space. But for now, their camper has become not only a home, but a homeschool and home base for their flower farm on Wild Turkey Road in rural Whitsett, 15 minutes east of downtown Greensboro.

Their flowers bloom in 13 commercial-scale greenhouses covering 32,000 square feet of indoor, irrigated growing space. Nearby, on their 7.5 acres of land is a 2,500-square-foot barn built in 1913.

The Bertrands grow ornamental plants in pots, flats and hanging baskets that they sell primarily to garden centers. They grow only chrysanthemums outdoors.

They don’t sell cut flowers, or plants for eating.

No sign announces the spot just yet.

By mid-morning on this March day, Patrick and Carrie have already been out on the farm for a few hours.

“So many people have no idea about this side of agriculture,” Patrick says from a building adjacent to the camper, wiping the sweat from his face while Carrie eats a yogurt-and-granola snack and the kids build a fort.

Patrick, now 47, grew up in Greensboro, the youngest of two sons of radiologist Margaret L. Bertrand and anesthesiologist Scott A. Bertrand. He graduated from the University of Colorado at Boulder with a B.A. in economics. Carrie, 42, grew up in a small town outside Columbus, Ohio. She studied elementary education at Wheeling Jesuit University in West Virginia.

The couple met at the Church on 68 and married there more than 13 years ago. 

Carrie taught school. They owned a landscaping business. But Patrick gradually realized that the work would grow increasingly strenuous.

The couple looked for something that would involve the whole family.

“Patrick was gone from sun-up to sundown most days, and we wanted a change from that routine,” Carrie recalls.

That routine indeed has changed. The family lives together — and works together.

The children help. Ayla maintains plants with three high school girls who work part-time. Silas enjoys fixing small machinery with his dad. Ellie is in the kindergarten-grade level and “excited about it all,” her mother says.

After dinner, the Bertrands enjoy typical family fun. Patrick might take Ellie to dance class; twice a week, Carrie drives them to American Ninja Warriors in Thomasville to prepare for competitions or takes Ayla to rock-climbing. Wednesday nights are for church. Tuesday nights are typically free, so they might cuddle in the camper to watch a movie.

Life on Maple Grove Flower Farm begins at 5:30 a.m. Carrie makes breakfast in the camper and teaches their children for three hours or more. She also manages the farm with Patrick, doing greenhouse work and accounting.

Although the camper has a bathroom, the family primarily uses one of two bathrooms in the adjacent building that they call the “head house.” The head house doubles as a family kitchen and a break room for the small staff. And of course, it’s home to the family frog.

In a separate section of the head house, they stage carts of plants that will go into pots.

The flower farm has two growing seasons.

The Bertrands and a handful of employees plant 40-plus varieties of tiny begonias, geraniums, zinnias, salvia, sedum, and other annuals and perennials, and grow them for six to eight weeks. All in all, they plant about 200,000 plugs — tiny plants — for spring sale, Carrie says.

For fall, they plant about 25 varieties of pansies, chrysanthemums, violas, snapdragons and dianthuses — plus poinsettias for the holiday season.

They sell the plants wholesale, primarily to garden centers in the Triad and beyond, from Winston-Salem to Raleigh and into southern Virginia — much like original business owner and grower Greg Welker did before them.

Among their customers are Guilford Garden Center in Greensboro, Saviero’s Tri-County Garden Center in High Point, Southern States in Chapel Hill and Asheboro, A.B. Seed at the Piedmont Triad Farmers Market in Colfax, and Logan’s Garden Shop in Raleigh.

“We would love to also be selling directly to some of the landscapers,” Carrie says.

“But we felt there was so much to learn just on what he [Welker] had built already,” she adds. “He had a very successful business and had amazing relationships with the garden centers in the area. We certainly want to do what he has been doing with excellence before trying to add a bunch of new stuff.”

By one recent survey for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, North Carolina ranks 10th among the 50 states in floriculture, both in terms of dollar sales and number of operations.

Their floriculture business has nearly tripled in volume from the landscape business they had previously owned for almost 18 years. “Triple sales, probably triple expenses,” Patrick says.

They feared they would lose a significant customer when New Garden Landscaping & Nursery closed its retail side in December after more than 50 years and focused on its commercial and residential landscaping. But in March, Guilford Garden Center put down roots in a second location, the Lawndale Drive shop where New Garden’s retail and garden center space had once thrived.

Stephanie Jones, who owns Guilford Garden Center with her husband, Elliott, understands what it means to run a small family business. “We have to look after each other,” she says.

Maple Grove Flower Farms’ humble beginnings took root with Greg Welker.

A native of Washington state, Welker started the flower farm in 1983, when he had finished a year-long horticulture program at a botanical garden on Kauai in Hawaii, followed by a year-long program at Ball Seed in Chicago.

His grandfather, Dan Welker, had purchased the land in 1956 and eventually passed it on to Welker’s father, Raymond Welker. Welker used that land to grow the flower farm, naming it for maple trees that stand across the road.

“It was hard work,” Welker says. “But at the end of the day, I got to walk to the greenhouses and see all the beautiful flowers, and I knew that everything I sent was going to make people smile.”

A chance encounter with Patrick blossomed into a sale.

When Welker opened the back of his 26-foot enclosed box truck one fateful day in fall 2022, Patrick’s eyes widened at the sight of vibrantly colorful ornamental flowers in trays of pots on shelved carts.

Patrick admired row after row of planted fall flowers — giant pansies in purples, yellows, whites and burgundy, cabbage and kale in hues of green, white, purple and pink.

“He seemed to have a library of plant material in the back of his truck, beyond what was dropped at our stop,” recalls Patrick, who had closed his landscaping business and was working for another.    

After that tailgate meeting, the entire Bertrand family visited Maple Grove Flower Farm.

Patrick and Carrie remember Ayla, from a young age, picking early blooms from azalea bushes at their former home to make floating bouquets or other artwork.

“We didn’t need to sell her on the idea of moving to a flower farm,” Patrick says.

Believing that they would buy the farm, he went to work for Welker in January 2023 as an apprentice.

In May 2023, they sold their cul-de-sac home on Oak Hollow Lake in High Point.

“We would love to say that it was smooth sailing, getting from one place to another,” Carrie says. “But it was a process that tested our patience and our faith.”

They finally got a loan from the Small Business Administration to buy the flower farm, sealing the deal in July 2023.

Welker still worked there two days a week that first fall “to get us into the groove,” Carrie recalls.

He is now 63, retired and living in Chapel Hill.

“He built everything on this property from the ground up, so he knows how to fix everything,” she says. “And Patrick has had to learn, because you can’t call somebody every time you need something fixed when you have an operation like this going on.”

At first, Carrie knew few of the flowers’ names. She could identify a petunia, but didn’t know a pansy from a viola, especially with the variety of flowers that they planted and sold for spring.

She learned fast.

For four to six weeks in the winter cold and the summer heat, they get breaks from farm work, but order plugs for the following season through Ball Seed, from farms in West Virginia, Illinois and New Jersey. Winter brings maintenance work.

That gives them time for family trips.

Cold affects the wallet when propane field heaters need to run.

This past winter, several irrigation lines burst in empty, unheated greenhouses and had to be repaired.

In late January, they began planting for their second spring season.

Within a few days, they filled 6,100 pots with potting soil to have ready for the first shipment of plugs that arrived the following week.

They want flowers to look picture perfect when they sell. They ensure that they are tagged with plant names, and are clean and free of pests. They pinch off each head so that they become fuller — just as customers prepare to buy them.

Mid-March brought the first sales of their second spring season. Patrick delivered flowers in a truck four to five days each week.

Patrick and Carrie talk of the future.

Last December, they converted one of the greenhouses into a winter wonderland.

They hosted events there that featured Santa and Mrs. Claus, a life-size Candyland game, cookie decorating, and hot cocoa.   

Carrie hopes to eventually plant sections of flowers where parents can bring their children and both groups can learn.

They envision welcoming school groups for field trips.   

They would like to open a small market on the land where they sell leftover items they grow, plus goods and produce from local artisans.

“We want to add some community involvement,” Patrick says.

They hope that at least one of their children someday will run Maple Grove Flower Farm. “Either our daughters or son will have the opportunity if they would like,” Patrick says. “I have a feeling at least one of them will want to continue building the farm, from the flowers to the community outreach.”

Want to schedule a visit to Maple Grove Flower Farm? Email maplegroveflowers@gmail.com, or call or text 336-209-3607.
To learn more, go online to maplegroveflowerfarm.com or to the Facebook page for Maple Grove Flower Farm.

Best Laid Plans

BEST LAID PLANS

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Best Laid Plans

Natural burials are making a mark in Greensboro

By Cynthia Adams  |  Illustrations by Keith Borshak

Late in December, O.Henry colleague David Bailey sent a riveting text from a state park in Alamance County. An avid hiker devoted to natural places, he shares his discoveries, photographing flora, fauna, mossy streams and waterfalls. But that winter’s day, he made a surprising find.

He stumbled across a tin metal box emblazoned with the words “Remains of Mrs. Brown” with the cryptic “by Googe” below. 

The discovery set my imagination afire, as I just so happened to be gathering information on natural burials and all the alternatives. 

Bailey left the remains undisturbed. He conceded that it could be a prank, meant to trap the curious. (Having once found a pink purse at a gas pump one evening filled with human waste, I could hardly argue.) Mrs. Brown, Bailey remarked dryly, could be a punny metaphor for the same thing.

In any event, moving the box was tantamount to disturbing a gravesite and he decided to let it rest in peace.

But I had a different point of view. Who was Mrs. Brown, I wondered, and why were her remains left carefully, sealed inside a box in the woods?

Was there foul play?

I briefly considered trekking into the woods to search for the confounding box, but it was mere days before Christmas. Perhaps Bailey was right — perhaps this was a memorial honoring Mrs. Brown’s final wish.

I flashed to the natural burial site known as All Souls Natural Burial Ground, which I had recently visited in the fall. It differs from any cemetery you probably know. Yet there is nothing unnatural about All Souls. It simply fulfills the most instinctive of impulses. Rather than embalming and sealing our dead inside coffins — or vases — for perpetuity — All Souls allows the body to rejoin the elements in the quietest of settings.

All Souls occupies 3 acres of wooded terrain in Guilford County. Located on a site adjacent to St. Barnabas Episcopal Church on Jefferson Road, it is among several such sites in North Carolina created in response to an increasing awareness of natural alternatives.

Don’t expect monuments and manicured grass. Instead, engraved, ground-level native stones mark individual sites (each recorded with its GPS coordinates), blending with its surroundings.

Those interred at All Souls are buried in their choice of a simple shroud, a box or a coffin made of biodegradable materials, allowing for the natural decomposition of the body.

Ashes to ashes, as the Book of Common Prayer says. Dust to dust. 

Mind you, none of this is new. It was the preferred way of our not-so-distant ancestors.

*****

Deborah Parker, board president and family liaison at All Souls Natural Burial Association, consults with those wishing to learn more about natural burial in a paneled meeting room filled with folding tables and chairs at St. Barnabas. In her six years of volunteering, she has sat here explaining their purpose many times over. 

Too often, that conversation occurs at the worst possible time. It is far easier when a conversation about final arrangements for our loved ones takes place before any crisis arises, she points out.

According to Parker, Randall Keeney, the retired vicar at St. Barnabas, did all the background advocacy and work to bring All Souls into being. Symbolically, the cemetery opened on November 2, 2019 — All Souls Day. On April 5, 2021, Frederick Westmoreland Jr. was their first natural burial. 

St. Barnabas and All Souls have a symbiotic relationship. “The church owns the graveyard. He [Keeney] did a lot of the groundskeeping when he was here,” she explains. By supporting and participating in natural burials, also known as green burials, Parker and a cadre of volunteers, mostly retirees, now provide the manual and emotional labor of running All Souls. 

At this writing, 26 people have been buried there and 80 have pre-purchased burial sites.

Parker, the family liaison, has been present for all but three of those burials.

“The American way of death is changing a lot,”
she says.

Blue-eyed and white-haired, Parker’s peasant top, Apple Watch and wire-rimmed glasses convey strength combined with compassion. I see both placidity and firmness, a quality the Japanese call “Goju,” meaning, hard and soft. With a wry grin, Parker says, “I can cry easily, yet tolerate no BS.”

On the face of it, the concept of a natural burial is age-old and the premise is simple. Many elders today still recall a time when their dead were bathed, dressed and prepared for burial at home. A number of my ancestors lie in family cemeteries once dotting rural farmlands.

The movement toward the natural interment of our dead is a return to the practices that were commonplace until the 1800s before the Civil War era. In the early days of embalming, reports of alcohol, arsenic and even gasoline were used to preserve the bodies for transport. On shipboard, prominent personages were “pickled” in casks of rum rather than buried at sea.

Gradually the process of burial was relegated to funeral homes, with restriction and regulations sprouting up.

Today, natural burial means many things — it may simply refer to interment in a family cemetery. It may also mean legally opting out of commonplace burial methods, such as embalming and even the use of a casket or a vault. At this writing, online estimates for basic funeral costs are between $7–10,000, although my personal experiences have exceeded that. Costs of a plot and monument are additional.

But how challenging is a return to a less institutional way of dealing with our dead? While the appeal of a different approach is undeniable, it raises questions. Is the red tape formidable?   

Turns out, it is simpler than imagined. Parker’s face sets with resolve. She has now been doing this work for years.  Delving into concepts about death — especially natural burials — has become a raison d’être. 

In the room where she meets those in the process of making final arrangements for themselves or a family member are examples of basic casket options, including a cardboard version. Some even invite others to help decorate it — like one would have friends sign their cast.

North Carolina law, in fact, offers a number of options for interment, she stresses. Embalming is not legally required. “To me, it is like putting your body through so much disrespect,” Parker observes.

So, it heartens Parker that the funeral industry itself has become a supportive partner with natural burials and has participated in most that she has experienced, transporting the dead and providing storage until interment is arranged. Her daughter, Meredith Springs, is an Asheville funeral director who also advocates natural burials.

Funeral homes also handle required legalities, including generating death certificates. But none are required to be handled by the funeral home, according to state law. (You might want to check out Evan Moore’s recent “Can You Bury a Relative at Home in Your Backyard” in the Charlotte Observer: charlotteobserver.com/news/local/article277022153.html.)

You can legally apply for and obtain a death certificate outside a funeral home, but, she warns, this is daunting. “One of the hardest things to do,” in Parker’s experience.

Nonetheless, “the American way of death is changing a lot,” she notes.

Parker, who lectures widely for civic groups and events, explains that a prevalent, mistaken belief is that the deceased must be immediately removed from the home by a funeral home. 

“You can keep the body at home,” she clarifies. “Which gives family members time to be with them.” According to online sources, that time frame is liberal, with few legal restrictions.

In describing personal experiences with her own family, Parker is most affecting. Her brother, Dale Clinard, was the impetus for her “desire and interest to help others have what they wanted” as he prepared his family for his pending death in 1989. He encouraged his family to become involved with the process.

She described the life lessons he imparted, teaching them “no fear of dying.”

At Dale’s death, the family requested a delayed pick up by the funeral home (permissible, she points out), allowing time to bathe and dress him, and affording time with family and friends who visited throughout the night.

“He had such a loving acceptance of death that it made it a lot easier for us,” she recalls.

“He had flowers sent to my parents the day after he died, thanking them for his life,” Parker says, still moved by the memory. 

The experience spurred her to become a hospice volunteer, and led to eventual involvement with natural burial. Each year Parker holds her own workshops in the church’s parish hall to guide others who wish for an intimate, involved experience. If they choose not, so be it, she says.

  All Souls, which helps coordinate the necessities of burial, has a single fee. A total of $3,500 includes the site, costs to open and close the grave, and a flat, native stone for engraving. “All we do here is receive the body — we call them ‘loved ones’ — and bury them.”

A shroud (many use a natural fabric sheet or quilt) or casket are funeral home expenses but it is legal to provide your own. For those who don’t purchase a shroud or a casket, Parker has personally swathed the deceased in a cotton sheet at the funeral home. 

All Souls does require that caskets be biodegradable, hence made of wood, bamboo or cardboard. Willow and seagrass caskets are also accepted — Parker mentions craftspeople at Moss and Thistle Farm near Asheville who commission wicker caskets, which she describes as “beautiful.”

There are no vaults, nor metal, sealed caskets at All Souls.

(There is also no legal requirement necessitating burial 6 feet under, Parker explains. Graves can permissibly be shallower, approximately 3–3.5 feet deep, as is the case at All Souls.) 

Others choose cremation. (All Souls does not accept cremains.) 

Ashes can be fashioned into cremation jewelry rather than buried at all. 

There are other options. One is a process variously called resomation, water cremation or aquamation. Proponents argue it is a greener option than cremation.

Resomation uses water, potassium hydroxide and steam heat to swiftly and fully dissolve the body. At present there are a few resomation chambers in North Carolina, in Charlotte, Hillsborough and Wilmington. Composting is a lesser-known, more green burial option.

            *****

Parker is a sort of culture warrior, advocating for straight talk concerning death as a healthier way of living our lives. She says she stands on the shoulders of many who have worked in the realm of death and dying, including artists. She praises a film, The Last Ecstatic Days, made by an Asheville filmmaker.

Approaching death, the subject, a 36-year-old yogi, said, “I am embodied. I am empowered. I am ecstatic.”

The three words were emblazoned on T-shirts.

She mentions how the very culture surrounding death is changing, thanks to his example and others like former intensive care nurse Julie McFadden. 

“She became a hospice nurse and wrote a book called Nothing to Fear. It is fabulous . . . She’s got stories about her personal experiences with people that are dying. So, in that book, she talks about the ‘D’ words: Death. Dying. And dead.”

Before parting, she leafs through pictures of natural burials she has participated in at All Souls. She describes loved ones giving eulogies surrounded by the moving, natural sounds of birdsong and breezes. An occasional deer meanders through. Burial sites are covered with greenery and flowers at the end. Parker finds these funerals beautifully evocative, even when she does not know the deceased.

She walks along the rustic grounds and pathways, pausing to discuss various people buried there.

Parker mentions another film, A Will for the Woods.

“Put it on your list,” she advises as we part. “And be sure you have your plans in order,” she adds, shoulders squared, a pensive smile dimpling her cheeks. The title had struck me as poetic in the moment. Yet I had no idea that it would prove prescient.

*****

On February 13, the day before Valentine’s Day, Bailey phoned with an update on the mysterious case of Mrs. Brown. 

Returning to the park, he noted police huddled in the parking lot alongside a park ranger, holding the box he had found in December.   

The box was firmly welded shut. “Whoever did this went to a great deal of trouble,” Bailey said, slightly short of breath as the police pried the metal box open.

“Say, do you remember when I told you about discovering it?” he asked.

The police talked in the background as we speculated. Absent foul play, surely, if someone wished for their remains to simply be left in the woods, it must be legal.

Actually, no, the park ranger quickly corrected us. It was illegal to dispose of human remains in public parklands.

This was hardly comparable to a natural burial, I was reminded. 

Later, Bailey texted pictures of possible fire ashes mingled with what looked a whole lot like cremains and visible teeth and bone fragment. I studied the photos, hoping this was all done in innocence.

The box, now with the medical examiner’s office, remains a mystery. A report has yet to be issued. Bailey returned to his own writing.

“It’s your story now,” he emailed. But of course, it wasn’t. 

It was another’s story. Someone — but who? — and their own particular will for the woods.

Farm Small Think Big

FARM SMALL THINK BIG

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Farm Small, Think Big

Innovative niche farmers are making our lives better every day

By Ross Howell Jr.

Hard to think of a better time to talk to farmers than spring, so that’s just what I did. What follows is a small sampling of the many creative and determined small farmers in our area who are growing beautiful, fresh and healthy products for our kitchens and homes, season after season.

Bugle Boy Farm, Summerfield

Named to honor James Gillies, a 14-year-old “bugle boy” killed in a skirmish with British troops in the American Revolution, Bugle Boy Farm is emblematic of a major trend in modern farming.

“Our goal is organic,” says owner Elizabeth McClellan, who purchased the farm with her husband, Gero, in 2012.

Elizabeth is a big fan of Joel Salatin, an internationally known pioneer in “regenerative farming” — using modern agricultural methods to grow organic produce and meats while improving and sustaining the land on which they’re grown.

For years, Bugle Boy Farm has produced organic blueberries, pasture-fed beef and chickens, plus eggs.

But it was Elizabeth’s nephew, Christian Hankins, who suggested a unique niche.

Garlic.

Christian, a veteran who grew up in Rochester, Minn., and played minor league hockey, retired from military service during the pandemic. He had fond memories of his grandparents’ family farm and began to research garlic as a crop. For a couple of years, he grew garlic as a hobby, studying the process of growing and curing.

After becoming a member of the Bugle Boy Farm team, Christian purchased 22 acres of open land, expanding operations.

“The clay soil here tends to hold water,” he says. So he developed a special blend to amend the soil, including cow manure, gypsum, bone meal and lime.

“Curing the garlic is a big issue because of the humidity in our region,” says Christian. Recently the farm added a modern drying facility, with humidity and temperature control, where the bulbs are cured and stored until ready for market.

Bugle Boy Farms grows several varieties, each with distinctive flavors. The farmers also test cooking recipes, pairing specific garlic varieties with particular styles of cooking — Italian, Mexican, Asian and so forth.

Garlic is also available in old-fashioned, handmade braids.

“They’re edible craft,” Christian smiles. “People like to hang them up in their kitchens.”

“Customers really enjoy buying them as gifts,” Elizabeth adds.

Another specialty is scapes.

These are the long, slender flower stems that grow from garlic bulbs in the early spring. Growers remove the scapes to concentrate plant growth in the bulbs, which are harvested in early summer.

“Scapes have a scallion taste,” Elizabeth says. Some local restaurants buy them, and, she tells me, she has a special recipe for making scape butter. “It’s very tasty,” she adds.

A big advantage to buying Bugle Boy Farm garlic is its freshness. Plus, Christian says, “You can use less garlic because the quality is better.”

(For more information, visit bugleboygarlic.com)

Sprinkles Gourmet Mushrooms, High Point

If I ask you to envision an urban farm, I’m pretty sure what comes to mind is not a photographer’s studio.

But that’s what ingenuity and fungi can do for you.

Mushroom farmer Troy Sprinkles lived in Greensboro for decades before moving his professional photography studio to High Point eight years ago — continuing to work with a range of furniture industry clients.

But, during the COVID pandemic four years ago, Troy experienced an epiphany. He picked up a copy of a book about mycelium (the root-like structure of fungus) written by Paul Stamets, best known for the documentary film, Fantastic Fungi.

“It was a life-changing experience,” Troy says. He read all of Stamets’ books and every other reference he could find about fungi and began growing mushrooms in the basement of his house.

One day he thought, “Why not convert my studio into a fungi farm?”

Section-by-section, Troy expanded his “farm” in the 7,000-square-foot building that still also houses his studio.

He concentrates his fungi culture on nine varieties.

“We only grow species that are wood lovers and tree dwellers,” Troy says.

Among those are shiitake, blue oyster and lion’s mane.

“Lion’s mane is a native and is the most prolific,” he says. “In the wild, it usually grows on oak trees. It’s excellent for its medicinal value and for its gourmet flavor.”

Troy purchases his substrate materials from reputable producers in Tennessee and North Carolina.

Everything that goes into his growing rooms must be completely sterilized before being inoculated with mycelium spawn.

“What you’re creating is a perfect environment for mold to grow,” says Troy. And stray mold is a real no-no because it overwhelms the spawn.

His farm is a family operation.

Troy’s wife, Beverly Clary — whom he met when she was an art director at Pace Communications — helped him develop the business. These days, she only works with him in the summer months.

“She’s a full-time elementary school art teacher now, teaching seven classes a day,” Troy smiles.

His 34-year-old son, Zachary, who held different jobs before joining his father, works full-time in the business.

“I say growing things is good for your soul,” Troy says.

(For more information, visit sprinklesshrooms.com)

Rocky Forge Farm, Linwood

When I first heard about this niche farm’s specialty, I headed straight to my dictionary. I’ll save you a trip.

“Wagyu” (wah-gyoo) means “Japanese cow.” More broadly, the term applies to cattle bred in Japan that are noted for the rich marbling of their meat, which makes it more flavorful, tender and moist.

A few years back, when Rocky Forge Farm’s owners, Michael and Jodi Jones, were mostly raising horses and other animals, they were celebrating a special occasion with a dinner of Wagyu ribeye steak.

“That experience ignited a passion,” Michael says. Little by little, they decided to go all in on raising American Wagyu beef cattle.

They purchased a purebred Wagyu bull and purebred black Angus heifers. They cleared additional land and built a 30-by-50-foot shelter.

“The first years were hard,” Michael says. “We had no income.”

That’s because raising Wagyu cattle takes patience and time.

“Our cattle are best when they’re 3 years old,” Michael says. “One we took to the processor recently was nearly 4 years old.” Compare that to the industry standard of 18 months for feedlot cattle raised commercially.

The Joneses are careful practitioners of sustainable agriculture. They grow alfalfa and timothy grass, reseeding pastures in the spring for summer grazing.

“We move our temporary fences every other day, so the fields won’t be overgrazed,” Michael says.

The farm also produces more than 100 round bales of hay that’s stored for winter forage.

Remember, these are all natural methods for raising cattle.

Rocky Forge Farm Wagyu cattle follow the quiet rhythms of herding animals — grazing, going to water and resting.

After years of crossbreeding, Michael and Jodi’s herd is more than 87% pure American Wagyu stock now. And demand for Rocky Forge Farm’s beef continues to grow.

The Joneses are the fifth generation of his family to live in the old Rocky Forge farmhouse. They’re proud of the cattle business they’ve built. They’re proud of the picturesque corner of the Piedmont where they live. And thankful.

“We’re all stewards of the Earth,” says Michael. “None of it goes with us when we go. It has to be passed on to others.”

(For more information, visit rockyforgefarm.com)

PTB Farm, Reidsville

PTB is an acronym for “Pine Trough Branch,” a small stream that shapes the western boundary of Hillary and Worth Kimmel’s farm, purchased by Worth’s grandparents in 1953.

The couple were just acquaintances when they both studied ecological agriculture at Warren Wilson College, where students grow and harvest the food they eat using sustainable agricultural practices. They got to know each other when Hillary was growing vegetables on her family’s farm in Boone and Worth was raising livestock on PTB Farm.

Since the Piedmont offers a good environment for both vegetables and livestock, they joined forces.

“In 2014, we got married and started coming to the Greensboro Farmers Curb Market,” Hilary says. “It’s been really key for us, because it’s a year-round market.”

Now the Kimmels have a 3-year-old daughter, Juniper.

The family grows vegetables, herbs and cut flowers, along with grass-fed beef and pastured pork.

For Worth and Hillary, “soil is the heart of what we do.”

“We learned about that at Warren Wilson,” Worth says. Farming, they were taught, is an element of a sustainable ecosystem creating healthy food.

Since agriculture is such a seasonal business, the Kimmels set up a PTB Farm co-op.

“A CSA (community-supported agriculture) co-op really helps us with cash flow,” Worth explains.

“Ours is a market-style cooperative,” Hillary says. Members pay an annual membership for the farm’s products and receive a 10% discount when they purchase against the balance of their fee.

“Members choose the produce and meats they want, rather than receiving a regular allotment,” Hilary adds. “We have some members who’ve been with us since we started. They feel like family.”

Worth tells me that in their first decade, the farm had big expenses just for infrastructure — wells, water tanks and irrigation for their cattle and plants, portable fencing so the animals could be moved about.

“Now, finally, we have a walk-in cooler,” Worth says, smiling. Very handy when you’re packing up meat and flowers for farmers markets.

To market their products, the Kimmels divide and conquer.

During peak growing season on a Thursday, they pick flowers in the morning and put them in the cooler. On Friday morning, they harvest vegetables and lettuce and arugula. By lunchtime, all the vegetables are washed and their special “PTB salad mix” is finished. Friday afternoon, Hillary makes up her bouquets and Worth packs up the meat in coolers.

Then, on Saturday mornings, Hillary works the Greensboro market and Worth sets up at the Winston-Salem market.

Do they ever alternate?

“For some reason, no,” Worth grins.

“And that’s when Juniper spends time with grandmother!” Hilary laughs.

(For more information, visit ptbfarm.com)

Waseda Farm Flowers, McLeansville

In 2020, Elaine Fryar and her daughter, Crystal Osborne, started growing cut flowers on a half-acre plot located on a 200-acre farm that’s been in the family of Elaine’s husband, Gerald, for more than a century.

Already, the two women have expanded their growing area to three-quarters of an acre, with plans to cultivate a full acre soon.

And, man, they have been keeping Gerald busy.

“We have a cooler now for the flowers,” Crystal says. “We were able to repurpose an old milking parlor from when the farm was a dairy.”

“Yes, Gerald made a nice walk-in cooler for us,” Elaine adds.

Two years ago, her husband completed an even bigger project.

“Gerald repurposed an old tobacco greenhouse for us,” Elaine says. “It measures 30 by 40 feet and has six beds. It was a lot of work for him.”

“There’s still a lot of glass left from the tobacco greenhouse,” Elaine continues. “But Gerald says if I want another flower greenhouse built, I’ll have to get a new husband.” She grins.

The women sell their flowers to other farmers who have their own market sites, to local florists and to a subscribers’ list online.

“And the Greensboro Farmers Curb Market has been fantastic for us,” says Crystal.

Crystal puts together all the bouquets.

She and her mother give a lot of thought to price points. They offer arrangements with names such as “Tiny Tots,” “Mason Minis” and “Nosegays” that come in BBQ sauce jars. They also sell more expensive arrangements in elegant vases or long-stemmed bouquets wrapped in plastic.

At the farm they also offer classes. In December, customers can take a wreath-making class.

“We use our own eucalyptus and purchase Doulas fir, cypress and cedar from local growers,” Crystal says.

In the summer they offer a class called “Petals and Prosecco.” Nothing like a nice bubbly to improve your blossom arranging skills, right?

“Our goal is to have one class each quarter,” Crystal says, noting that they announce advance ticket sales on social media.

There are more activities on the drawing board. This summer, Waseda Farm Flowers will offer its first pick-your-own sunflowers program.

“One day, we hope to have pick-your-own blueberries,” Elaine says. “Eventually, we’ll start keeping bees, to help with the pollination, and the honey, of course.”

“And we’ll be doing special, luxury, pop-up picnics,” Crystal smiles.

Sounds like whatever the future holds for Waseda Farm Flowers, it’ll be a bloomin’ good time.

(For more information, visit waseda-farm-flowers.square.site)

Healing Lands

HEALING LANDS

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Healing Lands

A once tired farmland is now a thriving home to family and flock

By Cassie Bustamante   •   Photographs by Amy Freeman

At the end of a long, gravel drive, where two golden-white Great Pyrenees greet visitors as soon as they hear the crunch of tires, sits a modest, 1,800-square-foot, 1950s rancher. Ashlynn Roth, her husband, Tim, and their two young children, ages 6 and 8, have been settling into their Whitsett farm over the last month. Beyond their sliding-glass back door, Dorper sheep with their young lambs roam freely on a vast, grassy pasture, bleating loudly in response to the sound of Ashlynn’s voice. In front of the home is a movable henhouse, where chickens produce plentiful eggs. But just a few short years ago, none of this existed here — not even the house. Years of tobacco and corn farming had taken its toll, leaving behind unserviceable, rock-hard soil. The Roths, however, had a vision: Heal the land and create a homestead.

Ashlynn is a petite blonde with sparkling brown eyes. Her hair is styled in long, loose curls that frame her round face. She’s been known to don a glittery evening gown and even participated in pageants at one point in her life, earning the title of Miss Thomasville in 2003. It’s easy to imagine her as a beauty queen and it’s no wonder she’s the face of Tupelo Honey Farms, a regenerative farm in Whitsett. But, she’s quick to tell you, she’s also a serious, full-time farmer. “No way,” people respond. “Oh, yes,” she says. And she’s got the dirt under her fingernails to prove it.

Farming is hard, gritty work, she admits, but not as grueling, she discoverd, as being an executive in the human resources software field. “When I was a VP in corporate America,” she says, “that was a challenge.” Her days were spent kissing her babes’ heads then dashing out the door to catch early morning flights as a new, nursing mother. As soon as her plane landed, she was making a run for a bathroom to pump breast milk, dashing off to meetings with clients, then rushing back home just to see her young family, however briefly, before doing it all again the next day. Tim was also collecting frequent flyer miles as a medical-device salesman with a focus on dialysis care. “We would pass each other in the air sometimes,” says Ashlynn.

Ashlynn and Tim had known one another since they were teenagers, but romance didn’t blossom until much later. She was living in Atlanta after graduating from UNCG, but coming back to the area frequently because her mother, her “best friend,” had fallen ill. Tim, too, had left the area after growing up here, landing in San Francisco, but his father had suffered some small strokes. Since his job allows for him to live anywhere, he traded Golden Gate City for The Gate City to take care of his father and his father’s own regenerative cattle farm.

They began running into each other at Cone Health, where Ashlynn was frequently visiting her mom. Tim, who was there on business, reached out to Ashlynn, thoughtfully bringing her magazines and then asking her to have lunch with him. “He asked me out five different times!” she says, but dating was the last thing on her mind.

When her mother was moved to Duke Hospital, where a diagnosis of a rare form of cancer was pronounced, flowers arrived one day for her mother — from Tim. “And my mom goes, ‘I think you should go on a date with him.’”

She took the advice. In her mom’s hospital room, she prepped for the date, a casual outing to watch the Durham Bulls play ball. After the game, they wandered into a bar and munched on a charcuterie board featuring sheeps’ cheese. A portent of things to come? “You’re going to laugh at this,” she says. The provisions — and the company — were welcome, but as she tucked into the sheeps’ cheese, her mouth began to itch: “Now, sheep are my favorite thing, but I can’t eat the sheeps’ cheese!”

Weeks turned into months and, before she knew it, Ashlynn couldn’t imagine a future without Tim in it. Though she swore she’d never move back to Greensboro and only wanted to live in big, thriving metropolises, she finally packed her bags and left Atlanta behind to begin creating a life together.

Her mom, though still ill, was feeling better. And Tim’s father was back to working his own farm, giving the couple the chance to leave Greensboro behind again. Over the next decade, they zig-zagged across the country, living as far as Houston, Texas, and Cleveland, Ohio. They also married and welcomed their two children. Sadly, Ashlynn’s mother passed away when her first-born was just 5 months old.

Eventually, with an infant and toddler at home, Ashlynn made the decision to quit her job, allowing the family the chance to live almost anywhere in the world. “We chose Greensboro.”

The family settled into an expansive Irving Park home, and just months later, Veeva, a cloud-computing company, offered her a remote job. “It’s for people going through clinical trials,” she says. Having tried to get her mother into a clinical trial, it was something that tugged at her. It seemed too good to be true, so she went back to work and hit the ground running in her new role.

And then in 2020, during the pandemic, she woke up one morning feeling dizzy and as if she were moving even though she wasn’t. “I felt like I was flipping,” she says. “And day after day kept going by and it never went away.”

MRIs and all sorts of testing on her inner ear and vestibular system resulted in no concrete answers or solutions. “They couldn’t figure out what was wrong with me.” She recalls being told by doctors, “We think you might have MdDS [Mal de Débarquement Syndrome] — we don’t know — but here are some eye exercises. Good luck!” (MdDS is a rare vestibular disorder that makes you feel like you’re moving when you’re still.)

After two-and-a-half years of feeling like she was constantly riding ocean waves, Ashlynn decided it was time to be her own advocate. She began searching for answers on Instagram and discovered Alicia Wolf, aka @thedizzycook, whose account touts itself for its “delicious anti-inflammatory recipes for brain health.”

“Her symptoms sounded just like mine,” Ashlynn says. So, she reached out. Wolf immediately got back to her and recommended Dr. Shin Beh in Texas, who, according to Wolf, was one of only a handful of neurologists in the country who studied dizziness at the time. In turn, Ashlynn reached out to Dr. Beh and begged him to take her virtually since dizziness was making travel a challenge. He accepted her as a new patient and had her almost immediately diagnosed with vestibular migraines and MdDS. “And I just busted out crying because I was like, finally, I know what this is.”

While these afflictions are not curable, they are treatable. Ashlynn, who soldiered on in her demanding job, implemented a wholistic approach in the kitchen, creating recipes from Wolf’s cookbook. She took prescription medication and doctor-recommended supplements. All the while, she kept reflecting that Dr. Beh had also advised lowering her stress levels. The people who most often get diagnosed with MdDs were just like her. “He said, ‘It’s women that are hustlers, go-getters like you, A-type personalities — they’re always on,’” she recalls. “And he was like, ‘We have got to get your mind calmed down.’”

Her response? “I know how to handle stress.” But she didn’t know how to slow down. These days, women are told we can do it all — have a career, have a family, have a side hustle. No one, however, tells you it’s not sustainable to do it all at the same time.

Once again, a new company came calling, this time for a role as a VP, a title she’d longed for. “This was just such a step up in my career and more money,” she says, “So I was like, I’ve gotta do this.” She took the job and once again found herself on the move nonstop for work.

As if her plate weren’t full enough already, she and Tim, both with farming in their blood, had decided to look for farm acreage. Tim came upon what he thought was the perfect piece of real estate and drove Ashlynn out to it. When they arrived, she gasped. “What in the world?” she recalls saying. “This is my great-grandfather’s land!” The Whitsett property had once belonged to her great-grandfather and remained in the hands of distant relatives. Her grandparents, now in their 90s, live right across the street. The couple not only put in an offer on the 15 acres marked for sale, but reached out to the owners of bordering pieces of land to try to cobble back together the bulk of what had once been her great-grandfather’s. “They were like, ‘We’re not giving you a deal even though you’re family,’” recalls Ashlynn. “And I am like, ‘Well, I am not asking for a deal.’”

They got the land. “And it was rough looking,” says Ashlynn. Between working in demanding careers and raising kids, the couple drove out to Whitsett every chance they got to clean it up and make it once again suitable for farming.

But after the Roths closed their deal, Tim’s father fell ill and they once again took over his cattle farm, just over 10 minutes from their land. They’d previously taken over property ownership, but Tim’s dad still lived there and operated it until he needed to move to a longterm care facility. “So now we’re taking care of that, too.”

Even with the hustle of shuffling from Greensboro to their Whitsett land and the cattle farm, Ashlynn says the time spent outside working in the dirt provided a peace she hadn’t felt in years. It offered a chance to get out of her mind and into her body, and renew her sense of wonder. Nearby, a large flock of birds pecks at the ground. A single bluebird stands out against the rest; he takes off and settles on a nearby tree branch. Ashlynn stares in awe.

The answer was clear: quit her high-paying corporate job and focus full-time on farming. “I sat my husband on the steps . . . and I said, ‘I can’t do this anymore. I am about to lose my mind.’”

He was going to say no, she just knew it. “We were standing right out here and it looked like crap — it looked awful, trash everywhere,” she recalls. He looked into her eyes with understanding: “OK,” he said.

Ashlynn immediately got to work, spending her days dropping her kids off at school then driving out to Whitsett. Eventually, after several laborious months of clearing out dead trees and enlarging pastures, the land was ready for animals. On weekends, when Tim wasn’t visiting hospitals for work, the entire family pitched in.

Taking a page from Tim’s father’s regenerative farm, the first animals to roam Tupelo Honey Farms were pigs because “pigs are amazing for regeneration.” In regenerative farming, land is not cultivated. Instead, animals graze — and are moved from pasture to pasture — to restore its natural ecosystem. “Now there is green grass coming out up there, so lush,” says Ashlynn. “I get so emotional about it.”

Of course, her grandfather, who’d once farmed this land and lived just across the street, didn’t see it her way. According to Ashlynn, he told her animals should be raised in a massive barn. While the two lovingly butted heads for a bit, she says, he eventually came around, saying to her, “Just because you’re doing it different, doesn’t mean it’s wrong.”

Not only was the land healing, but so was she. Three months into being a full-time farmer, Ashlynn was able to go off her medication. Dizzy days are not a thing of the past, but they’re no longer a regular occurrence. Being in nature, watching clouds pass by and grounding — a wellness practice that involves direct contact with the land’s surface — is what’s helped her. “I put my bare feet right on the Earth.”

And finally, after a few years of back-and-forth from Irving Park to Whitsett, she is able to step right out her front door and sink her toes into her own farmland. Staying true to their belief in sustainable practices, the couple opted to move an entire 1950s rancher from Greensboro to the property. Turns out, their Irving Park neighbor and good friend, Robert Kleinman, is the owner and director of real estate and development for PARC companies. PARC was about to demo a couple of houses to build an apartment complex. “We were like, ‘Hey man, can we grab one of those houses?’” she recalls with a laugh.

Loaded onto a trailer, the house made its voyage. A drive that normally takes Ashlynn around 20 minutes took the driver hauling the house hours to complete. When it finally arrived at the farm, Ashlynn wept as she thought, “Oh my gosh, we’re saving a house!”

The house, even before its maiden voyage, was in disrepair, so they ripped it down to the studs, salvaging everything they could, including original hardwood flooring. Like the land it now rested on, Ashlynn says, “It hadn’t been loved on in a while.”

Now, the brick exterior has been painted white and a porch has been added, complete with the traditional Southern “haint blue” ceiling. To complement that, Ashlynn’s selected copper light fixtures from Charleston, one of her favorite cities. A warm-toned wooden door beckons guests inside, where Ashlynn’s done all of the design work.

This once dilapidated and dark home is now light and bright, with French-European appeal. Above the new kitchen island hangs a stunning crystal chandelier she scored at Red Collection. In fact, much of her lighting, which she calls “jewelry for the house,” has come from there.

Whites, wood tones and gold embellishments carry throughout the home, but her kids’ spaces each have a splash of color: French blue in her son’s room and Sherwin-Williams Malted Milk, a soft and earthy pink, in her daughter’s room.

At less than a quarter of the size of the family’s former home, Ashlynn admits, “It’s a whole lifestyle change.”

The space Ashlynn calls “the hangout area” features comfortable chairs the family can snuggle in to watch the sunrise while sheep graze on the back pasture. The sheep run to Ashlynn whenever they hear her nearby. In the front yard, chickens peck the ground near their mobile henhouse, which gets moved every day to different grass.

In the backyard, she imagines a stamped concrete patio and string lights swagged over tables and chairs. Beyond the patio, lush kitchen gardens. And she hopes to teach others how to implement regenerative practices in their own backyards by eventually leading workshops right there. After all, she notes, that’s the mission. Tupelo Honey Farms’ tagline is “nourishing the community while healing the land.”

Ashlynn, it seems, still doesn’t know any other speed but “go!” Since starting the farm, she’s also expanded into making nontoxic candles and tallow skincare, and creating floral arrangements using local flower farms’ stems. And, most recently, she opened a brick-and-mortar location on Bessemer Avenue in Fisher Park called Bloom & Nectar, a “farm-to-fork market and bloomery,” where customers can shop her products and meat as well as goods from other local farms.

Standing in the living room where black-and-white family photos dating back through four generations hang, Ashlynn muses, “This is about a legacy, right?” They’re building on what her great-grandfather started. And doing it their way.

Looking out at the property toward the road, Ashlynn has a vision for what is yet to be. She pictures pecan trees lining the gravel lane. And, yes, she’d harvest their nuts. “And sell them. I would do it all.”

Of course, she quips, “My husband is like, ‘Woah, slow down!’”

Buffalo Presbyterian Church

BUFFALO PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH

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Buffalo Presbyterian Church

From generation to generation, Greensboro's pioneer church lives on

By Jim Dodson   •   Photographs by John Gessner

On a mild winter morning, welcome hints of spring in the air, the pews at historic Buffalo Presbyterian Church are nearly full for a Sunday service celebrating Rev. Brian Marsh’s second anniversary. Remarkably, Marsh is only the 17th minister in 269 years to occupy Buffalo’s pulpit since the church was organized by a band of Scots-Irish settlers in 1756. Such longevity speaks volumes about the faith and continuity of a church that predates the establishment of Guilford County by 15 years, the United States of America by 20 years, and Greensboro itself by 52 years. 

“I sometimes have to fight my emotions when I think about Buffalo’s historical importance to this community, a place where so many families of Greensboro have worshipped for centuries,” says Thomas McKnight, an eighth-generation member whose ancestor wrote the deed for the land on which the church sits. “Through the ups and downs of its history, good times and bad, literally war and peace, Buffalo Church has been a spiritual home where God’s word is preached and all are welcome.”

“I think that’s been the comforting message of Buffalo Church since its earliest days,” agrees Vinnie Gordy, another eighth-generation member who was baptized, grew up and was married in the church. “The settlers who created this church came out of a dangerous wilderness to make this their spiritual home. And that’s exactly what Buffalo Church is to many of us today — a home where we belong, sharing the love of Christ and the word of the Bible.”

Buffalo’s founders were liberty-loving, Scots-Irish immigrants who followed the Great Wagon Road from southern Pennsylvania to new lives in a wilderness area then known as the Nottingham Settlement, formed in 1750. It originally consisted of 33 plots of land purchased from Lord John Carteret, the second Earl of Granville, the last of North Carolina’s Lord Proprietors. The church today sits at the heart of the original settlement, which was framed by Horsepen Creek to the west, South Buffalo Creek to the east, Reedy Fork to the north and Muddy Creek to the south. Lore holds that the church, upon its establishment, took its name from the creek that bisects the modern city of Greensboro.

As I learned while researching my forthcoming book on the Great Wagon Road, America’s Scots-Irish Presbyterians were arguably the most determined travelers of the Wagon Road and the backbone of the country’s westward expansion, hardy souls who built more churches and log cabin schools than any other religious group in the Southern backcountry. They also brought with them a fierce sense of independence and a God-given talent for spreading the Gospels, making music, and educating their young. As Jim Webb writes in his 2004 bestseller Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America, they were also in the vanguard of fighting for liberty from the American Revolution onward.

If you want to know how old a church is, the saying goes, visit its graveyard.

Testament to Buffalo Church’s powerful influence on the history of this region is a peaceful 6-acre cemetery that’s home to one of the largest catalpa trees in North Carolina and an estimated 1,200 graves, including the remains of at least 145 soldiers, many of whom fought in both the Battle of Alamance and the Revolutionary War. Men from the church, in fact, have fought and died in all American wars with exception of one — the Spanish-American War. Many of their gravestones have simply vanished over time.

“As a result, there are many more graves out there than we’ve identified,” says Pam Brady, a seventh-generation member who has researched the cemetery for many years. “That’s because many of the original graves were marked with wooden crosses or stones that simply disappeared over the years.” The cemetery’s earliest headstone identifies the grave of Mary Starrett, who was the wife of Benjamin Starrett and was buried in 1775.

Still, a stroll among the hundreds of gravestones that remain intact, however, reads like an honor roll of Greensboro’s pioneer names  — Gillespie, Forbes, Donnell, McKnight, Forbis, Dick, Lindsay, McNary, Albright, Mebane and Rankin.

Brady once set out to find the grave of her ancestor, William Rankin, but was only able to locate a faded stone belonging to his wife, Jean. “By the time I did my research on where he might have been buried — presumably near his wife — and got back to the cemetery, even her stone had disappeared,” she says with a laugh, adding that at least 20 current church members have ancestors from the 1700s — not all soldiers — buried in Buffalo’s historic cemetery. “We feel blessed to worship where our ancestors worshiped,” she adds, “because it connects us to the rich history of Guilford County and the creation of Greensboro in a very personal way. I like to think that Buffalo Church is to Guilford County what Bruton Parish Church is to Colonial Williamsburg and the North Church to the city of Boston.”

The most celebrated grave site exists directly behind the sanctuary, a family plot framed by century-old boxwoods. It belongs to Rachel and David Caldwell, a Princeton theological graduate who was called to serve as Buffalo’s first pastor in 1765, sharing pulpit duties with Buffalo’s sister congregation just east of what is now Greensboro at Alamance Presbyterian Church for the next 55 years.

Two years after Caldwell arrived, he established what became known as Dr. Caldwell’s Log College, a theological and classical academy for young men. His students included future N.C. governors, members of Congress and at least 50 ministers. He later became a trustee of Liberty Hall, the precursor of the University of North Carolina.

Today, Caldwell’s Log College Site — home to his farm, well-preserved Federal-style house (dating from 1781) and influential school — are part of David Caldwell Historic Park, a National Historic Site that shares space with the Tanger Family Bicentennial Gardens. Come spring, there is probably no more visited public grounds in Greensboro.

In addition to Caldwell’s reputation as a spellbinding pastor, due to a shortage of physicians in the region, he acquired medical books from Philadelphia and became a self-taught doctor, which came in handy during his years as a key patriot leader in the Revolutionary War. According to records, he was present at the Battle of Alamance during the Regulator insurrection of May 16, 1771, and urged his flocks to volunteer during the American Revolution and the War of 1812. His farm also became a prime staging ground for American troops prior to the Battle of Guilford Courthouse, the major turning point of the war.

Rev. Caldwell died in August 1824. His wife, Rachel Craighead Caldwell, daughter of a Presbyterian firebrand patriot leader named Alexander Craighead, followed him to the grave one year later.

Just three years later, in 1827, Buffalo’s congregation replaced a previous pair of wooden sanctuaries — one of which was said to hold as many as 1,000 worshippers — with a striking brick sanctuary that is believed to be the first brick church in this part of North Carolina.

Seventh-generation member Clyde Albright’s great-great grandfather, Jacob Albright, built the sanctuary from bricks made on the property. 

Just under a century later, a classical portico was added to the entrance of the sanctuary and a choir loft was constructed. Not long afterwards, an education building named for David Caldwell was built on the west side of the church. A similar structure dedicated to Rachel Caldwell was eventually added to the east side of the sanctuary, completing the evolution of the church campus.

To celebrate Buffalo Church’s bicentennial in 1956, the church underwent a major renovation and sanctuary expansion. Clyde Albright’s grandfather, Lonnie Albright Sr., showed Boren Brick where to dig the clay from the original site (reportedly near Friendly Center) used for the bricks of the expanded sanctuary.

The highlight of the celebration was a dramatic two-night outdoor pageant called Let Freedom Ring, featuring a cast and staging crew of more than 75 members of the church, several professional actors and the choirs of Buffalo and Alamance churches. The play, presented over a trio of outdoor stages, told the story of Buffalo’s extraordinary history, from early days before the church’s founding to the achievement of America’s independence. “It was quite an exciting production,” remembers Vinnie Gordy. “There was great music, and cannons firing and lots of fireworks. I was age 12 and sang in the children’s choir. My older sister, Magie Fishburne, however, had a major role as Hannah Meeks, and my aunt, Helen Andrew, played Rachel Caldwell. There was a large turnout both nights from the community. I don’t believe anyone had ever seen anything quite like it.”  

Longtime members also point out that, like many older churches, Buffalo Church has seen its ups and downs over the decades. “By 2015,” says McKnight, “we were a church with a lot of older members, many who were dying out. Before COVID hit, in fact, we were down to about 68 regularly worshipping members — probably the lowest point in the church’s history.”

Ironically, he adds, COVID proved to be the unexpected salvation. When churches everywhere were asked to shut down for the duration, Buffalo’s leadership opted to remain open, employing extreme spacing throughout its handsome sanctuary. “When the word got out that we were holding services as usual, our membership returned, along with a lot of newcomers from other churches. It may be proof that God works in mysterious ways,” McKnight adds with a smile. “But the growth has continued regularly since that time.”

Today, the congregation numbers over 200 and continues to slowly grow, a timely revival for a congregation some affectionately call the “Pioneer Church of Greensboro.”

At a recent Saturday morning men’s prayer breakfast, a record turnout of more than 45 included nine newcomers who’ve recently come Buffalo’s way from other churches.

“I think they are drawn to a church where the fellowship is genuine and the preaching is firmly Bible-focused,” reflects Albright. “When I sit in the choir loft and remember where my parents and grandparents once sat, looking out over a sanctuary that is now almost full every Sunday, I think about the generations of people who were born, got married and passed their lives through this wonderful old church. I think our ancestors would be very pleased to see new faces and a church family that is growing again.”

Three decades ago, Albright — a lawyer with a gift for woodworking — took the remains of an 80-year-old white oak that met its demise through a lightning strike during a storm and made a rugged wooden cross. He wrapped it in chicken wire and planted in front of the church portico during Easter week. Last November, the same salvaged wood was used to build a larger cross, which hangs from the organ pipes in the sanctuary.

On Easter Sunday, members adorn the original cross he built with flowers before a sunrise service and congregation breakfast.

“It’s become a very popular tradition at Buffalo Church,” confirms Albright. “As the sun comes up, I think that old cross covered with spring flowers expresses our gratitude for the return of spring and the glory of Jesus Christ’s resurrection.”

Architectural Details We Cannot Resist

ARCHITECTURAL DETAILS WE CANNOT RESIST

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ARCHITECTURAL DETAILS
WE CANNOT RESIST

(Hint: Porches rock our worlds)

By Cynthia Adams •  Photographs by Bert and Becky VanderVeen

My dad stood on the brakes whenever he spied a house featuring grand, white columns and a generous porch sweeping across the front, his dusty pickup sputtering to a stop. He stopped, fully fixated, before puttering on, often headed to an antiques auction.

“Just beautiful,” he’d sigh, shaking his head in awe.

He most admired “grand old gals,” as he called the finest homes with slate roofs, copper gutters, working shutters and Juliet balconies. He would loop through historic neighborhoods, excitedly pointing and teaching me to recognize and value those details, too. Years later, I learned he had dismantled and salvaged materials from a ramshackle house to build our first family home just before my birth, proving just how much of a house guy he was — or, at least, proving his thrifty resourcefulness.

As for me, I was captivated by the interior details of homes. What treasures were to be found inside?

And I was anything but practical. 

With sparkling glass door knobs and a staircase to nowhere, even cobwebbing, cracking plaster and a dining-room floor that listed so much it gave you vertigo didn’t discourage my desire for a dodgy Westerwood home. It also possessed gorgeous molding (if an unfortunate, teensy fireplace) and a butler’s pantry — and a surprisingly serviceable floor plan featuring nooks and crannies galore. It quickly won the hearts of two neophyte homebuyers.

Old house lovers get it. 

Perhaps it takes preservationists and architectural buffs to fathom the irrational, deep affection historic homes and buildings inspire. And most can quickly tell you what particular details make their pulse quicken with pleasure — and why. They have an internal catalog of favorite things — from window details to arches. According to home blogs, they are particularly smitten by original details, especially French doors with mullions, substantial moldings and casings, ceiling details and medallions, and wall paneling.

So, I began asking some of my favorite old-house lovers, many of whom just so happen to have preservation credentials, to share some of their favorite architectural details up and down Greensboro’s streets and avenues.

Take Katherine Rowe, who lives in a classic brick two-story in the leafy and grand neighborhood of Sunset Hills and discovered a passion for historic homes while coming of age in Salisbury, where there is a thriving preservation movement. 

Proof? She served as an officer of Preservation Greensboro’s Board of Directors and dedicated 21 years volunteering with its Architectural Salvage program.

Rowe currently serves as a commissioner with the Historic Preservation Commission of Greensboro (HPCG). Two years ago, she helped judge the Community Appearance Awards of Winston-Salem and Forsyth County. Vocationally, she also does “small remodels and design work.”

Architecture is a topic she delightedly calls “fun!” 

If you ask what her favorite architectural detail is, Rowe hesitates to narrow it to one. Soon, she’s tripping over things she finds riveting. Firstly, she mentions the purple glass exterior sconces and cast concrete door surround at the old Masonic Temple on West Market Street “because they are so much themselves; bold, colorful. Meant to look a bit imposing, but they’re just adorable.” 

Rowe has difficulty choosing a single architectural detail that most delights. Then she discusses the elaborate cast-concrete Art Deco molding around windows “at 100 S. Eugene, next to the sheriff’s office, which are delightful because they are such a surprise. Detailed. A lot of work, and I appreciate the thought behind those windows, both from the architect and the guy who made them.”

Later she emails a list of admired architectural details around town, noting:

The miles of slate roof at Holy Trinity; graceful, symmetrical classical architecture at Temple Emanuel; arches and garages doors at the now defunct Central Fire Station on North Greene; robust arches at a private residence at 703 Fifth Ave. in Dunleath; the restored Gatekeeper’s Cottage (originally part of Green Hill Cemetery, now Carolina Home Partners) on Wharton Street; public spaces that are inspirational, such as War Memorial Stadium and East White Oak Community Center.

“There’s lots of good public architecture, right?” Rowe notes. “Charles Hartmann was responsible for much of it,” she adds, ticking off his greatest hits: “Grimsley High, Dudley High, the original Jefferson-Pilot building with Thomas Jefferson bust and Country Club Condos on Elm Street.”

On a personal note, she sends an email later, saying she was initially drawn to her home’s long sunroom with its three walls of windows and red quarry tile floor. “It reminded me of my great-grandmother’s sunroom in Albemarle; hers had jalousie windows, tropical barkcloth upholstery and bright, floral houseplants. Charming and cheerful to a child.”

Now that their sunroom is insulated, she and her husband, Jeri, spend weekend afternoons there reading or watching television. “And I bring in pots of geraniums and clover to overwinter on tables set up in front of two of the window walls. Which seems a bit full circle, don’t you think?”

Fellow volunteer, writer and preservationist David Arneke has also served with HPCG. Like Rowe, he has been an officer of Preservation Greensboro. He currently serves on the nonprofit Preservation Greensboro Development Fund.

Since 2017, he has written and edited piedmonthistorichomes.com, which serves as a comprehensive guide to “the most historic, notable and distinctive 18th-, 19th- and early- to mid-20th-century homes now for sale in North Carolina’s Piedmont Triad region.”

Notably, Arneke knows about succumbing to old house charms. For many years, he has lived in a circa 1900 College Hill home with Betty Work. Lured by certain charming architectural details when he first saw their future house, one distinction eclipsed all others.

“The feature that really grabbed us was the scalloped frieze boards that go all the way around the house. They were hard to even see when we bought the house because the entire exterior was painted beige — every last detail.” According to a November 1997 Greensboro News & Record interview, the couple took three years deliberating the perfect exterior paint colors.

“Also, inside the house, the back stairs,” he adds. “Neither of us had ever lived in a house with stairs in the front and in the back. Such a novelty for us.”

Having long chronicled features of older homes, he admires the columns on the Bumpas-Troy House, saying their size and prominence “make them grand and spectacular and unlike anything else in the neighborhood.” He muses, “It must have been quite a sight when it was built in 1847, out in the woods beyond the edge of town with no other houses around it.”

Arneke discusses a Dunleath home, which turns out to be the same one that Rowe had mentioned, notable for its “wonderfully distinctive front porch. I don’t remember seeing another one like it in Greensboro.”

Arneke recalls a striking historic feature of a Fisher Park house.

“The swooping roofline on 1101 Virginia Ave. . . . The whole house is remarkable, but that roofline, along with the portico, give it a whimsical look that you just don’t see very often. I get the feeling someone had fun designing that house.”

Fellow preservationist Deborah Kaufman, who lives in Sedgefield and now serves as an at-large commissioner on HPCG, says, “I absolutely love the front porches of older homes. They always make me nostalgic, especially if there’s a porch swing. I’m reminded of my childhood at my great-grandparents’ house.”

She qualifies details.

“Brick porch flooring and wrought iron rails just don’t give me the same warm feeling as those creaky wooden floors and white railings.” 

Even Greensboro City planner and preservationist Mike Cowhig, a Fisher Park resident, agrees with Arneke and Kaufman on the topic of porches, particularly when it comes to what’s directly under foot. In a word, Cowhig finds the commonplace touchingly affecting — and often overlooked. 

“There’s nothing like a well-preserved set of wood front porch steps and a tongue-and-groove porch floor,” he says. 

“Because they are exposed to the weather, [wooden] steps are often replaced with masonry steps, so they are increasingly rare. The treads are usually bullnose with a rounded edge like stair treads. Victorian era steps can have very decorative hand railings.”

As for historic tongue-and-groove porch floors? A yawping hole opened like a sinkhole in that Westerwood’s tongue-and-groove porch — just as I stepped out for the mail during our first week of residence.

Said porch’s beguiling Chippendale-style railings were rotting and much of the German siding cladding the entire house was also rotten. Only the concrete steps were not.

The next house that captivated us sold itself within minutes, even lacking a requisite front porch. But inside, it had handmade doors, brass knobs and gorgeous, deep windows (with wavy glass in the muntins!) offering a park view. Built in 1926 by former Greensboro mayor Ralph Lewis, we considered it “modern.” Sadly, the gorgeous slate roof was developing leaks, eventually requiring replacement a few years ago. As did the heating, air conditioning and rotting Tuscan columns at the front entry and side porch. 

But those windows with wavy glass? They survived, and they still slay me.

I was willing to overlook almost anything for its many sets of French doors (three!) and remarkably — how to express this to a saner person? — calming energy.  Laugh if you want, but the plaster walls inside our old house feel like a safe, sheltering place. 

Especially so if you forget the resident ghost.

From Central Park to Fisher Park

FROM CENTRAL PARK TO FISHER PARK

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From Central Park to Fisher Park

A big-city transplant brings verve to a 100-year-old bungalow

By Maria Johnson
Photographs by Amy Freeman

About a dozen years ago, Richard Peterson was walking down Greensboro’s North Eugene Street where it feathers from the commercial glassiness of downtown into the residential coziness of Fisher Park, when he saw a 90-some-year-old lady.

She was faded and outdated.

But she had class.

And good bones.

Peterson, once a jet-setting New York hair stylist with A-list clients, saw what she could be. So he did what he usually does: He made the most of her attributes, which, in this case, included a deep front porch, cedar shakes and rosy-brick walls stacked in a Flemish bond pattern, with alternating long and short sides in every course.

In the decade-plus since he bought the compact cottage, Peterson has artfully used tones from that brick palette — ranging from salmon to russet — to splash the property, inside and out, with blushing accents balanced by calming greens.

Now, especially in the spring, when the home’s English-flavored garden froths with blossoms inside the peaked waves of a boxwood hedge, the old Craftsman dame, petite though she may be at 1,000 square feet, still turns heads.

Her show stopper: the crown of pink Eden roses climbing above her front porch.

“When the roses are in bloom, people stop and take pictures,” Peterson says proudly. “If I’m outside, they tell me how beautiful the garden is and how much they enjoy seeing it.”

An anonymous passer-by once dropped off a pack of note cards with a picture of the house on the front.

“I think it’s a testament to the fact that the community around here is very thoughtful,” he says. “It’s a great place to live.”

Fifteen years a Piedmonter, Peterson still looks the part of Manhattanite with his oval glasses, shock of Warhol-white hair, low-cut Chuck Taylor sneakers, and jeans, henleys and hoodies in every conceivable shade of black.

Recently, he walked into a Greensboro furniture store.

“You must be from New York,” a saleswoman said.

How Peterson landed in Greensboro is as interesting as the transformation of his cottage from weary to whimsical.

He recounts some of his earliest memories as a child growing up outside Cleveland, Ohio, in the 1950s and ’60s. His father took the family for Sunday drives through swanky Shaker Heights, where the captains of shipping, steel and banking lived in grand homes.

Peterson wondered what life was like behind those walls.

His life was modest by comparison. His father owned a gas station. His mother was a housewife. His maternal grandfather, a Hungarian immigrant, tended a flower-and-vegetable garden behind the house that the two families shared.

Peterson was about 8 when his family moved to their own home, but he never forgot the flowers, partly because his grandfather incubated cuttings under Mason jars and literally passed on the beauty to the next generation.

When Peterson was 16, he went to work for a florist in Shaker Heights.

He accompanied the shop’s owner to the homes of wealthy clients to gather pretty vases, take them to the shop, fill them with botanicals and deliver them back to their stately homes. Peterson had found a way into the mansions that wowed him as a kid, and he liked what he saw.

“I drove my family crazy because all of a sudden I wanted Waterford and Baccarat crystal and sterling silver,” he says.

Soon, Peterson was arranging flowers.

Acting on the encouragement of a life partner who was a hairdresser, Peterson diverted his flair for composition into beauty school, where he learned how to snip, color and texture hair. He and his partner opened several salons in Cleveland.

“We were extremely successful,” Peterson says.

The couple moved to New York City in the late ’80s after Peterson snared a job with the late Kenneth Battelle, aka Mr. Kenneth, the darling of New York society women who wanted the cachet of being shorn by the man who is often described as the first celebrity hairdresser.

Mr. Kenneth created Jackie Kennedy’s iconic bouffant. Marilyn Monroe, Brooke Astor, Audrey Hepburn, Babe Paley, Katherine Graham, Nancy Kissinger, Joan Rivers and other notable noggins sat in his chair — but only for a cut.

Mr. Kenneth passed his wet-headed clients to his employees for styling. Peterson dried, combed, teased and lacquered his way into a loyal following.

He styled and schmoozed with Pamela Harriman, who was once married to Rudolph Churchill, the son of Sir Winston. Two husbands later, she was hitched to Averell Harriman, the U.S. Secretary of Commerce under President Harry Truman.

Peterson groomed the heads of many women affixed to heads of state.

When First Lady Betty Ford was in town, Peterson did her ’do. She told him about an Italian restaurant that she and the President liked. Peterson said that he’d love to take a friend there.

Ford made a reservation for them. When dessert was finished, Peterson called for the check. He was told that the dinner was compliments of Betty and Jerry Ford.

When the Crown Princess of Sweden was in New York and needed her hair styled, Peterson reported to her suite at the Waldorf Astoria; Mr. Kenneth’s salon was inside the hotel.

At the suite, Peterson was greeted by a man who led him to a room where he could work. Peterson directed the man to move some furniture so that the princess could sit in the best light.

After the princess was coiffed, her father walked into the room, and it dawned on Peterson who had helped him.

“I had the King of Sweden moving furniture around for me,” he says, dissolving into laughter.

With Mr. Kenneth’s blessing, Peterson worked part-time as a personal hairdresser to the CEO of two apparel companies. He traveled the world on her private jet.

“I was feeling all big-shot-like,” says Peterson. “It was a shock the first time I had to fly coach.” Except for a year-long stint with a salon in Palm Beach, Fla., Peterson camped in New York. He and his partner lived in an Upper West Side apartment overlooking Central Park, in the same building where actors Al Pacino and Andie MacDowell lived.

But, after a while, Peterson says, the magnets of love and work in the big city lost their pull. He started looking for a place to move solo. Someplace green, where he could have a yard. Someplace like his boyhood home, only warmer.

It just so happened that a friend, another New York stylist, flew to Greensboro every six weeks to style the hair of a local socialite he’d met in the Big Apple. Soon, he was doing the hair of several of her Greensboro friends. Peterson tagged along to help on one of those trips. During the visit, Peterson and his friend attended a drag bingo event in downtown Greensboro.

“The majority of the audience was straight people, and everyone was having a good time,” Peterson says. “It told me that this place was open and accepting. I thought, I could easily live here.”

A few phone calls later, he had a job at an upscale salon on North Eugene Street. He rented a room on Summit Avenue, watched way too much HGTV and set his sights on restoring an older home.

“I can’t tell you how many power tools I bought,” he says.

He haunted salvage stores, demo sites and antique shops, squirreling away hardscape for his someday yard: a wrought iron arch, a double metal gate, a white picket fence.

One day, as he walked down North Eugene, an aging swan caught his eye.

The sign out front said, “For Sale or Rent.”

Peterson rented with an option to buy. Then he opened his wallet.

He had the hardwood floors refinished and stained dark before he moved in.

Later, with deed in hand, he shelled out for a new roof, water heater, HVAC system and basement waterproofing.

The financial hits kept coming.

Inside the cottage, wood paneling peeled away from the walls. Under that, the original plaster flaked away. And under that, a brick wall crumbled. It was one of two side-by-side brick walls separated by a gap, an energy-saving style known as cavity construction, common in 1924, the year house was built.

Peterson had the inner brick wall repointed, hung with drywall and painted bright white.

He added floor-to-ceiling windows in the sunroom, where he often watches TV with his Labrador retriever, Sammy,

Waves of sunset and emerald tones — in the form of houseplants, artwork and punchy artifacts — carry the eye throughout the house. See a mannequin sheathed in pink sequins in the front room; a large metal pig in front of a Louis XVI repro desk in the middle room; and flying pigs perched in the sunroom.

The glee continues in the backyard with curvaceous rose-colored balusters around porches — including a small wedge that Peterson calls his “Juliet Balcony” — fan-back garden chairs and  faux flamingos.

The blushing accents pop against vivid green islands of artificial turf, which Peterson installed so his dog could go outside without stamping the house with muddy paw prints.

The rest of the backyard resembles a wooded hallway. With help, Peterson sculpted fieldstone paths and planting beds down the length. He decked the hall with river birches, azaleas, ligustrum, distylium and ferns.

The walkway ends with a project in progress, an empty landscape-block pond that Peterson envisions catching a tumbling waterfall.

“My wish is to be in a forest,” he says.

For the front yard, his wish is to be in the Cotswolds.

The metal gate, which he found at the now-shuttered Mary’s Antiques soon after moving here, is flanked by concrete orbs given to him by a client. She imported the balls from England.

“I can’t imagine what it cost to ship them,” Peterson says.

He added salvaged porch railings, balusters and a swing.

“No Southern porch is complete without a swing,” he says.

He filled the slatted seat with faux pillows and a throw that he made with spray foam, chicken wire, concrete slurry and paint. He spiked the arrangement with a gazing ball and contained the arrangement with a chain. The spectacle was made for eyes, not fannies.

Ditto the garden tucked between hedge and porch. In season, the space bubbles with a fountain that provides mood music for ferns, roses, azaleas, Asiatic jasmine, coleus, zinnias, impatiens, verbena and whatever else strikes Peterson’s fancy.

He bought a small pickup truck after moving to Greensboro, and he finds it difficult to pass a nursery without loading the bed with more plants.

“I was better off when I had a car, and not a truck, because now I’m not restricted,” he says.

He makes no apologies for his devotion to natural beauty, though.

“If you look at a flower — the color, the shape, the fragrance, everything — it’s a miracle,” he says.

He lets his observation hang before seeking a response.

“Isn’t it?” he finally asks.

The voice belongs not to a jaded urbanite, but to an awestruck kid.

A Way of Life

A WAY OF LIFE

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A Way of Life

Ann Tilley makes her mark, as lightly as possible

By Cassie Bustamante • Photographs by John Gessner

For me, it’s always been just to have the lightest impact on the world, on nature,” says Ann Tilley as she peers out from her sewing studio’s garage door, surveying the acreage that surrounds it. Nearby sits the narrow, tiny house with wood siding she and her husband, musician Adam Joyce, built and now reside in. The large family property is just about as far southeast as you can get in Guilford County. Just behind their home, a row of raised garden beds made from old refrigerators host early spring plantings, such as garlic, protected from the couple’s curious cats. Clothing pinned on a line strung along the garden’s exterior border waves in the breeze.

Tilley pauses, her fingers gently gliding along a patchwork T-shirt in shades of green with touches of lilac. “This is my absolute favorite shirt.” The garment has been created by stitching together pieces from old band merch. And not just any band — The Bronzed Chorus, Joyce’s group, whose sound is, according to Tilley, “instrumental post-rock, but then there’s a lot of synthesizer and electronic. I always say that if you listen to it in your car, you want to speed.” Tilley made a dozen or so of these tees and sold them at the band’s shows. The couple originally met at a Bronzed Chorus show in Durham, where Tilley was raised. Today, both are employees of Forge Greensboro. Joyce, a woodworker and furniture maker by trade, runs the makerspace’s wood shop while Tilley runs the textile shop.

Back in Bull City, Tilley’s parents own and run Acme Plumbing Company, originally founded by her great-grandfather. While her mother owned a sewing machine, Tilley, now 38, says the actual use of it sort of skipped a generation. “It was not progressive for her to sew,” she muses. Instead of traditional toys, Mom bought the kids sketchbooks and markers, nurturing creativity in other ways, while at the same time instilling in them environmentally conscious values.

“My mom was the first person I ever knew who wouldn’t buy something because of the packaging associated with it — before I ever heard of zero waste,” says Tilley.

Tilley recalls latching onto cross stitch as a child via Girl Scouts, discovering she loved fabricating art from fibers and how embroidery floss felt on her fingers. Later, in her tween years, a household book she happened to pull from a shelf opened her up to the world of sewing.

Foot to the pedal, she unearthed a means to express herself. “I like to be different,” she says. “I don’t like to wear what other people wear.”

Still, as the child of practical, no-nonsense parents, she says, “I thought fashion was frivolous. My parents are plumbers.”

Tilley’s interest in the arts led her to the Savannah College of Art and Design, a move that she says was good for her because it allowed her to explore painting, drawing, illustration and fashion. By the time she was an upperclassman, “I was obsessed with fashion magazines,” she recalls. “Harper’s Bazaar was my bible!” Tilley would flip through pages and, inspired, make her own versions of what she saw.

Her fashion interests led her to discover the fibers department, something she didn’t even know had a name. She recalls someone explaining to her what that department entailed and realizing it was exactly what she’d been after — “That’s me!” she recalls exclaiming. In 2008, Tilley graduated with her Bachelor of Fine Arts in fashion and fibers.

These days, Tilley calls herself a textile artist. The light-wood walls of her tiny home are filled with her own creations. “Pop art was my first love, which I think is really obvious.”

The art that hangs on her walls makes the house into something of a tiny museum that catalogues Tilley’s evolving interest in textiles. Inside a large, charcoal-gray, curved frame mimicking the shape of an iPhone is a woven textile she calls Hold Me, which is exactly what the text on the piece beckons. On the adjacent wall in the tiny home’s single spiral staircase leading to the loft, a complementary creation titled Current Reflections is framed in wood salvaged from old bleachers and given to them by a Forge friend. The piece itself is a chartreuse green, the yarn dyed by Tilley, and features a motif of toothbrushes, solar panels, poison ivy, trees and, in the center, tiny homes.

Up in the loft, the couple’s platform bed sits below a skylight. A shelf, inches away from the foot of the bed and made from the same recycled bleacher wood, provides ample room for books, plus space for guitar cases below. “It’s a little bit of a pain in the ass to change the sheets, but . . . ,” she trails off dreamily, looking up.

“I can literally see the Big Dipper,” she says. “And when you wake up in the middle of the night and the moon is there, I feel blessed every time.”

Next to the bed, a wall hanging Tilly fabricated faces the wrong direction so that the couple’s brindle-coated kitten, Tina — short for Patina — won’t damage it. Tilley takes it down and Tina immediately attacks.

The hanging is one of several Tilley made during a three-week art residency at Reconsidered Goods last November. Using denim yardage unearthed in “a ’70s storage unit,” Tilley crafted a piece that pays homage to Greensboro’s history in garment making, as well as her own background working as a Wrangler traveling on-site tailor and at a Raleigh denim factory. A pocket on the hanging is adorned with a leather Wrangler patch and Ralph Lauren rivets, a spray of bright, printed and embellished flowers emerging. Hot-pink felt lettering reads “Feeling lost? Discover crafts.”

“All of these pieces came from the idea of craft as therapy,” says Tilley of the work that came out of her residency.

Back downstairs on a gallery wall, a hanging fabricated from necktie silk reads “Days for Making, Days for Mending,” a necktie Tilley sewed hanging down its center. Along the bottom of the piece, “Salem” tags create a sort of fringe effect. Last fall, Tilley toured Salem Neckwear with Rene Trogdon, who was selling off and donating machinery and materials. His late father, James Trogdon Sr., had founded the company in 1964 to fill a niche market for premium neckties. Sixty years later, after Rene’s brother and the company’s then-president, James Trogdon Jr., became ill with long COVID, Rene found himself in a tough position and had to close. Sadly, James Trogdon Jr. passed away in December of last year.

“I mourn those stories of the loss of small and local,” she says, noting her parents’ own multigenerational company. Creating art with remnants from businesses such as Salem Neckwear, she gets to preserve a piece of their story.

“The thing I fear the most,” she continues, “is just that globalization is taking away all of that local personality.”

Every corner of their house, almost every nook and cranny in it, veers away from mass merchandising and designs driven by big-box retailers such as HomeGoods and Home Depot. The sliding door that leads to their single, green-tiled bathroom is a remnant from Tilley’s childhood bedroom. Where the original hardware sat, Joyce created darker-stained, midcentury-inspired wood inlays that flank the new nickel hardware. The exterior panels have been covered with mirrors to reflect light, giving the illusion of space. But the interior of the door was not such an easy task. Tilley struggled to strip all of the paint and eventually settled on covering it with a pastoral mural.

“I thought it was going to be done in a year without me doing anything,” quips Tilley about the home’s construction. But, she soon realized, “we need to do this together.”

Over the course of almost a decade, whenever they had time, Tilley and Joyce could be found outside of their rental home, just down the road in Julian, measuring, cutting, hammering. They also regularly visited the property, which had been in Joyce’s family for generations, first building and installing a solar shed.

The doors to the shed feature a modern graphic design in vibrant colors, inspired by a Frank Stella piece. Stella, who passed away in May of last year, was known as one of the fathers of 1960s minimalist art. Tilley and Joyce painted the doors right after a particularly busy moment in life, “and then, on our week off, we were like, ‘Let’s do something fun.’” A moment later, she chuckles. “We can’t ever relax.”

Beyond its bold doors, the building houses the tiny home’s breaker box and a generator, plus the regular tools one would expect to find in a shed. As far as the solar system that runs the property’s power, Tilley says, “Adam just watched a bunch of YouTube videos” and figured it out.

Some yards away from the home, a curved hangar featuring a bold, turquoise garage door serves as her sewing studio. It’s not heated though, so she has plans to construct a new building and has marked stairs with old sewing machines leading to where it will exist a stone’s throw away. “Manifest destiny, you know?”

“Right now, it’s a little nippy,” Tilley says. She tugs tighter around her a lavender velvet jacket she made with a cherry-printed lining, all fabric sourced from Reconsidered Goods.

This is where the real “magic” Tilley is known for happens — Magic Pants, that is. In 2016, Tilley founded Ann & Anne, a ready-to-wear clothing brand, with Anne Schroth, owner of Red Canary. While there, the two women designed a high-waisted tailored pant that featured an invisible elastic band in the back, an elastic panel in the front, and a cinching strap. The result? A pant that flattered figures of all shapes and sizes. Her friends started calling them “Magic Pants” and the name stuck.

Ann & Anne closed officially in 2018 and Tilley pivoted to teaching sewing classes across the area, from Durham all the way to Winston-Salem, including a stint at the John C. Campbell Folk School in Brasstown.

At Village Fabric Shop in Winston-Salem, she offered a class on making Magic Pants and the shop employees suggested that she make a pattern for them. At the time, she was busy teaching, but when COVID shut that down for a while, she got to work. And now? “I have literally sold this [pattern] on six continents.”

Tilley has also created her own YouTube channel, which allows her to increase her reach, teaching people across the world how to make these pants. Sewing, she says, is what gave her the “first feelings of self-sufficiency,” something she hopes to pass on to others through her instruction. Nowadays, she makes practically everything she wears, right down to the undies, something she started making from scraps when she worked at Gaia Conceptions, a sustainable brand founded by Andrea Crouse and located “just behind Westerwood Tavern.”

“I worked there for years,” says Tilley. Gaia Conceptions, she says, features made-to-order organic clothing and the brand pays its employees fairly. “They really walk the walk.” Crouse, Tilley says, even showed her how to make her own deodorant.

Nearby, a pair of of underwear in blue and white sits on her sewing table. “I haven’t worn these — don’t worry” she quips. The fabric is soft, comfortable, and there’s no elastic that would dig into a waist.

While the temperatures have been less than ideal, Tilley has, for now, set up shop in Joyce’s music studio, settled a little farther back on their land. A makeshift desk in the middle of his space holds her Brother sewing machine, a row of guitars hanging on the wall behind it. Next to the machine, old fashion drawings from her SCAD days feature a flirty midi dress, a long embellished gown and a mod ’60s-inspired swimsuit. “I do make my own swimsuits now,” she says. “And having a well-fitting swimsuit is wild!”

Joyce’s studio serves as the hangout spot for the couple’s other cat, Go-Go Boots, a beauty with long fur everywhere except for — you guessed it — below her knees. With the sun beckoning, she requests to go outside. Tilley follows.

“We actually got married in this field,” she says, looking out into a large, cleared space of land. In July of 2016, the couple tied the knot. True to form, the large tent that provided shade for guests was made by a friend “from old Tyvek he dumpster dived.”

And do they plan to live out their days where they once said “I do”?

“Forever home, absolutely,” says Tilley. Perhaps, one day, they may consider building a different house with a main-level bedroom as they age. But, if they do, it will be right here. “It’s a way of life.”