By Katie Elzer-Peters
Contributing writer
Over the past 20 years, proceeds from the Cape Fear Garden Club Azalea Garden Tour have returned more than $1 million to the community in the form of scholarships, conservation contributions and beautification grants. Since 1953, the North Carolina Azalea Festival and the Cape Fear Garden Club have collaborated to produce the Azalea Garden Tour, attracting flocks of bow-tied and be-hatted admirers to local backyards, plots and patios.
The theme for the 2015 tour taking place April 10-12 is “From River to Sea,” highlighting eight private and 10 public local gardens.
“We have fewer larger gardens on the tour this year, but the gardens we do have are still inspirational, while being relatable for the majority of tour goers,” said Sandra Kittinger, 2015 garden tour chairwoman.
Two of the showpiece gardens this year are located along Edgewater Lane off of Airlie Road in Wrightsville sand. Garden owners Donna and Britt Starling and Beverly and Carroll Thomas have created backyard oases that are dramatically different from each other, yet still fit seamlessly into a surrounding coastal landscape of palm trees and live oaks.
The garden of Donna and Britt Starling is a plant lover’s garden.
“I love the big, hot-pink Formosa azaleas in the front,” Donna Starling said. “I have some beautiful azaleas that are white with random hot pink stripes.”
Her favorite perennials are the farfugium, or leopard plants, found along a trail she named the Peaceful Garden Walk. The plants have large, circular green leaves with yellow spots. A few ginkgo trees dot the backyard alongside deciduous azaleas — not commonly planted in this region. Their bright orange flowers set the spring landscape on fire.
“Our garden has always very much reflected us as a family,” Starling said.
She is planting a Japanese garden next to the kitchen window that will incorporate her current obsession for bonsai.
Recycled construction materials and plants otherwise destined for a garbage bin or compost heap are a recurring theme. At the corner of the backyard sits a greenhouse built using the old windows from their house following a remodel. Starling mainly grows orchids and succulents inside.
“People bring me their orchids so I can make them rebloom. I also end up with a lot of orchids that people are planning to throw away,” she said. “I have boxwoods from a house that was being torn down. When some people down the street were redoing their yard and taking out some trees, I asked the contractor if I could have them.”
What was a playhouse, now outgrown by her three children, has been repurposed into a backyard tool shed.
An area once reserved for playing soccer and kickball is now slated to become a knot garden — an intricate, formal garden popular in Elizabethan England. Starling is modeling hers after the plantings at Reynolda Gardens of Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem.
“It will be filled with bulbs for the garden tour,” she said. Perennials and annuals will follow.
Starling gets her inspiration from traveling and visiting other botanical gardens and nurseries.
“My son plays hockey and we travel. I’m always Googling to see where there’s a nursery or a garden,” she said.
Not far from the Starlings, the Thomases’ pale-yellow home with a silver tin roof looks like it was plucked from Key West, complete with a model sailfish hanging on the outside of the pool house. Conch shells line the deck railings and numerous nautical sculptures are placed throughout the property.
The front garden combines Southern charm with a touch of the tropics. Formosa azaleas sweep along the driveway. The deep-set porch is shaded by palm trees and large fatsia plants, which are hardy here, but look like they came from a rainforest. Knockout roses, liriope and loropetalum complete the lush look. Spring annuals add a burst of color. The turfgrass, while dormant, forms an immaculate, golden carpet.
To get to the back garden, guests walk through a wooden gate anchored by tabby (shell and concrete) posts, covered with a rambling Lady Banks rose, in full bloom during the Azalea Garden Tour.
A kidney-shaped pool of sparkling turquoise water is the focal point of the backyard. It is surrounded by sable palms, hardy bananas and ornamental grasses. Squint and you could be in the Bahamas, but look up at sweeping live oaks and stately pines ringing the property, and you are right back at home in the Carolinas. If you need to rest your feet you can sit a while on the expansive deck overlooking the pool. And pretend like it’s your house. Doesn’t everyone do that while on the Cape Fear Garden Club’s Azalea Garden Tour?
