Azalea Festival

As it turns out, the reason for my family’s impromptu (at least, from my perspective) trip to the beach, was to go to the North Carolina Azalea Festival in Wilmington, NC. My aunt and uncle own a beach house on Topsail Island, which is only about 30 minutes away from Wilmington. They invited my parents, my grandmother, and me to come down for the Azalea Festival. My grandmother is a big gardener, I had never been to the festival, and my mom said the last time she’d been was when my grandparents took the family when she was a child.

Though there is a parade and a lot of other side events, like a shag contest, the main event is the tour of local chosen gardens. Unfortunately for the festival, the azaleas had been bitten by a late frost, so many of the blooms were wilted or dead. The thing about the gardens chosen for the Azalea Festival garden tour, of course, is that they’re often owned by very dedicated gardeners, and there’s a lot more to see than just azaleas. I wrote about the phenomenon of the lovely garden belles over at Geek Buffet, but there were a lot more beautiful things to see, and Saturday was a beautiful day for touring the gardens, very sunny and warm, but not too hot.

I took a lot of pictures, especially of interesting yard ornamentation. Note that the Buddha statue and the metal alligator were at the same house. Likewise, the candelabra on the tree and the ornate Eastern-looking heron pond grotto were at another house; it is also the one that had my favorite belle in the purple dress, if you checked the linked post above, and was set up to be lit at night. The house with the patio chess set was also the one with the gazebo sporting the glass ceiling, and it was one of my favorite houses. And of course, the wizened wizard statue standing in the potted kumquat was just too cute.

      

There were also a number of neat birdhouses:

  

And yes, I did also take pictures of flowers. Here are a few of my favorites. I’m sure you might notice that purple seems to predominate. Sorry, I can’t help it. I did think it was really neat to see how much a bleeding heart plant looks like its name, which you can see in the second picture.

    

Even though our day of touring gardens was beautiful and sunny, a huge storm system swept in during the night. Everyone else in the house was talking the next morning about whether or not the thunder and driving rain had woken them up. It continued to rain for most of Sunday, and there was enough fierce wind that there were tornado warnings for many of the counties up and down that part of the coast. Around midday, though, it stopped raining for about an hour, and we went over to the beach to look at the ocean. As you can see, it was a bit rough. And did I mention windy?