Southerners find an escape from urban growth among giant garden’s wonders.
Spring, borne on a rainbow of blossoms and butterfly wings, flits through the woods here, waking souls and chasing blues.
Azaleas, rhododendrons, dogwoods, daffodils and countless wild things bloom by the millions, it seems, drawing carloads, busloads of winter-weary people to this area’s floral showcase, Callaway Gardens. The 14,000-acre complex includes 700 varieties of azaleas, the world’s largest display of hollies and a glass-enclosed, tropical-garden butterfly center where transfixed human faces become landing zones for 1,000 multicolored winged creatures.
Created by Cason J. Callaway, a textile mogul who used to vacation near here in the 1930s, the gardens were conceived as a way to preserve the natural environment around Pine Mountain, Ga., 70 miles southwest of Atlanta.
Some 50,000 people visited when the complex opened to the public in 1952, but now 750,000 a year pay up to $10 to stroll and bicycle among its gardens and trails and around its fern-ringed lakes.
The exploding numbers are part of a story about the changing South. As developers turn more and more woods into parking lots, shopping centers and imitation Taras, city and suburban dwellers are left with fewer places to turn for a break from daily stresses.
In Georgia alone, said Lynn Hooven, the state Forestry Commission’s chief of forest management, 950,000 acres of forest timber was cut between 1981 and 1989--45% for “urban expansion.”
Allen Torbert, an agronomist in Auburn, Ala., said a lot of land where shrubs and wildflowers grow along with hardwood trees “is being clear-cut and turned into pine forests,” whose timber can be harvested and sold.
These changes make the trek to Callaway Gardens a therapeutic rite of spring for many, like Torbert and his family.
His mother-in-law, Pat Dalrymple of Urbana, Ill., standing among the butterflies, said: “You kind of forget there’s a winter when you come in a place like this.”
The people who work at the gardens sound a lot like doctors for winter-ill psyches when they talk about the visitors.
Judy Russell, director of public relations, recounted a popular story about a man who once said he was contemplating suicide, then walked along the nature trails and changed his mind.
On the first day of spring, Thomas Brinda, the gardens’ director of horticulture, was presiding over the creation of a group of huge topiaries being formed to represent prehistoric animals.
“We’re the Disneyland of the natural world,” he declared, noting that adults increasingly need another world.
They get it in the butterfly center, which opened in 1988. Modeled after those in England and Scotland, the glass-enclosed center contains tropical plants that provide a habitat in which butterflies carry out their entire life spans.
Pointing to a woman bent over a butterfly on a bush, camera poised, Frank Elia, manager of the butterfly center, said: “My whole reward is to see how much people love it. It’s an oasis.”
Brinda agreed. “Our urban parks and gardens aren’t being kept up,” he said, adding that “the density of the population in urban environments has to find a place to give.”
It gives here, as people visibly relax the moment they enter.
On the first day of spring, Bill and Lisa Yike, a husband and wife from Lawrenceville, Ga., in Gwinnett County, one of the nation’s fastest growing areas, came for an overnight stay. They planned to have dinner and a long, lazy day of azalea watching, a break from the madding crowds and the fast drivers around metropolitan Atlanta’s expressways.
Back home, she said, “we’re having to get up, having to go to work, having to go home. Down here, you can take your time and enjoy yourself. You can enjoy the beauty of it all.”
Said he: “Just for a few days, I’ll take my time, recapture that peacefulness and serenity. . . .”
