Flowers and Queens

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Wilmington, North Carolina is known as the Azalea capitol of the south.

The flowers are found everywhere, in practically every garden.

They certainly grow well in this climate, and are very tolerant of less than perfect gardening.

Just after World War II, the local garden club started the Azalea Festival, to show off these pretty gardens.

Other groups soon added their own events, until the festival became the largest in the state.

Today I experience part of it.

It turns out that this festival shows off certain aspects of Southern culture.



The festival started today with a parade.

Parts of it were very different from the other parades I’ve seen, even in the South.

For starters, there were the Azalea Belles.

Starting in 1969, the garden club promoted the event by hiring young women to lead tours in hoop skirts, and they became almost as famous as the gardens themselves.

They featured prominently on parade floats.

Then there were the beauty queens.

Every Southern parade features a beauty pageant winner or two (see March 24^th), but the Azalea Festival parade really goes overboard.

There were dozens upon dozens of them, everyone from Miss Teen North Carolina to Miss North Carolina Spot Festival.

The final float was the Azalea Queen herself, surrounded by eight princesses.

The other notable feature was the Citadel cadets.

Most Southern parades feature members of local military units.

Despite being less than sixty miles from Camp Lejeune Marine Corps Base, this parade had none at all.

Instead it had a corps of cadets from the Citadel Military College in Charleston.

They did some wonderful precision marching and drilling, but it was still an odd sight.

I find it telling that they all wear grey uniforms, which evoke the same sort of nostalgia that the Belles do.



After the parade, I went to one of the festival’s signature events, the house tours.

Wilmington has the largest collection of Antebellum and Victorian houses in North Carolina (and one of the ten largest in the US).

Except for three house museums, all of them are private houses and offices.

The Historic Wilmington Foundation was organized to preserve these buildings, and during the festival they organize a tour of several of them.

It’s a rare chance to see how people live daily in a historic house.

Many of them ARE decorated for the occasion, but the more everyday aspects do show through.



People’s treatments of their houses varied quite a bit.

The outside needs to be historically accurate in order to earn the preservation designation, but the inside doesn’t.

The bathrooms and kitchens are normally highly modern.

Two houses had modern additions to an existing structure.

The owners usually made an effort to preserve interior architectural detail, but it varied with the project.

Two people decorated their houses with artwork.

As a collector, I enjoyed this quite a bit.

Another owner is a huge collector of antebellum antiques, and their house was covered in them (it helps that they are an antique dealer!)



Three owners had taken houses that were really dilapidated (one had been used as a crack house) and restored them.

One pair did all the work themselves, partly to showcase their interior design business.

Talking to these owners, restoring a house is more a labor of love than an investment strategy, although houses in this neighborhood are now worth a bundle.



After the house tour I went to see the other side of the festival at the street fair.

Held on the waterfront, it contains the usual music stages and vendors.

The bands played classic rock.

Two vendors sold a delicacy that is mainly seen at Southern fairs: Deep fried Oreos.

Sadly, they were out by the time I wanted dinner.

The fair organizers sold beer to those with ID.

I was glad to see that many had a preference for Yuengling over the generic Budweiser products.



The end of the music concert featured something I have never seen before at an event like this.

As noted above, Wilmington is less than sixty miles from Camp Lejune.

Practically everyone in town is either active duty military, a veteran, or knows someone who is.

They had a short, poignant ceremony honoring Marines who died in combat.

After it was over, a chant of “USA! USA! broke out (something I have not seen at an event like this either).

That led into the fireworks show.



Initially, this show was much like the one in St. Petersburg.

They fired one firework at a time, leading to a boring show.

Then, the skies started to drip.

Initially, this was a good thing as it forced the fireworks people to speed up the performance.

Multiple fireworks now went off at once, leading to a much better presentation.

Then, the lightning started to flash.

The fireworks crew quickly shot off