“Whole weekend’s worth of fun” promised for this year’s Azalea Garden Tour
Cape Fear Garden Club's annual Azalea Garden Tour will feature thirteen gardens for tour goers during this year's N.C. Azalea Festival. (Photo by Donna M. Thompson/Courtesy of Cape Fear Garden Club)
Thirteen gardens will be available for the 2023 Azalea Garden Tour on April 14-16.
This year, the event is celebrating its 70th anniversary. Paying homage to the past as well as looking towards the future, the Cape Fear Garden Club’s annual event will begin at Lillian and Percy Smith’s home on Forest Hills Drive, the site of the inaugural tour in 1953.
“Seventy years ago, Lillian Smith’s mother-in-law was the chair of the very first garden tour,” Barbara Exner Downing, of the club’s media and communications committee, said. Lillian Smith’s husband recently passed away, so Downing explained, “the garden is almost identical to how his mother had it, and he wanted to honor his mother with being on the tour.”
The Smith yard will host a ribbon cutting ceremony to kick off the tour on Friday, April 14 at 9:30 a.m., with the Azalea Queen doing the honors. Smith’s yard is Garden 1 on the tour. Gardens 2 and 3 are close by in the Forest Hills neighborhood, and two more are across Oleander Drive in the Glen Meade area.
After touring those homes, garden guests can head to Masonboro Sound to tour Gardens 6 and 7. The Live Oaks estate, Garden 7, “has never been in any of the tours over the last 70 years,” according to Downing.
The large estate is a historic home that was designed by Henry Bacon, the same architect who designed the Lincoln Memorial, Downing said.
“In the 1920s, that property was the playground of the Astors and the Vanderbilts,” Downing shared. “The young couple who have bought the house have done a lot of work and put a lot of effort into it to spruce up the gardens, and people will be pleased and happy to get to see it.”
As Garden 8, Airlie Gardens invites guests to view its 67 acres on Saturday and Sunday. The New Hanover County gem is open to all Azalea Garden Tour ticketholders throughout the weekend.
From there, the tour returns to Landfall for the first time since 2012. Since traffic was an issue in the past, the garden club has arranged for transportation in and out of Landfall to the four gardens and Kenan Chapel.
Parking for shuttle service to Gardens 9-13 is located at Mayfaire Town Center. Guests are asked to park behind Fuel Fitness Wilmington (formerly O2 Fitness) and Fox & Hound, both located on Town Center Drive adjacent to Regal Mayfaire. Entrance to Landfall stops is only available for non-residents by this shuttle service.
Plein Air artists will be painting in all of the gardens and an art sale will be held in the garden at Live Oaks estate, Garden 7, on Sunday. There will also be raffles for a “truckload of plants” from the Proven Winners brand, supplied by Johnson Nursery, and a cruise on the Blue Bonnet courtesy of YachtSource.
“It is a whole weekend’s worth of fun,” Downing shared.
Tickets for the event are $50 and can be purchased online. Proceeds from the Garden Tour “funnel back into New Hanover County nonprofits in the form of grants and scholarships,” according to Downing.
