EDITOR'S NOTE: This story originally appeared in our March/April 2012 issue. It is being presented again here as part of our 30th Anniversary celebration.
Joseph Mackereth
Helen and Julia Smith
Helen and Julia Smith spent a quarter century documenting the wildflowers along the Blue Ridge Parkway on slides and in notebooks, eventually influencing the Parkway to change its mowing practices so the rest of us could enjoy the blooms as much as they did.
In May 1996, O. Norris Smith of Greensboro, N.C. wrote a simple letter to Blue Ridge Parkway headquarters in Asheville offering up a collection of more than 3,000 wildflower slides and dozens of notebooks collected over the course of 25 years documenting the flora and fauna along the Parkway milepost by milepost. The photographs and notebooks had belonged to his sisters, Helen and Julia Smith, two elderly ladies, former residents of the Presbyterian Home of High Point, who had dedicated a fair portion of their lives to saving the wildflowers of the Blue Ridge from the cutting blades of park maintenance personnel.
"During spring-summer-fall," Smith wrote later to Parkway curator Jackie Holt, "they kept close watch on the flowers along the parkway, and could direct you to the best display of certain flowers in relation to the mileage markers, and knew the parkway police by name." Smith was offering his sisters' archives to the Park Service only two weeks after Helen's death at age 97.
The parkway accepted the gift, acknowledging the sisters' contribution not just in their photographs and notes, but in the way they changed the Park Service's and the public's perception of what is beautiful.
After 15 years of lobbying park personnel to stop cutting wildflowers along the roadway, the sisters won their battle by the early 1980s to change the parkway's policy of carefully manicured roadways in favor of a more natural appearance that not only benefited the public with gorgeous wildflower displays but provided more wildlife food and habitat as well.
"Our mowing policy is, in a general way, unchanged since the days of the sisters' persistence toward our policy to park management," notes parkway spokesperson Peter Givens.
Helen and Julia Smith always lived close to the Blue Ridge Parkway, having spent their girlhoods in Lexington, Va., where their father was president of Washington & Lee University, and then later moving to Greensboro. Both were professional women. Julia was a professor of nursing at UNC Chapel Hill and then at the University of Tennessee
Nursing School, and Helen taught physical education at the North Carolina College for Women. But in their free time and eventually in their retirement, one of the sisters' favorite pursuits was touring the parkway in search of wildflowers. Their slides, taken mostly by Helen, date back into the 1950s, and cover the flora and fauna of the parkway from its beginning to end, every flower and shrub carefully described and noted by milepost in little brown notebooks.
On July 10, 1974, Helen wrote in excitement in her notebook about wildflower displays at MP 208, "Black-eyed susans and wild sweet pea and one stalk of butterfly weed just beginning to open!"
Typically it was Julia who identified the flowers, while Helen took pictures, but both sisters were frustrated to find, year after year, that their beloved wildflowers were constantly being mowed down by parkway maintenance staff. Their notebook entries are sometime humorous but often filled with consternation. Helen wrote on July 15, 1973, after seeing wildflowers cut down near MP 293, "In the excitement of noting that the mowing had included the bank where the Gray's Lily had been, I completely forgot the little oozy ditch and ran into it, the car listing to starboard and Maria and Mary Weaver [her traveling companions that day] pinned in on the right side! Had to be pulled out by a wrecker!"
Only a few days earlier, Helen had approached parkway maintenance crews about their mowing. "First thing I saw was a group of boys cutting everything way down," Helen wrote on July 10 of that same year. "And across the road a Park Service man cutting tree limbs and bushes." She approached the men and asked why they were cutting everything and was told grumpily, that the cutting was to create "sight distance."
So upset were the sisters by the indiscriminate mowing practices that deprived visitors of native flora and fauna displays that Helen and Julia decided to start lobbying the parkway to change its cutting policies.
They documented mile after mile of the parkway, taking pictures of wildflowers before they were cut and then taking pictures of the same areas after cutting. They wrote letters to headquarters, pleading with the park service to preserve wildflowers spaces.
Finally in 1978, they were granted the opportunity to show their slides to parkway personnel in Asheville and make their case for reduced mowing. Julia noted after the meeting that maintenance staff especially were fearful of any change in mowing practices, believing that any cutback in mowing would endanger their jobs and cost them income. But a month later, the sisters received a letter from then Parkway Superintendent Gary Everhardt expressing appreciation for their presentation. Over the next few years, park service policy began to change.
The late Assistant Superintendent Arthur Allen remembered the Smith sisters fondly. "I found them delightful," he said. "I never saw so much enthusiasm for keeping records of flowers. There wasn't anything that went on with the flora of the parkway that they didn't observe.
"They were the conscience of people interested in the flora of the parkway," Allen added. "Maintenance men's pride was to make the parkway look good in their terms." But the Smith sisters created new terms where letting nature take its course preceded the desire to create manicured ditches. Allen participated in efforts to create wildflower demonstration areas along the parkway and in hiring resource management personnel who could document where the best wildflower areas were and where rare flowers could be found. Today the resource management staff numbers five, where in the 1970s, there was no one in charge of resource management.
In 1987, the parkway's new Natural Resource Manager, Bambi Teague, established a wildflower display area management plan that extended the new mowing policies to not only cut back on cutting but to create actual areas along the drive especially for providing "an aesthetically pleasing recreational and viewing activity for the parkway visitor and food, cover, and habitat for birds and small mammals."
Even trail maintenance today reflects the lobbying of the Smith sisters. The current mowing standards declare that "ferns, wildflowers, and seeps along the trails shall not be mowed except to provide sufficient clearance for unimpaired foot travel."
But even as mowing and trail maintenance policies began to change, Helen and Julia kept a careful eye on the Blue Ridge Parkway. In 1988, Helen told the High Point Enterprise, "Each year we are always hopeful we will see more flowers than the year before." By that time both sisters were in their 80s.
After the sisters showed their slide presentation to parkway personnel, they watched the roadways for changes. In June 1978, Helen wrote about wildflower displays between mileposts 348 and 349: ''A big clump of Phlox near the ditch-he must have lifted the cutting blade! Another cluster of bright yellow flowers right of the ditch, he had lifted the cutting blade for it!"
That same day as the sisters approached MP 250, Helen noted, "They have cut back only one swath-everything fine."
The sisters also mentioned talking to a new park ranger at the Pisgah Inn above Asheville who said she had been told about the sisters' efforts to curb mowing on the parkway. "I gather they have briefed the rangers," wrote Helen, "so they can explain to the public if necessary."
The sisters continued to monitor their beloved wildflowers till the ends of their lives. Julia died in 1993, and Helen died three years later. "It is appropriate to note," says Givens, "that Helen died at age 97 just after giving a wildflower talk to a group of residents in a nursing home!"
Today the Smith sisters' passion and influence is remembered in a display at the Blue Ridge Parkway visitor center at Peaks of Otter in Virginia, where several of their wildflower slides are on display.
Today's visitors won't see wildflower display area signs on the parkway anymore because of problems with some visitors poaching rare flowers. But a careful observer may still note shaggy areas along the drive where wildflowers are preparing to bloom or a sudden colorful display as they come around the bend - all thanks to two sisters who loved these mountain flowers more than anything, and maybe more than anyone else.