Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 22, 1990 TAG: 9004220266
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: F-6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: PINE MOUNTAIN, GA. LENGTH: Medium
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 flora 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, 70 miles southwest of Atlanta.
Some 50,000 people visited when it opened to the public in 1952, but now 750,000 annually 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 and shopping centers, city and suburban dwellers are left with fewer places to turn for a break from daily stresses.
Peter Kirby, southeast regional director of the Wildnerness Society, complained that the federal government designates as wilderness only 10 percent of 4 million acres that it manages in six national forests in Georgia, Tennessee, North Carolina, Virginia and South Carolina. In California, he said, as much as 40 percent of U.S.-run forest land is designated wilderness.
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 percent 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."
Torbert's mother, Jeanette Torbert of Society Hill, Ala., was able to forget, for a while, the bad news that permeates life.
"You read about ugly things, and then you come in here and see all this beauty and you feel better," she said.
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, was assaulted by beauty and changed his mind.
The gardens, Russell said, are "a different experience for everybody," ranging from pure recreation to getting ideas for landscaping at home.
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 metamorphosis and lifespan.
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 . . ."
by CNB