The Not So Secret Gardens of Flat Rock
/Visitors to Flat Rock Playhouse arrive expecting to be entertained by some of the most professional theater and musical productions offered anywhere in the Southeast. What they don’t expect, however, is to see professional landscaping and the series of beautiful gardens that adorn the expansive Playhouse campus.
The captivating natural areas at the Playhouse are the product of 15 years of hard work, dedication, and a lot of volunteer sweat invested by the North Carolina State Theater Garden Club. The Garden Club is part of the Supporting Players Volunteer Guild and is charged with enhancing and maintaining the beauty of the Playhouse gardens.
Pam and Eileen work on a planter at Flat Rock Playhouse
Master Gardener, Tamsin Allpress, heads up the volunteers and has been with the club since it first started working at the Playhouse. “We were asked to come in the summer of 2008 to put some flowers around and to decorate a little. And then one thing led to another. We’ve been coming back ever since.”
Garden Club volunteers work in the gardens twice a week on Tuesday and Friday mornings. Tamsin estimates that there are about 15 volunteers and that 8 are consistently active. Several of the members are Master Gardeners, but that is not a requirement to be part of the club. “It's a volunteer group of people who love to garden,” explains Tamsin, “and they are really dedicated to the Flat Rock Playhouse." New volunteers are welcome. "People who want to help just have to give me a call and show up and bring their gloves. You just have to love gardening.”
Tamsin is quick to point out that the club does much more than basic pruning, weeding, and planting. “We design, plan, sculpt, and organize all the gardens here at the Playhouse. We've created several garden paths and built arbors for people to stroll through the gardens. We've built many of the rock walls you see here and put in the ponds as well.”
Altogether, there are 12 major garden areas with 62 separate flower beds on the Playhouse grounds - all maintained by the Club. Each of the gardens has a theme; including the white garden, the rain garden, a native plant garden, a hydrangea circle, a woodland garden, and a pollinator garden. To help visitors more fully appreciate what they are seeing, the Club is working on updating the QR Code signs in each garden which will allow visitors to pull up descriptions of the gardens and plants on their smartphones.
And it is Tamsin’s hope that the gardens themselves will become a destination for visitors to the Playhouse - even when there isn’t a stage production in progress. “We want visitors to be able to come during the day, have a picnic, and enjoy the Playhouse gardens with their family and friends.”
The Theater Garden Club holds a plant sale in the fall that features plants that originated from the Playhouse gardens. Sales of these plants provide revenues needed by the club to continue their work. The next plant sale will be at the end of September 2023, so go ahead and mark your calendar now to make sure you can get a little piece of the Playhouse for your personal garden.
In the meantime, the Garden Club invites you to stroll around the grounds of the Playhouse and enjoy the fruits of 15 years of a labor of love. You might be surprised at the performance staged by nature when it has the assistance of some dedicated and talented gardeners.
