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Ribbon Cutting Ceremony Celebrates Originals
Airlie Azaleas Come Full Circle
BY PAT BRADFORD
TENDER pink, white and purple petals amid flashes of bright whites line the grounds of 1925 South Live Oak Parkway, site
of this year’s Azalea Garden Tour ribbon cutting Friday, April 5 at 10 a.m. Legend has it that the azaleas blooming are old
growth shrubs transplanted from the fabled Airlie gardens on the grounds of one of the summer homes of newly married
Sarah and Pembroke Jones.
Sarah transformed Airlie into a garden estate by creating lakes and tree-lined paths in the early 1900s. Camellias and azaleas were
brought to Airlie by renowned horticulturist P. J. Berckmans of Augusta, Ga. In 1906, Sarah hired German landscape gardener Rudolph
Topel to develop and maintain the grounds, which he did until his death
31 years later. The Airlie narrative has Sarah as having hired Topel away
from the German Kaiser.
It is some of these azaleas and camelias that are said to have been
transplanted from Airlie to Live Oak Drive, which has seen just three
owners: the Bears, the W.H. Corbett family, of Corbett Packaging, who
bought the home in the early 1970s, and Linda and Steve Smits, who
purchased it and began extensive inside renovations in 2012.
In 1931, Sarah promoted Airlie’s grounds with its first public garden
tour. Later, in 1948, after the Corbett family bought Airlie, the first Azalea
Festival took place there.
Fifty years later the Airlie property would be sold to New Hanover
County for preservation as a county park.
The Corbetts were the second family to reside at 1925 Live Oak
Parkway and are credited with transplanting some of Airlie’s beloved
azaleas and camellias on site. But the ribbon cutting’s home was built
and its grounds established by Dr. Sigmond and Catherine Bear in the
early 1950s. Over the next 20 years, they reared their four daughters
there. One, artist Barbara Bear Jamison, a fourth generation Wilmington
native, says she has wonderful memories of her childhood home in
what was at the time a far more rural setting accessed by a dirt road.
“There were no neighbors, just pine forests around us for a few
years and the road in front of our home was unpaved. The woods were
beautiful and there was a horse stable at the end of the dirt road (now
the location of Sterling Place) where some kept their horses and rode
on trails all through the pine forest,” Jamison says.
KATIE DOWDY
The Cape Fear Garden Club will open its annual Azalea Garden
Tour with a ribbon-cutting ceremony on April 5 at 1925 South Live
Oak Parkway, Wilmington.
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WBM april 2019