When I was in the process of purchasing the land I now live and garden on in North Carolina, one sunny morning I met with three men, all of us standing near the deeply rutted dirt road that led back to the property.
There was the surveyor I had hired, an 82-year-old mountain man who would later leave me out of breath scrambling up the ridge after him. There was the current landowner’s brother, who was living in the old farmhouse on a separate plot. And there was a neighbor, then perhaps in his late 70s, who was part of the family that had once owned the farm before it began being divided into smaller parcels.
That morning, I came to know a little bit about the history of the property before I even had purchased it, and walked it hundreds of times, and studied sunken ground, unusual patches of plants, and piles of rock. I was surprised when the neighbor said not long ago, the farm was all in tobacco. So surprised I had to ask a clarifying question, “All of it?” He told me yes. The only trees were on the ridge lines. What now looked like a steep pine forest had a handful of decades ago, ALL been in tobacco. The neighbor had worked the tobacco with his family as a boy and a young man, and although tractors were widely available at the time, they couldn’t use one on slopes so steep, so they used horses. I believe at some point in the conversation someone cracked a joke about tying the horse to a ridgeline tree to keep it from toppling.
The history of small tobacco farms, how they came to be and how abruptly they ended, is fascinating. I won’t go into it too much here though. But this is just a little backstory on why I became interested in paying homage to a critical part of North Carolina’s history with none other than, tobacco flowers.
A close-up of the tobacco flower "smoke"
Tobacco flowers are especially interesting to me in many ways. For one, they are quite delicate soft pink little trumpets that splay out on top of a thick stalk. But what captivated me most is that tobacco flowers are an overlooked byproduct of tobacco production. Blooms are removed not because they lack beauty, but because the crop has been cultivated for another purpose. Anyone familiar with growing tobacco already knows that it’s common practice to “top” every plant after it flowers so that the plant will reinvest in growing out its leaves. So there you have it, hundreds or thousands of beautiful flowers offering their value by lying in the field to rot.
I had this idea one day to decorate the old farmhouse porch with tobacco flowers, as a way of remembering what the land used to be, what the rhythm of the family that lived there looked like, how it was all shaped by the tobacco plant. But I had a problem. No one hardly grows tobacco in Western North Carolina anymore. Where would I get the flowers? And then wouldn’t you know, when I was dropping my child at daycare, I noticed someone had planted a small field right next door.
The tobacco field next to my son's daycare
So for a few months, I watched the tobacco grow. And it grew FAST. And before I knew it, it was starting to bloom. I asked about the tobacco field at the daycare, and was told the man who grows it does it so his grandkids can experience a little bit of what life used to be like. I thought that was pretty cool, and I got lucky enough to see him outside working one day while picking my son up. I don’t think he could have imagined what I was about to ask as I toddled toward him juggling my two young kids. And credit to him, despite the strange question, he told me I could top some plants!
I couldn’t believe my luck. Tobacco flowers are delicate, so I didn’t want to wait long after harvesting them to do the installation. I immediately called the owner of the farmhouse who I’ve known for some years. The farmhouse itself has been empty now since around the time I bought my land, and what once was home now looks more like a relic of a way of life long gone. I have to say I was expecting a yes to being able to use the farmhouse as a setting for my flower installation due to my relationship with the owner, but what I received was far more interesting.
She said yes, you can decorate the porch with flowers, anytime, but no, you can’t use tobacco flowers. I’m against tobacco. I was disappointed, but reminded of the complicated history and power of this plant and of the tobacco industry itself. After my disappointment waned, I realized that this kind of tension was exactly what I was exploring with the installation: the exploitation, the livelihood; the brutal work, the meaningful agricultural traditions.
So I reached out to a friend with a barn to see if she would host me, umm…tomorrow morning? Because that’s when I had the opportunity to harvest. And because my friend is gracious and amazing, she didn’t mind the last minute request, and I got a resounding yes. We were off to the races! I was still imagining the installation happening outside the barn. Vining up from the ground, like it was reclaiming the structure somehow, which is what I had planned to do at the farmhouse.
The front entrance of my friend's multi-level barn
But when I arrived, my friend showed me around the barn as it had been a while since I’d seen it. And when she showed me the dark and musty loft with tier poles made of still-barked slender trees, we wondered if they had at one time hung tobacco there. Her barn is not a tobacco barn, as the style is highly recognizable in Western North Carolina, but still the loft closely resembled what you would find in a barn built for that purpose. Suddenly, this dark place with just a little light coming through cracks between the boards seemed just right. And because of the setting, the installation started to take shape in a different way. Instead of something taking back over, it became quieter. Now it was something fading out. Something wafting through the space. Something that was once concrete, but now you just pass through it.
Me working on framing the shot
I still didn't have a complete idea of the install, but now I had a clear direction. And a time constraint working with the delicate flowers (which in the end held up much better than I thought they would) so I felt I needed to boogie. I couldn’t help but grin when my friend came out of her house with a camera tripod I hadn’t even asked for, as I had ordered one for the shoot but it hadn’t come in on time.
I framed the shot. The tier poles and a suspended wire were already there to help hold my mechanics against gravity. I started working on my chicken wire “smoke.” I used chicken wire, zip ties, and fishing line to hold the sculpture together. As far as I could tell, it looked alright, but it was hard to see the form in the dark loft before the flowers were on it, so I was playing a little bit of a guessing game, and I knew I’d just have to start placing flowers and go from there.
Setting up the mechanics using chicken wire, zip ties, and fishing line
Placing the flowers ended up taking longer than setting up the mechanics, to my surprise. That was because once the flowers were on the structure, I could finally see where I needed to edit to get the shape and the movement right, and I ended up making a lot of tweaks and photographing each one to better see the composition, so I conveniently ended up documenting my process without intending to. I shot with a new-to-me lens, and learned pretty quickly that if I moved in front of the camera in the low light, I could create a smoke-like haze in the photograph. So I was doing a lot of strange dancing in front of my tobacco flower sculpture which felt very fitting at the time.
All of my edits led to more and more visual simplification
From the time I started topping the tobacco plants to when I hauled the last bucket of the removed installation flowers back to my car, was about 8 hours of sheer hustling. It took about 3 more hours than I anticipated. The more of these kinds of things I do, the more I see how all the little time thieves that are hard to anticipate add up. Being an incessant editor, there are many things I would have done a little differently, but I’m really happy with how it turned out.
I might still be in shock that I was even able to source tobacco flowers and find a great place to shoot on such short notice, and there’s a big thank you in there to the tobacco grower and my friend who let me use her barn and helped me out in so many other ways too. So many pieces fell into place that when I was first dreaming up the idea, all felt like a shot in the dark. And I guess that’s what I ended up doing really, was shooting…in the dark.
A picture my friend took of me in the loft
Stay tuned because I am planning more Appalachian storytelling with flowers. I did get permission to use the old farmhouse after all!
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