Cullowhee. The name rolls off the tongue like the bend of a slow creek curling through the southern hills, gathering what time has forgotten and what wisdom still grows green. Cullowhee is not a place you visit—it is a place you join.
This July, I found myself walking into that communion for the first time, though it felt like a homecoming. I arrived alongside George Mitchell, who first attended the Cullowhee Native Plant Conference in 1982. George, whose work with Woodlanders built a legacy now spanning 45 years, introduced me not just to the conference, but to the enduring spirit of a community that has always looked to the understory for answers.
There is something near-reverent in this gathering of growers, ecologists, poets, and plant lovers. In the quiet corners of Western Carolina University, discourse blooms as wild and intricate as a summer meadow—our conversations swaying between taxonomy and philosophy, kinship and keystone species.
“This isn't just about plants,” I overheard someone say. “It’s about place.”
Roots, Both Old and New
To be welcomed into the Cullowhee fold is to recognize that native plants are not a trend. They are a return. A reclamation of story. George’s invitation was more than personal—it was generational. I felt the ghost of Woodlanders past in the soil beneath our feet and in the knowing nods of those who stopped me to say, “We’ve long admired what Woodlanders started.”
This was no ordinary conference. The pedigree of the speakers was staggering: Doug Tallamy’s rallying cry for ecological intimacy, Thomas Woltz’s landscapes as narrative, the deeply rooted wisdom of Alan Weakley, the musical syntax of Jim McCormac, the fierce clarity of Dr. Kristen Wickert, and of course—J. Drew Lanham, whose words remind us that land and love and loss are not separate things.
A Gathering of Minds, A Gifting of Plants
In the margins of lectures, friendships blossomed. There were late-night exchanges of cuttings and seed pods like secrets. Jack Johnston handed me a rare find with the tenderness of passing on a family heirloom. Jeff Jackson—the Stewartia whisperer—spoke of branches like old friends and taught me to see the curves of a trunk as choreography.
It was not just the exchange of plants but the exchange of care, of trust, of long-term hope. You don’t give someone a Stewartia unless you believe they’ll live to see it flower.
“Watch the birds,” Drew Lanham said. “Watch the moths and fireflies. They'll tell you who belongs and who’s overstayed.”
The Pull Between Worlds
Much of the conversation circled the now-familiar tension between native and non-native. But Alan Weakley reminded us not to fall into purism. The world, like the garden, is full of nuance. A non-native is not inherently evil—only when it unbalances. And even then, sometimes it harbors the home of a warbler or the larva of a moth whose name you’ve yet to learn.
Cullowhee teaches stewardship over superiority. It teaches to watch closely, prune gently, and remember that we are not rulers of a landscape but caretakers of its conversation.
“Sometimes you leave a weed,” I scribbled in my notebook, “not for the plant—but for the promise it keeps for something else.”
The Afterglow
As I drove away, a few cuttings nestled beside me in the passenger seat, I thought not just of what I learned but what I inherited. Cullowhee is not an event. It is a season that stays in you. It is the echo of a field lecture at golden hour. It is the hush of 300 people listening, breath held, as Doug Tallamy draws connections between caterpillars and carbon.
Cullowhee reminds me that native plants are more than ornamental—they are our link to legacy, to lineage, to land.
“Love a thing enough to learn its name,” Drew Lanham said, his voice soft as leaf litter. “Then let it teach you yours.”
