Enter a Wonderland of Floating Water Lilies on the Edge of the Blue Ridge Mountains

To harvest a water lily, Nikki Gibson first pulls on her waders. With her dogs, Tucker the basset hound and Danni the Great Dane, and maybe even Pye the peacock trailing along, she walks down the grassy path from her home toward one of her shallow ponds on the edge of the Blue Ridge Mountains. 

In this misty sliver of the Cowee Valley near Franklin, North Carolina, Gibson sloshes into the muck, chooses a young lily pad, and then dips her hand into the cool, dark water. Never mind the snakes, frogs, and snapping turtles. As she follows the plant down six inches or so, she feels for the knotty rhizome and slices into it with a knife, leaving in place a handful of leggy tendrils.

Back up the hill near her home and the Perry’s Water Gardens nursery, which she’s run since 2010, she grabs a thin plastic pot. “They love this good heavy dirt right out of the ground,” she says as she tucks the roots inside and packs the dirt around them. “This mountain clay is a good thing; regular potting soil would just float away.” During the season from April 1 through Labor Day, she sinks dozens of such pots into display pools out in front of Perry’s, where shoppers pick aquatic plants for their own backyard ponds: leafy lotuses, and water lilies in every color imaginable, their cartoonlike pads perfect for a frog nap.

Many of the plants for sale won’t yet be flowering (it might take them a few weeks to bloom after repotting), but Gibson can describe their pastel petals and whether they’ll open in the bright sun or after dusk. Her grandfather Perry D. Slocum taught her well: Slocum once served as president of the International Water Lily Society and is listed in the Water Lily Hall of Fame. Gibson just called him Papaw.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. A retired man moves to a remote Southern mountain town, falls in love with a waitress, and in her family’s cow pasture starts breeding rare aquatic flowers. No? And with good reason: Most folks agree that what Slocum and his family built is something special.

Perry Slocum’s adult life floated on water lilies. Born on a dairy farm in rural upstate New York in 1913, he left medical school to chase his botanical dreams—first as a young husband and father, when he built a farm near Binghamton, New York, then in Winter Haven, Florida, where his Slocum Water Gardens became a tourist attraction with display ponds full of goldfish swimming among massive lily pads and lotuses. Water lilies are native to most parts of the temperate and tropical world, with an uncountable number of crossbred cultivars. In 1948, Slocum hybridized a tropical night bloomer whose white petals unfurl in the evening and close in the late morning. He named it after his first wife, calling it the Nymphaea Trudy Slocum. In 1979, Trudy died after a long illness, and Slocum retired to a cabin in North Carolina.

That’s where he met Maggie Belle Gibson, a widowed grandmother who had lived in the area her whole life. “My mother had taken a job at a little restaurant near here,” Ben Gibson remembers. She had always loved flowers, and after the couple got married, and with the help of her son Ben, a farmer, they dug nearly a hundred small ponds across fourteen acres of her family’s land in the Cowee Valley.

Some “retirement”—by the mid-1980s, Slocum and his family had hired half a dozen employees who worked from mid-March through the end of summer, shipping lilies and lotuses all over the country as well as to England, the Netherlands, and South Korea, sometimes filling orders for a thousand plants. “Mom would ring a bell, and she’d have fixed everyone lunch,” Ben recalls. “Cornbread, mashed potatoes, green beans.” And sometimes, the water garden specialty of turtle soup. “Turtles snap at the lilies, so if I caught one in a pond and cleaned it, Mom would cook it up.” He chuckles when he remembers how some of Slocum’s plant pals visiting from Europe absolutely loved this very local delicacy.

The setting brimmed with wonder for Ben’s children and the extended family of grandkids and cousins, many of whom lived within walking distance. On the back cover of one of the books Slocum wrote, Waterlilies and Lotuses (first published in 1996; Timber Press released a second edition in 2005), Ben’s young son Gregg sits atop a floating lily pad that spans some four feet, a stick fishing pole in hand. Gregg’s toddler sister Nikki would trot down from their house barefoot, spending mornings hiding among the lotus blossoms that soared above her head, and entire afternoons catching frogs. “I knew Dad was always working,” Nikki says, “but you don’t really process how hard that work is when you’re a kid. We were just carefree running around Papaw and Mamaw’s house.”

Papaw was usually in his waders, she remembers, poking around the ponds and checking on his cultivars. Slocum had hybridized some tropical water lilies in Florida, but in the cool mountain air, his plant-breeding ambitions soared. He took inspiration from the French botanist Joseph Bory Latour-Marliac, who in the nineteenth century crossed water lily varieties in his garden east of Bordeaux. “I have been told that the summer climate [in North Carolina] is very similar to that of the area in southern France where [Latour-Marliac] did much of his work,” Slocum wrote in Waterlilies and Lotuses. “Although many of my introductions resulted from hand-pollination, others are the result of natural (bee) crosses; it is thought that many of [Latour-Marliac’s] originations developed from bee crosses, too.”

Slocum introduced such meticulously cultivated prizes as his deeply purple Nymphaea Almost Black, which he described as “nearly unbelievable,” adding with pride that “some skeptics said it could not be done.” But his book also lists many surprises, like Gregg’s Orange Beauty, named for the kid who discovered it while splashing through his own magical mountain backyard.

Ben Gibson bought Perry’s Water Gardens from his stepfather in 1986, allowing Slocum to spend a real retirement hosting botanists in North Carolina and Florida, writing scientific articles and books, and hybridizing plants. By the time of his death in 2004, Slocum had given the planet two more iris cultivars, thirty lotuses, and some eighty-three water lily hybrids. Nikki Gibson puts it simply: “He leaves us all a legacy of beauty scattered throughout water gardens all over the world.” Among his most prized introductions was the Maggie Belle Slocum, a lotus with huge lavender-pink flowers that still blooms in the Cowee Valley pasture. Gibson, who took over the farm from her dad fifteen years ago, calls that flower named after her grandmother “a showstopper.”

Now down to thirty ponds across seven acres that she plants, weeds, and harvests on her own (and sometimes with the help of extended family), Gibson has heard visitors remark that the gardens are nothing like the grand expanse they remember from when Slocum was alive. That can sting a little, but Gibson understands. Her Papaw was a legend, and he led an entire staff. She wonders sometimes if the stoic scientist would find her menagerie—the dogs and peacock, along with a chicken, a donkey, a goat, cows, and “way too many farm cats”—silly, a distraction from the work of tending the business.

But there’s no time to dwell. Gibson keeps his memory alive every time she puts her boots in pond water and her hands in mountain clay. Each spring and summer, she ships plants packed in peat moss all over the country. She answers questions from the water gardening newbies who visit every day but Sunday (call to check if she’s open before making a drive, she asks). She’ll advise them to sink a pot with no holes in it, unless they want roots to take over their pond; use heavy soil and top the pot with gravel so the dirt doesn’t drift away; float lilies where they’ll get plenty of sun; watch out for snapping turtles.

Most of the pond labels have faded over time, and sometimes a water lily will bloom that Gibson cannot identify. She will page through Slocum’s books, looking through his photographs and reading his handwriting in the margins. She was just a barefoot kid when he recorded all this stuff, including one straightforward but tender description in 1988, about a flower he cultivated around the time she turned eight: “Nelumbo ‘Nikki Gibson,’ a true tri-color, is one of the choicest single lotuses. Blooms are initially cup-shaped and deep pink, then open out flat on the second day as pink and yellow, and on the third day as mostly yellow. All are held high above the leaves. This cultivar is named for my granddaughter.”