Floyd County Scenes

Wildwood Farms - 1200 varieties of daylilies

Drive a few miles south of Floyd, VA on Route 221 and you will come to Wildwood Farms, a treasure trove of daylilies. Mid-June to mid-July is their peak blooming season, but they are open through September with late-blooming varieties available.

Judy Bowman and her family operate this tastefully landscaped garden in a way that provides a memorable customer experience. You are greeted when you arrive and you get a price list that helps you wander through the garden beds and identify the plants you want to buy.

Judy has made daylily buying a pleasant family excursion even for spouses who are not up to browsing 30 beds of daylilies. These spectator spouses can relax  in the comfort of a padded swing seat while sipping ice-cold bottled water provided by Wildwood Farms management. Life doesn't get much better!

When the lily buyers finish their selection, the staff digs up the selected plants and bags then for your trip home. They will even ship your plants, if you are just visiting Floyd from a distant location.

There are over 50,000 named, registered daylily varieties available worldwide and the team at Wildwood Farms is adding to that list every year. While I was there I spoke with Judy's niece, Caitlin, who was working on new hybrids for the next season.

The daylilies at Wildwood show many variations in color, form and texture. They also come in a variety of sizes. If you browse through the two Wildwood Farms photo albums on the right side bar, you will see a hundred different plants that caught my eye while my wife was selecting ten varieties to plant in our garden.

One thing I learned from Judy was that daylilies are not prone to disease and insects. I saw Japanese beetles swarming on the blossoms, but they were not eating them. For those of us who have had entire trees denuded by these hungry pests, daylilies offer a welcome rest from battling beetles.

Make Wildwood Farms a stop on your trip through Floyd, VA, even if you aren't yet in the market for daylilies. You will come away inspired and will have beautiful memories of possibilities that you never anticipated.

Wildwood Farms
2380 Floyd Highway South
Floyd, VA 24091
email:rjbow91@aol.com
phone: 540-745-5155

Hard to find but worth the effort - Whitlock's Garage

There is a garage in Floyd, VA that provides far better service for my Dodge B3500 Van than I ever got from the biggest Dodge Dealer in Charlottesville, VA.

Whitlock's garage appears to violate every marketing rule except one, and it has been operating in the same location for 45 years!

That might give you a clue that Mac Whitlock really understands how to provide customer satisfaction. His business model does not depend on signage, architecturally clever building exteriors, or landscaped grounds. His operation is focused on providing a superior customer experience in the form of a correctly repaired vehicle.

You cannot find this place without directions and it is several miles from the nearest main road. The sign is so small, you have to drive up in front of the building to see what it says. The exterior shows signs of extensive patching and the landscaping will never win the fancy garage award. But, when you walk inside, you get competent service using the latest in technology and they can handle vehicles of great size.

Unlike the Charlottesville Dodge dealership I described in Fumble, Stumble, and Fail, Whitlock's personnel are competent! Every single one of them! They could tell me immediately what they could handle and what they couldn't.

When they handled something, it stays handled! For example, they fixed a long-term heavy, clunking noise in the rear end in minutes, which my old Dodge dealer could never seem to find!

My Charlottesville Dodge Dealer with its smartly uniformed staff and a million dollar facility had struggled for 2 and 1/2 years to deal with this problem and had failed to fix it even after I had spent more than $500 on one retrofit after another. They were so inept at preventative maintenance that it cost me a $4000 engine job with several trips back to fix what they broke during the repair.

So what is the difference? Whitlock's garage seems to put attention on fixing vehicles, not on fancy facilities. I was able to ask questions and get clear answers from David Radford and Mac Whitlock. From my old Dodge Dealer, I got a lot of glib assurances and spotty service.

On the other hand, we have a Subaru and we received excellent service in Charlottesville and in Roanoke from Subaru dealers with neatly groomed staff and spotless shops.

If all car dealers in this area operated at that level, Whitlock's business might be confined to farm tractors and large trucks. Fortunately for us, Mac Whitlock  provides good service at a great price and he is only a few miles away...as the crow flies.

If you need vehicle service in the Floyd area, get somebody to tell you how to get to either end of Huckleberry Ridge Road. Drive until you see the building in the photo and tell them I sent you.

The address is 1075 Huckleberry Ridge Road NE in Floyd, VA and the phone number is 540-745-3585. They are good people.

The Jacksonville Center in Floyd - an unusual resource for artists and craftspeople

Located near the Blue Ridge Parkway in Floyd, Virginia, the Jacksonville Center for the Arts is home to Virginia's first residential crafts school. Now in its second year of operation, it offers numerous opportunities to learn a new craft and to study with some of the best artisans in the region.

There are so many high-value courses available that I plan to post frequently about upcoming courses and what makes them special.

I recently wrote about the Learn to be a Blacksmith course and was fortunate to see the course in action today. If I had not had an appointment to keep, I could have stayed and watched for hours.

David Tucciarone makes blacksmithing accessible and understandable.
Pulling red hot iron out of the forge, he deftly shapes it on an anvil with effortless strokes of his hammer while describing what he is doing and the things to watch out for.

While his blacksmithing students watch attentively, he discusses the finer points of the hammer work necessary to achieve certain shapes. He is able to focus on what he is doing and share the experience with his students at the same time.

I have seen blacksmiths at work before, but none who possessed the ability to explain the finer points of what they were doing while they were doing it.

UPDATE:
If you have any desire to acquire blacksmithing skills, you should check out the next course, Introduction to Blacksmithing, taught by  Jessie Ward, a fourth-generation female blacksmith. It will be offered May 13, 20, & 27, Saturdays 9am-4:30am. Visit the Jacksonville Center website for more information.

The new Bell Gallery - another reason to visit Floyd

William and Joanne Bell opened their Bell Gallery & Garden today and it's everything we had expected it would be.

The gallery displays work by top local artists as well as work by William and Joanne themselves.

There was so much to admire and the quality was so uniformly high that it was hard to pick out a display that stood out from the rest, but the large framed photographs by William Bell were truly exceptional.

As you can see from the image above, the photos are so realistic that it is like standing in front of a window. William has developed a revolutionary mounting technique for his large format photos that does away for the need for glass to protect the photograph! As a result, the clarity and intensity of the framed photograph is undiminished from the original image.

After seeing one of these photographs, you will never want to go back to the old method of framing again.

The gallery is spacious and occupies the entire first floor of the building. There is a framing shop on the premises and a garden at the rear of the gallery. You will find it easy to lose an hour browsing through the imaginatively designed displays.

Everywhere you look, you will see evidence of the care with which the Bells created this gallery. For example, in the renovation of this historic building, they discovered that the walls were constructed of 8-inch-wide stacked hardwood boards!

As you can see in this photo, the boards were simply stacked one on top of the other with each row offset from the next to provide a gripping surface for the original plaster. The boards were nailed down and were overlapped on the corners like log cabin construction. You can see the inside view of one wall and a detail view of one of the corners which was exposed during renovations.

An original wall section has been varnished and left exposed in the rear of the gallery. For those of you who are architectural history buffs, it makes for fascinating viewing.

While I was shooting pictures and interviewing the Bells, Gretchen fell in love with some of Joanne's unique hanging glass. As a result, we now have some of these pieces hanging in our picture windows. Very nice!

Drop in and visit the Bells if you are in Floyd. The Bell Gallery & Garden is at 112 N. Locust Street in Floyd, VA, and is located right next to Oddfellas Cantina, where you can retire to celebrate your purchases.

Tell them you saw their gallery on the Internet.

Tag: Floyd, VA

Cafe del Sol in Floyd

The Baristas at the Cafe del Sol in Floyd, VA, are constantly seeking to improve themselves. They are not content with producing excellent espresso-based drinks, they insist on making them attractive as well. I am in favor of experimentation especially when it comes out like this.

A young woman named Tiger created this chocolate design on top of our two lattes. It not only decorated the drinks, it added a subtle taste of chocolate.   :)

I will definitely order this again.

Many thanks to Sally and Frank Walker, owners of the Cafe del Sol, for encouraging their staff to produce a superior level of service.

Disclaimer: I have no financial interest in the Cafe or in any of the establishments in Floyd that I write about. My sole purpose in recommending them is to enable others to take advantage of the unique services that these establishments provide.