Craggy Gardens is a section of the North Carolina mountains accessible via the Blue Ridge Parkway, north of Asheville. It has excellent hiking trails, a picnic area, cool mountaintop balds with wild blueberry bushes and dramatic mountain vistas. Read on to see what we saw on our hike of the Craggy Gardens Trail in early May! Hint: Wildflowers galore and other cool stuff that makes us love love love nature.
The 2016 farmer’s market season is almost here, and that means the Black Mountain Tailgate Market is coming soon! The market features locally-grown food including produce, meat, eggs and honey, as well as arts and crafts. It’s an awesome community gathering.
Looking to get outdoors during your springtime visit to the Asheville area? A waterfall hike can be a great experience for many reasons: a chance to see spring wildflowers and other vibrant spring green everywhere, fewer crowds on the trails than in the summer and fall, and also the snow melt from higher elevations and the occasional spring rain shower make for more water…falling. One waterfall we like happens to be the closest one to the Inn on Mill Creek: Catawba Falls.
It’s Spring! Our favorite season has arrived and one of our favorite places, Biltmore Estate in Asheville, is blooming big. Biltmore has several gardens on an 8,000-acre property, so you might be wondering…when is the best time to see Biltmore’s blooms in all their glory, and where on the estate should I go? Let’s discuss.
The Black & White Garden (formerly just the White Garden) at the Inn on Mill Creek B&B is a small garden space — work in progress — where we’re growing plants with white or black blooms and/or foliage. Let’s take a look and see what’s blooming in June this year.
Combine a scenic drive along the Blue Ridge Parkway — complete with beautiful blooming rhododendron and photogenic verdant ridges — with a picnic lunch and short hike, and you have what we consider the perfect June afternoon in western North Carolina. One option to make this day trip happen is to head north of Asheville to Craggy Gardens, specifically, the Craggy Gardens Picnic Area.
We’ve progressed quite a bit with the Guest Favorites Garden since we last updated you in August of 2014. As many of our blog readers know, we created a new garden space (Innkeeper Brigette just can’t stop), dedicated to plants/flowers that our guests love.
This month, we have been fortunate to see a Green Heron on the pond at the Inn on Mill Creek B&B. This is the first year that we’ve seen one, although that doesn’t mean they haven’t been here before…we just never noticed! So now that we have taken notice, this beautiful bird is getting the May 2015 spot in our 12 Months of Birding at the Inn series on the blog.
Most people think of Biltmore House when they think of Biltmore Estate, but the gardens are magnificent and well worth spending some time exploring. Acres and acres of gardens, including formal gardens, park-like gardens spaces, and a beautiful azalea garden are all part of the grounds.
While the Asheville area is known for natural beauty — hiking trails, waterfalls, the Blue Ridge Parkway — it is equally known for its superb arts culture. Asheville is recognized annually for its art and craft on various “top ten” lists.
