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Bullington Gardens now owns the land it cultivates

The boards of the Henderson County Education Foundation and Bullington Gardens celebrated the sale of the property from the foundation to the gardens last week. [BILL MOSS/Hendersonville Lightning]

By Lightning Reports, Published: October 14, 2021

Bob Bullington was “many different things to many people” — a brilliant, self-taught horticulturist, advocate for education, philanthropist and, at times, grumpy old man, Brian McCall, a friend and student of his, recalled in a remembrance.

Bullington would not have been grumpy at the event last week, when the boards of Bullington Gardens and the Henderson County Education Foundation celebrated the sale of the property from the foundation to the nonprofit corporation that operates the gardens and education center. After months of negotiations, Bullington Gardens bought the property for $150,000, ensuring that it would own the land on which substantial improvements are expected to be made under a newly drafted master plan.

 “It’s a place where many amazing, community-minded people have converged and rallied around,” Bullington Gardens Director John Murphy said after Education Foundation Director Summer Stipe presented him a gold key. “It has deep community value, far beyond its dollar value. I thank the Henderson County Education Foundation for acknowledging that. We call this place a garden with heart for good reason. There’s just much gratitude for this to happen.”

With that, members of the two boards, seated under a tent in a steady drizzle, raised their glasses for a champagne toast.

Born in 1900 in Cordele, Georgia, Bob Bullington was forced to drop out of school after the third grade to help support the family after his father’s death. At age 18, he thumbed a ride to New York City, where he worked first for the Long Island rail system, then as a New York City police officer. Throughout his police career, first at Jackson Heights in Queens and later on Long Island, Bullington gardened on the side. In Queens, he used a vacant lot to grow dozens of azaleas. One day, someone asked if he would sell some. He said yes, and soon sold a lot.

“He said he made the most money that day than he’s ever seen in his life,” said Fritz McCall, Brian McCall’s father.

By the time he retired from the NYPD, Bullington was known widely for his flower gardens. The garden department of the state’s horse-racing tracks at Belmont, Saratoga and Aqueduct hired him to groom the grounds. He planted 50,000 chrysanthemums a year, and grew the same number of pansies at Aqueduct alone.

Brian McCall, who became a horticulture professor at N.C. State University, started working for Bullington at the greenhouse and grounds on Zeb Corn Road in 1978. “Probably 90 percent of whart he told me I cannot repeat,” McCall said, “but I learned several important things about the man. One was that everything was black and white.”

The gardens he lovingly cultivated were anything but, and to this day the flowering bushes and trees and explosion of color attract volunteers and visitors throughout the year. Currently, thousands of dahlias in bloom.

“I fell in love with mountain laurels, and Bob told me how to propagate them,” nurseryman Wes Burlingame told reporter Jennie Giles for a story published in 2002 in the Times-News. “He became my mentor, a teacher. Some of the most popular mainstream plants we have today he showed us how to propagate.”

When Bullington died in 1989, he left his property and life’s work to the Henderson County Educational Foundation for what’s now known as Bullington Gardens.

“He was always talking about how important education is,” Burlingame said in the 2002 story. “He was a master educator. That’s his most important legacy.”