“A Commentary on the Dogwood Arts Festival” by Paul Harvey
In 1947, author John Gunther wrote a book called “Inside USA"
In that book he gratuitously referred to Knoxville as “America’s ugliest city.”
The gentlefolk of Knoxville were at first hurt, then offended, and then indignant.
If the central business district had been neglected; if industry had soiled,
what author Gunther called “the scruffy little city on the Tennessee River,”
homefolks had always looked beyond that-
to the backdrop of mist blue mountains, lush foliage,
through four gentle seasons, to charming residential architecture.
And thriving in red clay, dogwood trees grew bigger and better than anywhere.
Nobody can claim credit for what happened next, everybody can.
Stung by the New York author’s rude remark,
the people of Knoxville, one household at a time,
undertook to redecorate with dogwood and forsythia,
with tulips and flocks and azaleas, and dogwood.
They planted red bud, and flowering crab, and wisteria, and dogwood.
Suddenly, what had appeared a myopic outsider as a “scruffy little city” became a
big beautiful city- young again every spring.
There’s something about the soul and the climate between the placid lakes
and the sloping meadows and the stone bluffs of the Smokies. There’s something about Knoxville that
makes dogwood trees grow taller. Blossoms are giant-sized. Pink hybrids are a translucent pink.
On shady slopes you’ll see wild dogwood- Pliant branches creating
a fountain from the top of a limbless trunk,
and then drooping gracefully down in a waterfall of white blossoms.
And in residential streets, the nurtured dogwoods
are resplendent by day and moonlighted by night.
Over 35 years, that Festival has grown to where it hosts
a quarter-million visitors for its grand garden party.
There are violets and iris, many apples carpeting the woodland floors, May apples.
There are lilacs and narcissus, and a rainbow of flowering fruit trees,
but mostly along half a hundred miles of trails,
into and through and around the city is
a springtime blizzard of blossoms of dogwood.
Knoxville, Tennessee read the rude rebuke of a hit and run writer
and got mad, and closed ranks, and got even.
And then thus motivated, and now mobilized, irresistible Knoxville
waits to seduce all who may pass that way with a golden crown
of Smoky Mountain moonlight and a negligee of white lace.
