THE MOST Passionate Flower

I trace my awakening as a plant lover to an afternoon spent wandering the banks of the Tuckasegee River on my family’s property in the mountains of western North Carolina. I must have been about 12 or 13 at the time. We’d come up from Atlanta for a weekend to visit our Appalachian relatives, but as boys of that age are prone to do, I eventually got bored with the adults and wandered off to see if the woods had anything more interesting to offer. Flowers were certainly not on the list of things that interested me at the time—though that changed in an instant when I encountered a frilly