Life of flowers: The Azalea Festival 'king' died 20 years ago, but his legacy remains

In the 20 years since Henry Rehder Sr. died, Wilmington's N.C. Azalea Festival hasn't been quite the same.

For well over half a century, Rehder, who passed away in February of 2004 at the age of 92, was nearly synonymous with the festival he helped found, earning nicknames like "Mr. Azalea" and "The Azalea King."

A nationally recognized horticulturalist, his famous garden on Oleander Drive was on the Cape Fear Garden Club's Azalea Garden Tour a record 20 times between 1953 (the tour's first year) and 2003. From the festival's first year in 1948 until the year of his death, the Azalea Festival queen's official portrait was always taken in Rehder's sprawling garden filled with blooming azaleas, camellias, exotic hydrangeas and more.

The 77th Azalea Festival will be held April 3-7 in and around Wilmington and New Hanover County, and features concerts, a parade, a street fair, fireworks, home and garden tours, and other activities. The coronation of Queen Azalea LXXVII Sharon Lawrence, which is free to attend, is 3 p.m. Wednesday, April 3, at the Battleship North Carolina.

Sharon Lawrence: NC Azalea Festival announces its 77th Azalea Queen

Wilmington resident and actress Nina Repeta, who served as Azalea Festival queen in 2000, has vivid memories of her time with Rehder.

"We really hit it off," Repeta said. "I cherish that time with him."

Repeta said that when she moved to Wilmington in 1989, she took a job as "a lowly house painter." One of her first gigs was "literally glazing windows in Henry Rehder's greenhouse."

In 2000, Repeta said, when she had a recurring role on "Dawson's Creek" and was named that year's Azalea queen, she went for her portrait in Rehder's garden. When she told him about how she'd met him painting his greenhouse more than a decade earlier, Repeta recalled that Rehder said, "And now you've returned a triumphant queen!"

"He was always, always dressed to impress, even if he was just lounging around the house," Repeta said. "One thing I really loved about him, if he was excited about something he'd say, 'Hot dog!'"

In a 2003 StarNews profile, Rehder recalled how Jacqueline White, the festival's first queen, "spent most of the morning here and admired the azaleas very much … They didn't have the queens scheduled 'round the clock, like they do now."

Rehder, always the genteel Southern gentleman, had kind things to say about most every queen he met.

"Kathryn Grayson (1957 queen), she was a lovely person," Rehder said in 2003, while 1985 queen Phylicia Rashad, then Phylicia Ayers-Allen, "Knew more about horticulture than many of the other queens. She particularly liked our Chinese magnolia. She'd never seen one before."

Esther Williams, however, the queen from 1958, "Was a little hard to get along with. She got mad at her escort and threw her flowers at him," Rehder told the StarNews in 2003.

Seeds of a festival

Rehder was there from the festival's earliest days.

In a letter from the Azalea Festival's first president, the late Hugh Morton, posted to the "history" page of the official festival website, Morton recalled attending a meeting called in 1947 by the late Dr. W. Houston Moore. At the meeting were representatives of "all of the leading civic clubs in Wilmington … to discuss the feasibility of holding an Azalea Festival that would celebrate the beauty of Greenfield, Orton, Airlie and other gardens around town.

"I can recall Henry Rehder … as being among ones who were particularly supportive of Dr. Moore’s idea," Morton wrote.

In its first year, Rehder was in charge of the parade and its floats, Morton told the StarNews in 2004. "We couldn't have put on the show we did if it weren't for him."

According to a presentation to the Cape Fear Garden Club by longtime member and Wilmington historian Elaine Blackmon Henson, Rehder, with help from his younger brother, Stanley Rehder, "came up with 16 flatbed trailers, some pulled by tractors, for the first parade."

"My father was interested in horticulture and helped develop Greenfield Lake," Rehder told the StarNews in 2002. "When the azaleas bloomed, it was so attractive, it was decided to reveal it to the world in the Azalea Festival."

Floral life

Rehder came by his love of plants and flowers honestly.

Born in a house on Rankin Street in 1911, his parents, Will and Johanna Rehder, already ran a successful florist business that Rehder's grandparents had founded on Red Cross Street in 1872. He worked at the shop as a boy, took it over when his father died in 1945 and, all told, worked there 62 years.

After graduating from New Hanover High School in 1928, Rehder studied for a year at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and then went to floral design school in Philadelphia.

He was quite the world traveler as a young man.

While working as an apprentice for a large florist in Washington, D.C., "I was able to decorate in foreign embassies and the White House. I even shook President Herbert Hoover’s hand," Rehder told the StarNews in 2002.

He led a travel tour to Nazi Germany in 1936 to see the Olympic Games, and in 1937 his tour group had to flee China after the Japanese invaded the country while the group was in Peking.

After a three-year stint in the U.S. Merchant Marine during World War II, Rehder returned to Wilmington, where he met Barbara Beeland Quarles, the woman who would become his wife of 49 years, at Wrightsville Beach. Three weeks after they met, they were married.

From 2002: At 91, Henry Rehder Sr. still indulging in his passion for flowers and gardening

Roots of a legacy

Rehder's legacy extends well beyond the Azalea Festival.

He wasn't just a businessman, but also something of a scientist. He's credited with developing a half dozen new varieties of camellia, including ones named for his parents and wife, as well as a variety of azalea called "Rehder's Red." In 1952, he discovered a never-before observed, insect-eating pitcher plant the Smithsonian Institution named after him: Saracena Rehderii.

Wilmington's nationally recognized Tidewater Camellia Club, which Rehder founded in 1952 as the Men's Garden Club (the club changed its name in 1960), is still active. With his brother, who died in 2012, he helped develop the Stanley Rehder Carnivorous Plant Garden at Piney Ridge Nature Preserve, which welcomes visitors to this day.

"He taught me an enourmous amount" about gardening and horticulture, Repeta said. When she mentioned to Rehder that someone had gifted her a now-reviled Bradford pear tree, "He said, 'Tear that thing down immediately.'"

Rehder's involvement in his community included leading the board of the old St. John's Museum of Art, which was the predecessor of the Cameron Art Museum, and he was a charter member of the Wilmington Civitan Club.

"I always try to relish his voice and mint julep accent," late author Susan Taylor Block told the StarNews in 2003. "It's a good day when the phone rings, and I hear him say 'Susan' in three syllables."

"'Gracious' is the first word that comes to mind when I think of him," Henson said, a quality that got Rehder named an Honorary Life Member of the Cape Fear Garden Club, of which his wife Barbara was a member for many years. "He had good manners, and you really saw that in his children, too."

In 2003, Henson said, Southern Living photographed his garden, but Rehder died a couple of months before he could see it depicted on the magazine's cover. At the 2004 Azalea Festival, just two months after his death, a special ceremony was held in his garden featuring a cake with the Southern Living cover reproduced on it.

An empty garden: Henry Rehder's outdoor wonderland was the heart of the Azalea Festival for 55 years

Photos of Rehder's garden had previously been published in The New York Times, National Geographic and The New Yorker.

"I admired and loved him deeply," Repeta said. After meeting him at the Azalea Festival in 2000, "We probably talked weekly." When walking became difficult for him, she would go to his house and he would give her a private tour of his garden via walkie talkie.

This article originally appeared on Wilmington StarNews: Henry Rehder's NC Azalea Festival legacy remains 20 years after death