In March of 1953, a group of women gathered in a five-acre garden on Forest Hills Drive to plan a fundraiser. The garden belonged to Bess Smith, then president of the Cape Fear Garden Club, and the plan she and her members settled on that day became the Azalea Garden Tour, a self-guided walk through Wilmington's private gardens that opened for the first time later that spring with a $1.50 ticket. Smith's own garden hosted the opening ribbon cutting.
Seventy-plus years later, that same address has appeared on the tour eighteen separate times, including the tour's landmark 50th anniversary edition and, more recently, its 70th anniversary edition in 2023. Do the math and roughly one out of every four tours the Cape Fear Garden Club has ever run has passed through the same Forest Hills yard where the whole thing was dreamed up. Most neighborhoods host a tradition. Forest Hills is the reason this one exists.
Why the Land Made Room for This
The origin story only makes sense once you understand how the neighborhood itself was built. Forest Hills went up in the 1920s as one of Wilmington's first automobile suburbs, and it broke from the grid pattern that shaped most of the surrounding city. Instead of straight blocks, its streets curve with the natural terrain, tracing low ridges and creek banks rather than cutting through them. Many of the earliest homes were built by employees of the Atlantic Coastline Railroad, ranging from modest bungalows to larger colonials, and more than one longtime resident has pointed out that the circular driveways scattered through the neighborhood were themselves a small status symbol in the 1920s, a way to show off the fact that a household owned a car.
That decision to follow the land instead of flattening it into a grid had a side effect nobody was planning for a garden tour: it produced irregular, often oversized lots. A rectangular grid lot rarely runs to five acres. A lot shaped by a creek bend sometimes does. Smith's garden was large enough to host a ribbon cutting with a crowd because the street pattern around it allowed for that kind of scale in the first place. The same geography that makes Forest Hills feel unusually private on an ordinary Tuesday is what made it possible for one backyard to become a stage.
The Tour That Outgrew Its Own Address
The Azalea Garden Tour has since spread across the entire city and beyond it. This year's run, the 73rd annual, went out April 10 through 12 and included stops well outside Forest Hills, from Autumn Hall's undisclosed "secret gardens" reachable only by shuttle to the 67 acres of Airlie Gardens, which opens to the public on tour weekend alongside its resident swans and the Minnie Evans Bottle Chapel. Proceeds from the tour don't stay with the club.
Since 2003, the Cape Fear Garden Club's Azalea Garden Tour has awarded more than $1.4 million in grants to local nonprofits for beautification, conservation, and education projects across New Hanover County.
That's the scale the tradition has reached from a single 1953 planning meeting. And even as the tour expanded to Landfall, to Autumn Hall, to public gardens across town, Forest Hills Drive has never stopped getting an invitation back. Eighteen times is not a neighborhood being included out of courtesy. It's a neighborhood that keeps producing gardens worth walking through.
The Other 358 Days
Tour weekend is loud, at least by Forest Hills standards. Parking runs one side of the street only, ticket holders wander in comfortable shoes, and for three days in April the yards that are usually private become the main event. The rest of the year runs at a different register entirely, and it traces back to the same curving streets.
Because the roads bend instead of running straight, walking through Forest Hills rarely feels like walking a block. It feels more like following a path, which is part of why residents use the sidewalks the way they do: for the dog at 7 a.m., for a stroller loop after dinner, for the kind of unplanned walk that a strict grid discourages simply because a grid always shows you exactly how far you have left to go. A curved street hides the end of the block, and that turns out to matter.
The neighborhood's small parks fit the same pattern of scale as everything else here, sized for a walk rather than a destination drive. Thomas B. Lilly Park offers picnic tables and outdoor exercise equipment tucked into its own residential corner, while Beaumont Park gives kids a playground and a basketball court without asking anyone to get in a car. Neither is a regional draw. Both are the kind of park you visit because it's close, not because it's famous, and that is exactly their job.
For anyone who wants more organized activity, the Nir Family YMCA sits inside the neighborhood on Market Street, close enough that it functions less like a gym membership and more like a second living room, with swim lessons and kids' camps that turn it into a daily stop rather than an occasional one. And for residents drawn to golf or tennis, Cape Fear Country Club borders the neighborhood directly. Founded in 1896, it holds the distinction of being the oldest private club in North Carolina, and its 18-hole course was designed by Donald Ross, the same architect behind Pinehurst No. 2. You don't have to be a member to notice how much of Forest Hills' identity is wrapped up in being next door to something that old.
None of this is loud in the way a food hall opening or a new restaurant is loud. It's the kind of infrastructure that only becomes visible once you've lived somewhere long enough to use it without thinking about it, which is precisely the audience this piece is for.
One Street, Two Rhythms
What ties the ribbon-cutting weekend in April to the ordinary Tuesday in September is the same decision made a century ago to let the land dictate the streets instead of the other way around. That choice produced oversized lots capable of hosting a five-acre garden and a citywide institution born inside it. It also produced a walking network that curves instead of grids, pocket parks scaled to a stroll, and a neighborhood where the loudest weekend of the year and the quietest Tuesday in September come from the exact same set of decisions made in the 1920s.
Most people who live on Forest Hills Drive today weren't there in 1953, and most won't host a ribbon cutting of their own. But the shape of the street outside their window, the size of the yard behind their house, and the fact that a stranger's garden tour still bends through their neighborhood eighteen times and counting all trace back to the same choice: build with the land, not against it.
If you're weighing what a home in a neighborhood like this is actually worth, from the way its lots were platted to how that history shows up in today's market, the team at Galarde & Co. knows Wilmington's older neighborhoods block by block. Schedule a Personalized Consultation whenever you're ready to talk specifics.
