The Herb Festival Returns for Its 36th Spring in Fletcher
The Herb Festival Returns for Its 36th Spring in Fletcher
For thirty-six springs now, the parking lot at the WNC Agricultural Center has filled up with station wagons and hatchbacks that smell faintly of dirt and rosemary. The Asheville Herb Festival — free, cheerfully amateur in the best sense, and stubbornly beloved — returns April 24 through 26, and everyone with a balcony pot or a back-forty herb spiral is already making a list.
Seventy-five-odd vendors set up beneath the Davis Event Center's steel rafters, and the air goes thick with the green-pepper snap of tomato starts, the lemony sting of verbena, the cool menthol breath of a hundred mints crowding one long table. Growers from across Western North Carolina haul in heirloom vegetable seedlings, medicinal tinctures, handmade soaps, garlic braids, dried chamomile by the pound, and the occasional tray of carnivorous pitcher plants glowering at passersby.
What makes this festival different is how completely it refuses to be fancy. Admission is free. Parking is free. The workshops are free. More than twenty classes run across the weekend — herbal first aid, seed saving, foraging the Blue Ridge, making your own bitters — taught by growers and practitioners who would rather show you how to do the thing than sell you the thing.
By Saturday afternoon the aisles are a gentle crush of gardeners comparing notes, kids trailing bunches of basil like green wands, and newcomers asking an old-timer in a straw hat which thyme will survive a Fletcher winter. It is one of the largest herb festivals in North America, and yet it still feels like a county potluck where everyone brought the good stuff.
Plan your visit: Friday and Saturday 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m., Sunday 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., at the Davis Event Center, 761 Boylston Highway in Fletcher, just south of Asheville Regional Airport. Bring a wagon if you're serious — and you will be serious by noon.
