PINK HILL — A rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but a rose festival without roses would be an odd thing, indeed.
At the Pink Hill Rose Festival, Corazon Ngo, a doctor at Duplin General Hospital, had roses on display and for sale as she knitted under the warm spring sun. The roses came from the Foust Nursery in Warsaw.
“Looking good, so far. Doing good,” Ngo said Saturday. “Everybody wants to take a picture of the roses. And I don’t know how you can have a rose festival without a rose.”
She had different varieties available, noting some are better than others for cutting and displaying in the home. Ngo also touted the rose as a regularly blooming plant.
“They are the only flower, the plant that blooms every six weeks,” Ngo said. “Because, look — dogwood blooms, after two or three weeks, they’re gone. Bradford pears, they bloom, and after three or four weeks, they’re gone. But every six weeks, the roses bloom.”
A number of other booths contained merchants making and selling small crafts, while children performed on flatbed trailers and other kids played on and around inflatable amusements. Across from where the children played, an array of restored and modified classic cars were on display.
Near lunchtime, business began to pick up at the food vendors. The Pink Hill Volunteer Fire Department offered barbecue plates, while over at the Demario’s Classic Catering booth, Derrick Coley fried fish and served up turkey legs.
Coley had a simple process for his turkey legs, which tend to give a person the appearance of a Viking while eating the massive drumstick.
“My turkey legs, when I get them, they’re already smoked,” Coley said. “We take them, we put them on the grill, warm them through, and it usually takes about an hour and a half to cook them. I just continually cook them, cook them, cook them until they get a nice, bronzed look to them.”
Meanwhile, Catherine Tyndall manned the Pink Hill Flower Fund booth while tending to her barbecue lunch. She’s worked with the group for about a year.
“We’re just trying to dress up Pink Hill, and we’ve asked a lot of different businesses to donate money toward putting roses — they’re called the Knock Out roses,” Tyndall said.
The beautification project has picked up in each year — they planted 50 rose bushes in 2011, 230 in 2012 and have 401 on tap for this year. The goal for 2014 is 500 bushes planted.
According to the plant’s wholesaler, Knock Out roses are disease- and pest-resistant, drought tolerant, require little maintenance and produce blooms until the first hard frost.
The rose festival continued until 10 p.m., and included the crowning of a Rose Court, cornhole, golf, and softball tournaments, a 5K run/walk and other activities, culminating in a public dance.
Wes Wolfe can be reached at 252-559-1075 or wes.wolfe@kinston.com. Follow him on Twitter @WolfeReports.