Petals From The Past

Petals From The Past

16034 County Road 29
Jemison, AL 35085-4680
(205) 646-0069

Petals from the Past started as a little roadside stand where an Auburn grad named Jason Powell began selling antique roses. But Jason quickly outgrew his roadside business and created one of the region's premier sites for local food, heirloom plants, and fruit trees as well as sage gardening tips for the would-be green thumb. In 1994, alongside his wife Shelley and his father Arlie, Jason bought some land and opened a homegrown, family-run establishment that we now know as Petals from the Past.

Although renown for the beauty of its antique roses, Petals from the Past features a nursery full of heirloom plants as diverse as they are plentiful: full, snowy white hydrangeas and fiery Mexican paintbrushes, to the most delicate orchid and bright tiger lily. There are entire rows of fragrant herbs, a greenhouse devoted to succulents and cacti, and acres of U-Pick gardens filled with different kinds of fruit and vegetables.

Trellises run all over the grounds, each section home to a different fruit: muscadines, kiwis, blackberries, and blueberries. There are clusters of peach trees and fig trees, Asian pears, persimmons, and satsumas. Apple trees circle the outskirts. There is an entire greenhouse of citrus fruit. The produce at Petals has no cover-spray of chemically protective coating; you can eat it right off the vine, sun-warm and deliciously fresh. There is a certain sort of freedom in walking through trellises heavy with fruit and being able to pick it, to get sticky juice on your fingers, to let the berries burst in your mouth. There is a reality to this that transcends the grocery store, the plastic packaging and pesticide and the genetically-perfect tomato. This fruit is cultivated, but it maintains some sense that everything in the U-Pick once came from a wild plant, from the natural world. If nature had a grocery store, this would be it.

For store hours, events, and the U-Pick harvest schedule, check out their website:

http://petalsfromthepast.com/

Elizabeth