Photo: N.C. Museum of History.

Thanks to an agricultural education collaborative that's planted the state's leading crops between the State Capitol and the North Carolina Legislative Building, North Carolina's halls of power are lined with cornstalks and tobacco leaves.

"It's been a great way to take the museum outdoors and let people reconnect with where their food comes from," says North Carolina Museum of History youth and family programs coordinator Emily Grant, who worked with the state's Department of Administration and Department of Agriculture to create a series of agricultural vignettes in decorative planters where maple trees and azaleas once grew.

"Our standard landscape planting was starting to die out from the drought," Grant says. "We thought we could pick out plants from North Carolina to talk about plant use and abuse."

The project this year took more than five planters of varying sizes. "We don't have a big lawn where we can just plow the back," Grant says of the urban museum, sowing seeds for a Three Sisters garden of beans, corn and squash; cotton; tobacco; sweet potatoes and peanuts.


"If you've never seen peanuts come out of the ground, it's one of those 'a-ha!' moments," Grant says. "And we know there are peanuts down there, because we've had a few curious people who couldn't help but look."

Grant says even the passersby who don't dig their fingers into exhibit dirt can't resist gawking at the crops, either because they've never seen cotton sprout bolls or because they never imagined encountering the plant they've farmed for decades just yards away from the state's capital.

"Almost every fourth and eighth grader in the state, every lawmaker, anybody coming to stage a rally or a protest is in that space," Grant says of the busy pathway between the Capitol and Legislative Building. "Everybody's pointing at the planters. We have grandfathers saying to their grandchildren, 'This is what I grew up picking'."

After the crops are harvested, the museum will plow them under and plant rye and clover for the winter.

"They're so pretty," Grant enthuses.

Much prettier, most North Carolinians seem to think, than greenhouse-grown maples and azaleas.