What do those pink lines mean?
If you’re new in town, now that April is here, you may soon make a turn up into a Knoxville neighborhood to follow the thick pink lines painted right in the middle of the street. You can join the motorcade meandering through one of more than 90 miles of historic Dogwood Trails throughout 13 of Knoxville’s more established neighborhoods, blooming with the glorious colors of an East Tennessee spring.
“The first Dogwood trail was established in 1955 and this year we’re celebrating 70 years of the trails. These blooming trails are open the entire month of April every year and are synonymous with spring in Knoxville,” says Dogwood Arts Trails and Gardens Program Manager Vicki Baumgartner.
“Within six years, so many visitors were coming to drive the beautiful dogwood trails, the Chamber of Commerce and Junior league came together in support of a celebration to share the culture of our area with dogwood tourists when they were in town. Thus, the first Dogwood Arts Festival was introduced."
”Running continuously since 1961, the Dogwood Arts Festival is the recipient of many arts’ tourism awards, most recently Voted #3 Best Art Festival in the Country according to USA Today's Readers Poll 2024.
“A half-century after the trails opened, some trees were being lost to development, decline, age, and disease,” Vicki continues. A dogwood tree’s average lifespan is 25-30 years in an urban setting and up to 70 in a native setting.
“Bazillion Blooms started in 2009 as a three-year initiative to educate the community about the need to continue planting dogwood trees to keep our trails thriving. We wanted to help our community understand if we don’t keep replenishing trees, we’ll wake up one day and the Dogwood Trails won’t be quite what they used to be. By that point, it’s too late to plant to make an immediate impact since the trees need time to grow. So, Bazillion Blooms has become a campaign of planting for the future."
”Fifteen years later and 16,000+ new dogwood trees planted, Bazillion Blooms has been so successful it is now a permanent program.”
How can you bloom?
Dogwood Arts makes the critical mission to Keep Knoxville Blooming easy with this annual tree-planting initiative.
“We take orders throughout the year and in the fall, the dogwoods are dug and shipped from a local grower in Middle Tennessee. We process and then distribute the trees from our office during the first week of December. Typically, the year’s orders bring in around 2,000 dogwoods,” Vicki adds.
Three online purchase options make it convenient for everyone to take part in Bazillion Blooms.
1) Donate a tree in honor, memory, or celebration of someone special anytime during the year and Dogwood Arts staff will send a commemorative notecard with your personal message.
“For example, if you wanted to donate a dogwood for someone’s birthday, hop online to purchase and then we would send the notecard on the date you desire,” Vicki says. “When all the trees come into our offices in December, that tree would then be donated to our historic Dogwood Trails.”
2) You can choose to donate trees through Bazillion Blooms because you enjoy and care about the trails and want to ensure their beauty for future generations. Dogwood Arts trail chairmen take all the donated trees back to the trail communities where they are planted along the trails.
3) You can also purchase dogwood trees to pick up and plant yourself to enhance the landscaping of your own yard. Those trees are available at the Dogwood Arts office to be picked up that same week in December.
Dogwood trees are the perfect gift to give and to get for East Tennesseans–native to the area, easier to grow, disease-resistant, and available in pink or white. They bloom in the spring, provide summer shade and nectar to pollinators including bees and spring azure butterflies, turn crimson in the fall, and provide winter berries for wildlife, including 35 species of birds.
Vicki encourages people throughout Knoxville and East Tennessee to get involved in the springtime celebration, handed down from another generation for us to enjoy. In 1947, after a visiting journalist disparaged Knoxville, writing an unflattering description of the town, three of Knoxville’s great ladies and leaders of the Knoxville Garden Club, Betsy Creekmore, Martha Ashe, and Betsy Goodson, decided to prove him wrong by showcasing the natural beauty of their beloved hometown. And the trails were born.
“We met recently with Mrs. Creekmore, Sr.’s daughter, who shared fabulous stories about her mother’s passion for the Dogwood Trails,” Vicki recounts. “She remembers her mother making them stand in the parking lot at their church in Sequoyah Hills after services, to make sure the cars leaving the parking lot took the correct turn to put them on a Dogwood Trail. They had put a traffic counter on it and were determined to report to the city how many cars were driving the trails. Mrs. Creekmore’s vision and tenacity have now brought 70 years of beauty to Knoxville residents and its many visitors.”
Millions of cars and bazillions of blooms later, what began as a neighborhood beautification project has blossomed into one of the most celebrated cultural events in Knoxville and one of the longest-running nonprofit organizations in our region. Treat your family to the trails and featured gardens this April and catch this year’s Dogwood Arts Festival on the Performance Lawn at World’s Fair Park, April 25-27. Learn more about the 20+ annual programs that are part of Knoxville’s beloved tradition of the celebration of our beautiful community.
Ready to dig in and help grow Bazillion Blooms? Visit Dogwoodarts.com/bazillionblooms
“Bazillion Blooms started in 2009 as a three-year initiative to educate the community about the need to continue planting dogwood trees to keep our trails blooming.” — Vicki Baumgartner