David Tracey
Bees pollinate a sunflower at Dorothea Dix Park during SunFest on Saturday. The Sunflower Field was a popular attraction of the festival.
Pictures of a vast sunflower field have been dominating the social media of Raleigh locals for the past few weeks, leaving a lot of people asking: where are these flowers? What are they for? SunFest at Dorothea Dix Park answered all these questions and more by inviting people to enjoy the flowers and community this past Saturday.
Located near NC State, Dorothea Dix Park is one of Raleigh’s hidden gems. A former mental health campus, the space was acquired by the city of Raleigh in 2015 with hopes to turn the land into a community space. The sunflowers, however, are a recent addition, with the surprise attraction revealed to the public in late June.
“The original thought was, we planted this 5-acre, 150,000-plant sunflower field, let’s create a festival around it,” said City of Raleigh Project Manager Kate Pearce. “We didn’t know it was going to turn out as huge and amazing as it did, but we’re pretty excited about it.”
In addition to the sunflower fields on display, there were vendors, food trucks, informational booths and a live band for festival-goers to enjoy.
“What if I told you this was a happy accident?” said Kenneth Waldroup, Raleigh’s assistant public utilities director and an NC State graduate. “The intent wasn’t originally to start a festival, the intent was to raise sunflowers for their biofuel potential, and we did that at the Neuse River Recovery Facility last year and we were inundated with people fascinated by sunflowers.”
Raleigh citizens will recall a similar social media explosion of sunflowers that took place last summer. Waldroup said the flowers’ popularity and the large number of visitors resulted in this year’s location change.
“We’re engineers and finance majors and public administration majors, we’re running a business,” Waldroup said. “We weren’t expecting everybody to show up and say ‘Wow, your waste water plant’s the most beautiful thing we’ve ever seen.’”
In 2010, the City of Raleigh began exploring the possibility of using sunflowers and other plants as a source of biofuel production. From there, the city was able to obtain their mobile biofuel refinery, which was on display for visitors to explore.
“The refinery itself was a joint application grant with NC State, in order to acquire the refinery and to approach our biosolids application from a sustainable activity,” Waldroup said. “[Raleigh] has been beneficially applying biosolids for a long time, it was only recently that it was suggested that perhaps we could use some of our harvested crops to go another step and start generating biofuels from them.”
Pearce spoke about the future of Dix Park, as well as the importance of community involvement with park planning.
“We’re doing a lot of different things, like maybe creating a land bridge over Western Boulevard to connect Pullen Park and central campus to Dix Park, so you could go from the Belltower all through central campus and never cross a road to Dix Park, which would be cool,” Pearce said. “We were in New York a few months ago and this man, who runs the Trust for Public Land, said this is the most exciting and important urban project in America today.”
Raleigh can anticipate a lot from Dix Park in the coming months. In addition to movie nights, star watching and a youth festival, Dix Park is set to be the backdrop for hip hop star J. Cole’s upcoming music festival, Dreamville.
“This was a place you didn’t really go because it was a mental health campus,” Pearce said. “When the city bought the park in 2015, one of our main things was let’s get people here, let’s get folks excited about what the future of the park could be, so that’s why we’re doing all these events, just to introduce Dorothea Dix Park to the city of Raleigh and to the larger community.”
Kyle Malone, a fourth-year studying chemical engineering and history, said that he found out about SunFest through social media.
“I saw pictures of sunflowers, and I love festivals like this, when everyone comes out, craftspeople and such, and there’s live music. It’s just a good atmosphere.”
Pearce shared her hope for Dix Park: that it becomes a Raleigh staple.
“The best thing is this is a park built by everyone for everyone,” Pearce said. “We need everyone to participate. Go online, come to events, give your ideas, provide your feedback and help really create a park for everyone in the heart of Raleigh.”