Farewell to Lake Lure Flowering Bridge, beautiful victim of Helene
In its short life as an Eden of the Blue Ridge, the Lake Lure Flowering Bridge witnessed a thousand held hands, stolen kisses, and not a few marriage proposals — a spot so dreamy and inspiring that it made the meekest souls shout out loud.
Lesser people would have scrapped it, turned it to rubble rather than carting in stones and dirt and transforming an obsolete bridge that carried a century of cars and trucks into a hanging garden that floated over the Broad River.
When it opened in 2013, the bridge drew flocks of people to see the roses, salvia, crape myrtles blooming over its concrete arches, crowds that grew to 180,000 a year.
“It’s a place you didn’t think you needed to visit until you were there,” said Kris Willing, a neighbor. “You might have hurriedly driven over the active parallel bridge on a regular old Tuesday in less than three seconds without looking back. But, once you paused, parked and stepped onto the Flowering Bridge, time mattered less.”
And now, the world can add the flowering bridge to the long list of beautiful things destroyed by Hurricane Helene. The town of Lake Lure announced Thursday that two engineering firms have judged its treasure past any hope of repair.
“May the seeds planted here continue to find new ground to grow in time,” wrote Caroline Stallworth on the town’s Facebook page. “This is absolutely heartbreaking, but gardeners are as resilient as the plants they tend with such devotion!”
Everything blooming and beautiful
The bridge between Lake Lure and Chimney Rock caught eyes even before volunteer gardeners decked it with flowers, succulents and herbs.
Italianate in style, it featured three stone arches and two balustrades. The Department of Transportation made plans to tear down the bridge in 2010 after 85 years of carrying traffic, but Bill Miller from the Lake Lure parks board stepped in to share a vision that flashed into his head one day while he looked at it from the shore.
“All of a sudden I saw that bridge covered in flowers and bushes and shrubs,” Miller said in a Ted Talk, “ and everything blooming and beautiful, and people walking across it and vines coming down into the water.”
Volunteers built a dozen raised beds connected by a serpentine path, giving each one a theme: tropical, herbs, wildflowers, succulents ...
“My favorite parts were the ones full of whimsy,” Willing said, “doll heads sprouting cascading vines, small colorful fairies nestled into woodland-themed pockets, or hand-painted bricks that mimicked favorite classic children’s books. ‘The Wizard of Oz,’ ‘Goodnight Moon’ and ‘Heidi’ come to mind.”
Enter Helene
Helene dumped more than 22 inches of rain on Lake Lure and all but washed away the town, making it one of the earliest and most shocking stories of the storm’s power.
Water carrying tons of debris washed completely over the flowering bridge, leaving it strewn with debris both above and below, completely disconnecting it from one bank of the river.
Town residents still find dog collars in the mud, left over from the pet memorial “rainbow bridge” that washed away completely from the gardens that surrounded the floating version.
Despite massive damage to its water and sewer infrastructure, the town has spent a year collecting funds to slowly rebuild, hoping to reopen the lake itself by next spring.
But the best that can be hoped for the garden is to start again in a new spot, hopefully with some pieces of the old bridge salvaged during its removal.
Any gardener with dirty fingernails and mud-stained dungarees knows that new beds can be dug and new seeds can be planted, and that gentler rains will fall.
This story was originally published August 8, 2025 at 1:28 PM with the headline "Farewell to Lake Lure Flowering Bridge, beautiful victim of Helene."