December 2025 Newsletter
As 2025 has been a super year for WNCOS, please join me in celebrating on December 14th, at our Annual Holiday Social!! Before further celebration details, I would like to mention a few highlights from 2025, most especially our membership. What a great group of folks we have gathered together, old and new, to share our love of growing orchids. And quite a number of excellent growers included, based on our dazzling Show-and-Tell tables throughout the year. In addition, of special note for 2025, The Asheville Orchid Festival, “Orchid Arcadia,” one of our best shows ever. Huge gratitude for all the member contributions, including spectacular blooming orchids and outstanding volunteerism across the board. As well, 2025 included several engaging speakers, road trips, a very entertaining and successful annual auction, and let’s not forget the addition of the New Growers Group created by Marion Allen.
And now, I would like to turn our attention to one particular member, in recognition of his years and years of devotion to the Western North Carolina Orchid Society. This member joined WNCOS in 1986, yes, that is almost 40 years ago!! He has served as President, Vice President, Secretary and Treasurer over these many years. He has participated in each and every orchid show at N.C. Arboretum, a total of 23!! He is always there when needed, including manning the raffle table month after month, and traveling to sister society orchid shows for installs and take-out. I could only be talking about one person, Axel Graumann! Years ago, in 2010, my wife Leslie Keller wrote a short biography of Axel for our monthly newsletter. A ‘must-read,’ I have reprinted it below. Thank you Axel for being the most devoted of members, and a valued friend.
On to our 2025 Holiday Social! This year we will hold our celebration at The Ivy Building (9 Genevieve Circle), Sunday, December 14th, from 1:00p.m. until 3p.m. WNCOS will supply turkey, ham and soft drinks, and encourages members to bring a favorite holiday dish to share. Please feel free to bring your own spirits. All attending members will receive the gift of an orchid provided by the one-and-only Fred Clarke of Sunset Valley Orchids. It’s going to be a great party, looking forward to seeing you there!
Axel’s bio:
Weatherman extraordinaire. All you weather watchers out there are going to love this story. Axel Graumann began forecasting the weather in the 5th grade. He began digging up and replanting plants at the age of 3. Weather and gardening have been Axel’s predominant interests for as long as he can remember. A precocious child, no doubt!
But let us step back, even before those early days, and get a glimpse of Axel’s heritage. It is a dramatic story with common beginnings. Axel’s great grandfather was a farmer, his grandfather, a gardener of fruits, flowers and vegetables. A love of growing plants has definitely passed down through the male line of the Graumann family. These hearty men were of German origin, haling from the region of Germany that would ultimately become communist East Germany. It is during those fraught years after WWII that life in Germany would become a challenge for the Graumanns.
Axel’s father, Heinz Robert Graumann, was active in the anti-communist underground movement. For this he would suffer. He was imprisoned in a labor camp for violating curfew laws. By the time he was freed 5 years later, he and the woman he had fallen in love with decided to gather up what little they had and flee the country. Heinz Robert and his new wife, Irmgard, escaped by train through Berlin and made their way to Hamburg. There they awaited the appropriate papers to migrate to the United States. They also awaited the birth of their first child, Axel. After Axel was born the couple received sponsorship from a family in Wilmington, Delaware.
After a brief time in Delaware, Graumann moved his growing family to Germantown, Philadelphia, home to a large German community. The Graumanns joined the owners of a clock repair shop in their upstairs apartment. Axel’s earliest memories are of this Germantown Avenue apartment with its views of store fronts and ancient trolley cars. And it is here where Axel, at age 3, first began digging up and replanting plants in a small plot of land behind the repair shop. The Graumanns would eventually buy a home of their own and Heinz Robert would begin a lifetime of dedicated gardening. Axel says that his own passion for gardening sprung from those early days spent with his father not only in the garden, but in the many local greenhouses. Father and son spent hours ogling and studying all the many varieties of plants.
At age 10, Axel’s gardening enthusiasm expanded multifold when he coaxed his elderly neighbor into giving him free rein over her garden. Some of his fondest memories are of tending Mrs. Hogg’s garden, right up until he graduated high school. And one of his proudest achievements was the weighing of his largest tomato ever—2 ½ pounds! With college, gardening had to be temporarily left aside.
Let us return to the promise of weather. Snowstorms, thunderstorms, heat waves, and cold waves, Axel loved them all. When he found himself at Pennsylvania State University there was no question what he would devote himself to. During the early years of his childhood Axel had listened intently to the weather report given by famed radio broadcasters Dr. Eliot Abrams and Dr. Joe Sobel. Little did he know that he himself would be filling their shoes one day. By the 5th grade Axel was recording the weather daily and making formal forecast to his classmates. Amazing!—but just a small indication of Axel’s later achievements. When Axel graduated from Penn State in 1977 he immediately began working for AccuWeather. Then located in an old house across from campus, Accu-Weather is today a worldwide forecasting company. Being a forecaster for the nation’s largest forecasting firm was the biggest challenge of Axel’s life. During the epic winter of 1977-78 he worked 44 days in a row including double shifts, a tough stint that he was greatly rewarded for by being named forecaster of the year!
And then, in 1983, came a diversion. Passions, somewhat paradoxically, do seem to rule this disciplined, high-achieving man. He fell in love, married and followed his new wife to Florida, leaving Accu-Weather behind. With no regrets, Axel enjoyed a two year break from his stellar career. He did odd jobs while imbibing on paradise and reengaging in one of his first loves—gardening. And he discovered orchids. Orchids were everywhere, at local flea markets, at orchid shows in the mall, in the neighbor’s trees! Axel fell in love with the exoticism of these plants. Two years later when it was time to return to his meteorology career, time to leave Florida, Axel would take his orchid passion with him to the mountains of North Carolina.
Axel landed a prime position at the National Climatic Data Center here in Asheville. Very fortunate for all of us, in 1986, he also met retired fellow meteorologist Dr. Harold Crutcher. Dr. Crutcher was an avid orchid grower and then current president of the Western North Carolina Orchid Society. Axel soon began attending the society meetings, taking in the orchid growing stories of these early WNCOS pioneers. So enthralled was Axel with his experience at WNCOS that he soon became the secretary/treasurer. He held this position, as well as annual show chair, for more years than he can remember.
Today Axel grows his orchids under lights during the winter and moves them out of-doors in the summer into a custom built screen house. Slipper varieties are his orchids of choice as they require less light and care, and ‘bloom on cue every year’. In the past his collection has peaked at 150 plants, but at this time it is half that. Yet Axel has plans that may spike this collection upwards once again. He is going to build a new, grander than ever, orchid room. This spring, Axel and his new love, Kathryn Long, are purchasing a home with ample yard for gardening and a spacious basement just waiting to be filled with orchids. Kathryn is a much achieved interior designer and owner of Ambiance Interiors on Chestnut Street. Between these two, this new home is sure to be a showplace of sumptuous color and exotic flora.
Before wrapping up, we must turn once again to weather, for Axel continues to excel in this field. I know all of you out there glued to the Weather Channel will be impressed to know that Axel is considered the satellite data guru of the National Climatic Data Center. He manages over 400 TB of satellite date (that’s terabytes, equal to 100,000 megabytes—one can only imagine!). Multitalented, lover of sky and land, Axel Graumann has been, and continues to be, a great boon to our society.