Peggy Crosby’s expanding pollinator pathway is fast-becoming western Carolina’s favorite dive-through.

After three seasons of dedicated planning and planting, The Peggy Crosby Community Services Center, the Laurel and Mountain Garden Clubs, and other pollinator habitat supporters are nurturing a thriving environment of botanicals, butterflies, bees and birds. It’s dubbed Peggy’s Pollinator Garden.

All you need is a big heart and a pair of helping hands to be a pal of Peggy. “Peggy” is the affectionate nickname of the Peggy Crosby Center in Highlands. Her building was originally a hospital established around 1950. The healing and helping it instituted continues today, fostered by many community businesses and charities that have rented space over the past couple of decades.

The Crosby Center launched in 1996 when Peggy Crosby-Thompson asked her husband for an exceptional birthday present: buy the hospital building and turn it into affordable office space for local non-profit organizations. He did, and she was thrilled with the outcome.

When COVID has us otherwise confined, taking a jaunt down the street, walking past the Peggy Crosby Center is a welcome highlight of the day.

We breathe in the sweet, fragrant air of PCC’s pollinator garden. And we notice something else …an awareness of the symbolism that pairs Peggy and pollination. Peggy’s known for nurturing and growing non-profits and burgeoning small businesses. She is to charities and start-ups as bees and butterflies are to gardens.

Even though the Peggy Crosby Center is practically a legend in Highlands, there are still those who aren’t sure of its true purpose.

Simply put, the Peggy Crosby Center provides low-cost office space to aid helping-hand organizations and small business ventures on the Plateau.