A year after a historic flood, the gardens at the Nashville’s Gaylord Opryland Resort are more vibrant than ever.

in the first two days of May 2010, flooding caused by torrential rains devastated portions of Tennessee, Kentucky and Mississippi. In Nashville, the Cumberland River crested at levels not seen since 1937, flooding the city.

After the storm, Hollis Malone, horticulture manager of the Gaylord Opryland Resort & Convention Center, entered the Cascades Atrium of the resort and says he felt sick.

Eight feet of water from the Cumberland filled the building’s once-opulent, 9-acre indoor botanical gardens. “It was unbelievable. Most of the plants were underwater; tables were floating around. You could smell the diesel from the flooded generators. All of our hard work had been washed away,” Malone says.

The glass atriums at the Opryland Resort provide ample light for plants and trees to thrive. Many bloom all year.

But Malone, a self-proclaimed optimist, didn’t mourn for long. In conjunction with teams of remediation experts, he and his crew immediately went to work to repair the damage and revive the indoor gardens, which help attract more than 1 million visitors annually.

Luckily, the outdoor grounds of the hotel were more easily repaired. Within a day, excess water and mud were pushed from the lawn by brooms attached to the crews’ lawnmowers, and trees and plants along the property were power washed with non-foaming soap to remove the diesel.

Few exterior plants were lost, but some still bear faint brown rings around their trunks and foliage, war wounds indicating the high water mark of the flood.

Key advice Malone offers any landscape professional facing clean up after a natural disaster: Give your plants a chance to rebound before pulling them up, especially if they are natives because they are hardier. “Things really do survive if you give them a chance,” he says.

He also says it’s essential to stay organized, be mindful of the emotional toll disasters take on your customers and staff, and focus on the potential of improving the property.

Whether you are dealing with the aftermath of a flood, hurricane, tornado or blizzard, most landscape professionals will face some sort of storm damage during their careers. It’s important to be prepared and keep your cool.

“As bad as this tragedy was, I have to look at the good that came of it. The garden now has more rare and unusual plants than before the flood. We added so many new varieties of plants to the gardens, stuff that wasn’t available previously,” he says.

Coming back to life

The cleanup and restoration to the interior gardens required five months. Nineteen employees worked 10 hour days, seven days a week. At times, the interior temperature reached 100 degrees, and the atriums were blanketed by fog because the air conditioning was out of commission. But the staff persevered.

This aerial shot, taken just after the flood, shows he resort property submerged in water.

“One of our supervisors’ houses was under water, but she was here working every day. It was an emotional time for everyone,” Malone says.