 A Southern Gardener
by
Nicki Leone
To me summer is a season for taking delight in a garden. For there is no time when it is more inviting than in the early freshness that precedes the heat of the day, or the cool twilight and fragrant darkness that follow it. —Elizabeth Lawrence, A Southern Garden I’d like to say right at the start that at the moment I don’t feel like talking about books. It is simply too beautiful out, and I’d rather be in the garden. The month of May in the Carolinas is a wonder. The seeds that I so painstakingly planted back in March and April are now established and growing vigorously. I know, at this point, which things will succeed, and which will not. The beds that only three weeks ago were almost bare are now hidden under thick foliage and reaching, branching stems (and oh, a multitude of weeds). And even though I walk among the garden beds every day, and have done so since I first turned them over in February, I still find myself amazed that all this life, this vibrancy, has appeared like magic after nothing more than a little dedicated watering. So, while I am aware that I really should be nattering on about the books on my bedside table, in point of fact I am sitting here on my back deck, looking out over the yard and marveling at how very red a cardinal looks perched among the yellow-orange zinnias and soft blue Nepeta (catmint). I learned about gardening, as I learned most of the things that are important in my life, first from my mother. But unlike the other things she taught me—to love reading, or enjoy art—it was quite awhile before the gardening lessons finally took. Like most young people I led a somewhat transient life, which does not lend itself to gardening in the slightest. So I would grow herbs in pots, most of which would not live out the winters thanks to my haphazard care. It wasn’t until I moved South that I finally began to try to have a garden. I now lived in houses, not apartments, and the houses had yards, which could be dug up and planted. But ironically, now that I had the place to garden, I had no one to give me advice. My mother, who is very wise and can make anything grow, lives in a completely different climate zone and the things that do well in her garden are usually ill-suited to mine. The South is a different country altogether from where I grew up in New York and New England. The trees are different, the flowers in people’s gardens are different, the weedy wildflowers that grew in roadside ditches are different. Being of a pragmatic bent, I immediately began planting peppers, tomatoes, herbs and beans—“useful” plants like vegetables and herbs with medicinal or culinary value. And because mom’s stored up reservoir of garden wisdom was of limited use in a place where it stayed in the seventies right through December, I did what I always do when I want to know about something: I bought books. Books with titles like Taylor’s Guide to Growing Vegetables and No-Dig, No-Weed Gardening (the gardening equivalent of a “miracle diet” book that promises you can lose weight without exercising or watching what you eat). All of which is to say that while I collected a number of useful (or useless) reference books, my gardening life was not a literary life, something that was very unusual for me. All my passions tend to be reflected in my library—contained and explored and celebrated in writing. I realize life in writing. To the age old question of sounds of trees that fall in the forest, I have always thought that what matters is that someone is there to hear it, and then to tell others about it. The garden—my garden—was not to be found among my books or writings until last year, when several unexpected things happened: I found myself alone after fifteen years, faced with the tattered remains of a broken relationship. I found I had more time at home, because I was able to work anywhere I could plug in my laptop and get onto the Internet. And I happened, on a whim, to have planted sunflowers and morning glories. Grieving for a failed romance had me often walking among the garden beds I had laid down to distract myself from sorrowing thoughts. And working at home meant I had more time to work the beds and walk among them. But it was the sunflowers and morning glories that made the difference. I’m not even sure why I planted them—I think I had some vague notion that the birds would like the sunflowers and the morning glories would be nice climbing up them. At the time, I was still all about gardens being productive. Mine was a kitchen garden with an ambitious, unrealistic notion of how many tomatoes a single person could actually eat and put up. Then they bloomed. The sunflowers—seven and eight feet tall, gorgeous massive heads of yellow gold—towered over everything in the garden and had all the neighbors paying me compliments. The morning glories (the variety called “Heavenly Blue”) ran riot along the garden fence and back deck from June until October, covering the railings with handfuls of luminously blue flowers. Yes, the birds loved it all. So did the hummingbirds, the butterflies and the bees. And so did I. I realized, staring up at one of my Russian Giant Grey Stripe sunflowers, that just looking at them made me feel happy and at peace. In that moment, I stopped gardening for the sake of the tomato harvest, and started gardening for the pure pleasure in seeing things grow. And it was then that Elizabeth Lawrence came into my life. I sometimes think that books come to us when we are ready for them. I knew about Elizabeth Lawrence, of course. The longtime garden columnist for the Charlotte Observer, Lawrence is often considered the quintessential, classic southern garden writer. Her book A Southern Garden was first published in 1942 and has never been out of print. It is considered de rigueur for the gardener’s bookshelf if one lives below the Mason-Dixon Line. There are some nine different collections of her articles and essays available now, and over fifty articles published in various magazines and journals. In 2004 Horticulture magazine named her one of America’s Twenty Greatest gardeners. In my days as a bookseller I would hand Elizabeth Lawrence to anyone new to the area who wanted to know about southern gardening. But I had never read her myself, because—I’m sorry to say—I thought she only wrote about flowers, and I was only interested in “useful” gardens. The summer of the sunflowers changed my mind—it was a lesson hard learned and overdue—and I suddenly found myself dissatisfied with my garden books, which were nothing but endless lists of vegetable varieties and planting conditions. As if a garden were just a series of individual plants stuck in the ground. I don’t buy cookbooks based on the number of recipes they have, I buy them because of what they say about food, about cuisine, and about cooking. Now, I wanted books about gardening, the verb. The pursuit of creating Eden. And it was as if the universe was listening, for there appeared in my inbox a message from my friend Emily Herring-Wilson. “Nicki, I’m coming to town to talk about my new book. Can you be there?” Emily has been writing about Elizabeth Lawrence. Elizabeth Lawrence was a woman of a bygone age. Born in 1926, she grew up in Georgia and North Carolina, a shy and dutiful daughter in a genteel Southern family. That she found the will to attend Barnard College is something of a marvel—but she was certainly intelligent and her father valued intelligence, even in his daughters. She returned home, became the first woman to graduate from the landscape design program at NC State University, and spent the rest of her life caring for her family and creating her garden and, eventually, writing about it. “People think,” Emily said to me, “she didn’t lead a fulfilling life because she stayed home to live with her mother and work in the garden. They think she didn’t do anything. They wonder why she never married”—and here Emily smiled—“But why would she?” Emily Herring-Wilson’s book, Becoming Elizabeth Lawrence: Discovered Letters of a Southern Gardener, traces the long correspondence of Lawrence with her best friend, the playwright Ann Preston Bridgers, best known for co-producing the Broadway musical Coquette, which was later made into a hit movie with Helen Hayes. Emily jokes that the book’s title might actually refer more to herself than to Lawrence. Like me, Emily has been learning to garden, under Lawrence’s guidance. It is hard for me to grasp how, with nine books and umpteen published articles to her name, anyone could think that Elizabeth Lawrence didn’t “do” anything. But that’s how it is with women, is it not? Thoreau can sequester himself on Walden to write, JD Salinger can refuse to leave his cabin for decades, Thomas Pynchon can refuse all interviews and they are all considered eccentric and great writers. Lawrence, who chose not to marry or have children, to live at home with her mother and write—indefatigably—about gardening, apparently did nothing with her life. I hope that one day I can accomplish as much “nothing” as Lawrence did. Lawrence’s books, by and large, are both extremely practical—she is a dedicated and careful horticulturalist—and beautifully poetic: “Sweeter yet than dream or song of Summer of Spring are Winter’s sometime smiles.” The season’s beauty is in the quality of the sunlight, which is more luminous when it is less brilliant, and in the delicacy of the shadows, which are paler and more precise than those of spring or summer or fall. On chance-mild days when an incandescent light falls on then twigs, throwing their fine shadows across gravel walks, my garden seems more beautiful than at any other time. –Elizabeth Lawrence, Gardens in Winter This, then, is what I was looking for after I realized how important sunflowers were to me—a gardener for whom the point of the garden was not a jigsaw puzzle of blooming flowers to be put together in the proper order, but a piece of the Earth to be cared for, coaxed, transformed, husbanded. No wonder she never married. Becoming Elizabeth Lawrence is not the first Lawrence collection Emily Herring-Wilson has edited. In 2002 she published Two Gardeners: A Friendship in Letters, a collection of the correspondence between Lawrence and Katherine White, best known to most as the wife of E.B. White and fiction editor of The New Yorker. But that collection was, as the title states, all about gardening. And while it must have taken some nerve to write letters to a woman who was the pre-eminent doyenne of literary style in the nation, Lawrence herself was on sure ground when it came to horticulture. The two women were well-matched. Becoming Elizabeth Lawrence is another kind of book entirely. Oh, there is quite a lot of gardening in it. And I can’t tell you how comforting it was to read and discover that many of the mistakes I have made in my garden, many of the failings I have castigated myself for, she was guilty of as well. I was comforted to know that even after years of experience, Lawrence still was in the habit of over-ordering from catalogs, still unpacking shipments of plants, uncertain of what they were, still unable to resist impulsively buying unusual plants, even if she had no plan for where to put them in her garden, still losing track of where things had been planted and accidentally digging up bulbs because she had forgotten they were there. Her garden, it seems, was well-planned in conception, but sometimes serendipitous in execution. She did not impose her will upon it, the garden imposed its will upon her. But Becoming Elizabeth Lawrence is a collection of letters Lawrence wrote, not to another gardener, but to another writer. To a writer who was, in fact, her main literary influence. At the time the letters begin in 1936, Ann Preston Bridgers is already famous, a literary light and nationally known. Elizabeth Lawrence is just beginning to write for magazines and papers. Ann is her critic and confidant. And interestingly, Elizabeth becomes Ann’s as well. It is a much more personal story than any other book of Lawrence’s I have read; filled with the small details of her daily life, her thoughts about what she is doing, what she is reading, what she is thinking and feeling. It is, also, a one-sided story because while the letters Elizabeth Lawrence wrote to Ann Bridgers were found among Bridger’s papers, the letters Ann wrote to Elizabeth have never been discovered. So reading the correspondence is sometimes like listening to one side of a telephone conversation—one must intuit, from the things you hear, what the other person is saying. Particularly frustrating to me were the long and fascinating critiques Elizabeth would write, discussing manuscripts of plays that Ann apparently sent to her for input. Since the manuscripts themselves are not included in the book, one can only wonder wistfully what they were like. The kind of insight and thoughtful quality that comes through in Lawrence’s garden writing is present tenfold in her letters to Ann: I have just walked around the corner to post a letter to my sister Ann. Do you always find a special charm in posting letters? A sudden feeling of communication with the person you have written to, as you drop it in the box . . . Much more than in writing it. When you write a letter you are thinking more of yourself than of the person you are writing to. Sometimes I think up letters to write, just for the fun of walking with Michael [her pet spaniel] to the station to post them. And I have never been able to figure out why it is no fun to walk to the station without a letter to post. And I always prefer to post letters at night. But then everything is heightened after dark. –Elizabeth Lawrence to Ann Preston Bridgers, July 22, 1934 I found an unexpected sense of kinship with this quiet, shy Southern lady who taught Sunday school and devoted her life to her mother and her garden. For one thing, it is clear reading the letters that Lawrence was a great and thoughtful reader—there are more books mentioned in these letters than there are plants. She even—I found this vastly amusing—complained about her book club, for not talking enough about the book, but wasting time instead discussing family doings and gossiping. It’s nice to know that’s been a problem with book clubs since the beginning. Lawrence also took a great deal of pleasure in simply learning things—she teaches herself seventeenth-century music and learns to make reed pipes and flutes, which she plays softly on summer evenings. She has, it is clear, mastered the art of a reflective and considered life. It is a thing I envy in her. I still grow tomatoes and peppers, but my garden now means more to me than the end of summer harvest. This season, as I pace my beds, filled now with zinnias, tithonia, dahlias, evening primroses, nicotiana, marigolds, black eyed susans and four o’clocks, I’m content to simply watch things grow. To see what happens, and enjoy the unexpected pleasures of small flowers coming up in unlooked-for places. To let the garden rule me, instead of the other way around. The patron saint of gardeners is supposed to be Saint Fiacre—an Irish monk of the Middle Ages who was handy with a spade. But the patron saint of my garden is Elizabeth Lawrence—a woman who, like my friend Emily, I am in the process of becoming. Books mentioned in this column:
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