After four months of coaxing, three okra pods appear on a spindly little stick, barely eight inches tall, in my husband’s vegetable patch. To say okra grows reluctantly in New England soil is a sad understatement: it just doesn’t want to be there. I tell my father about this bumper crop while we stand in his garden, the one built for my wedding, on a warm August afternoon in central Alabama. He sympathizes with my okra. A second-generation farmer, he has the deeply tanned skin of a man who’s worked outside his whole life. He is, as the local widows say, “a good looking man, even at sixty.” He ought to be thinking of retirement. Instead, he’s eyeing an adjoining 200 acres so he can extend his cattle operation. He is looking for investors.
“You got an money?” he asks me.
“No, Daddy. The mortgage company took everything.”
“Hmmm. You better get to writing.”
He sighs, then glances toward the farm that extends as far back as the eye can see. It wants to be wild; it would be wild if he turned his back on it. And he tells a story. Someone new to the area asks: what grows around here besides okra? He says, “More okra.” His blue eyes twinkle at the telling of his story but I know he’s thinking: you can keep that cold weather up there.
My father is mystified that anyone, especially his daughter, can live up North with its unreasonable winters, its faith in taxes and government. When my husband, Brian, and I bought our run-down house in Newburyport, Massachusetts, he said ruefully, “You could have bought a lot of land in Alabama for that kind of money.” He’s amazed we can grow anything so close to the sea and in such a brief growing season. But the message of the okra story is really this: why are you there, not home? And who is going to take over this farm?
Brian and I have chosen to live in a very old seaport where the houses abut the streets, leaving no room for front yards only private backyards hidden by tall fences and pergolas dripping with flowers. Our street, Boardman, has been a street since the 1750s. Our yard has been a yard since 1860, when someone decided to build the tallest house on the street in the most modern of architectural styles—Second Empire. Although the house stands relatively unaltered since then, the yard is a different story.
A concrete foundation, once for a shed, covers most of it—three cars can park on it. A sad strip of grass grows undaunted between concrete and a garden bed. A rotting fence that thankfully belongs to the neighbor wavers on the left. Our own stronger fence stands in back and to the right, providing six-feet of illusory privacy. In the left corner, the best plants have arrived without invitation: the neighbor’s creeping juniper extends its graceful tendrils along our shared fence that her ferns have tunneled beneath. These interlopers overshadow those 40 labeled varieties that the previous owner set out in this crowded little garden. Along each fence is a four-foot wide swath of plantings, but these have been devoured by green goutweed and pineapple mint. Once planted as innocuous ground cover, these two vie like warring factions for control of all the grounds.
The former owners let the yard go wild while their house stagnated on the real estate market for a year. According to the neighbors, they had treated the house with the same indifference for 30 years. The windows open with a hammer’s aid. The drooping soffits allow water to seep into the third floor catwalk, cascade between the walls, and break through the first floor plaster ceiling. Inexorable and expensive construction lies ahead, so we decide to spend the summer avoiding it by working in the yard. This house casts a long shadow.
To have a real garden, the first priority becomes the concrete slab’s removal. And all the neighbors say, “Call Jimmy.” He lives down the street and runs a hot-topping business. We call Jimmy, whose real name is Don, and he sends one of his grandsons to give us an estimate in late April. Jimmy joins us later. He walks slowly up the driveway; his small body looks lost in his heavy coat and work clothes. He wears one diamond stud earring, an unusual accessory for an 87-year-old man. Jimmy is comely, and according to local legend, was quite handsome.
Unlike any other contractor I’ve met, Jimmy gives us a reasonable price, once he realizes we don’t want the driveway repaved. He says they can start soon. Like all contractors, he gets a late start and the project drags. And because the house operates in accordance with the laws of physics, it provides more work for him. While the slab is being removed (an action), the retaining wall in the front of the house collapses (a reaction.) Jimmy, who complains of knee problems and walks with a limp, heaves concrete blocks from the front wall and the back yard into the bobcat’s bucket, which pulls double duty as the braking system. He rescues an evergreen tree and a few shrubs, now bereft of a front retaining wall, and deposits these on the only grassy spot in the yard. At the end of May, the dirt-covered yard begins to look ominously big.
Brian and I aren’t in exact agreement about what the yard should be: a playground? A space for entertaining? Something fancy or practical? Brian really wants a vegetable garden. He’s poured over a how-to book on jardinage, the art of growing things in very small spaces. The book includes exotic looking pictures of trellised cantaloupes hanging precariously from string. Brian is captivated by the idea of this harvest and follows the book’s directions to a tee.
His interest in gardening started quite young and quite unexpectedly. He grew up in Northeast Pennsylvania among Polish-Catholics who worked in mines and factories and grew cabbages and horseradish. As a child he and his cousins would bike past an incongruous herb farm on the way to grandmother’s house. What about this farm caught his ten-year-old imagination I don’t know. But he came by so often, the young couple building it asked if he wanted to work there. Brian started by dragging fieldstone from their creek. With these stones, he helped build a sunken garden full of winding beds and healing herbs. The garden became this magical place—one of the first he took me to see after the introduction to his parents.
On a Sunday afternoon in May, Brian mixes with a scientist’s care the vermiculite and peat moss into the soil. He builds a trellis for the climbing vegetables. He constructs a four by four grid and begins planting his garden. Arugula and radishes. Nasturtiums—a natural insect repellent, he reads. Habanero peppers—his favorite. Cucumber and green beans, Early Girl and Rutgers tomatoes. But the okra he plants for me, an homage to Alabama.
Okra is a southern food, and tender okra pods are rare in New England grocery stores. Sometimes, old, tough, and blackening pods can be acquired for exorbitant rates at the organic superstores. But their product is inedible. In Alabama, an okra stalk will grow eight feet tall. The pods shoot off from the stalk, poised like fireworks waiting to be light. The spines on its heart-shaped leaf cause skin rashes. It’s one tough plant: it makes its eight-inch tall Yankee cousin look wimpy.
Though I grew up on a farm, I never had a vegetable garden of my own. My mother, who taught first grade for thirty years, always said that getting out report cards conflicted with spring planting. But her mother had the most bountiful vegetable garden. I remember spending a summer picking through an acre of purple-hulled peas. The harvest brought all of her nine children together for what seemed like a grand adventure to me, the first grandchild, but was really just hard work. The men worked in the yard stirring corn with a long wooden paddle as it cooked over a fire in a black iron cauldron. Inside the women canned everything. Fig preserves were a house specialty. My grandmother labeled them with the care a winemaker bestows on each new vintage. She froze copious amounts of her vegetable soup, viscous with okra that grew abundantly in her garden. I still crave her soup.
My grandmother knew plants. She had a gift for growing things. She knew when to pick pokeroot when it wasn’t poisonous and could be eaten as salad greens. Even the slim wooded areas surrounding her house in rural Alabama were full of small wonders that her keen eye would find: wild sassafras, huckleberry bushes. She loved her annuals and perennials, too. Cuttings could always be found in Mason jar vases in her windows. Her hydrangea would flower in both pink and blue. But the plant I remember the most is one I never saw—a night blooming cereus.
Somehow, in her fifties, she came to own a rare plant that bloomed only at midnight and after a light drizzle. This cactus-like plant, which she kept at her back door, looked innocuous at best until it bloomed. Then, a white globe appeared, its petals shooting out like moonbeams. Unfurled, the blossom reached eight inches in diameter and died before dawn. When it bloomed, my grandmother woke everyone in the house. My aunt still remembers the event, even now, with a child’s petulance of being awoken for no reason.
New England summers are nothing like the languid, long summers of my childhood. They are brief, but dramatic. Some plants grow as if they are aware they have four months to thrive and want to savor every moment. I’ve lived in New England for ten years and never appreciated its operatic growing season.
Jimmy finishes his work in mid-May, the beginning of the explosive growth period in New England gardens. In moving plants around, I find hostas that look rocket-like beneath the dirt, ready to grow. I am an indelicate gardener and even my most careless handling leaves the plant undaunted. Thrown haphazardly in a pit, they grow. So do other things that I think are geraniums. Then they flower and I see columbine, in pink and blue, proffering little jester hats like those the fairies wear in Tasha Tudor books. Bleeding hearts drop stems full of heart shaped flowers, each with a blood red stamen.
Lots of mysterious green leaves appear everywhere. Our more experienced neighbor-gardeners try to categorize them: “Weeds,” they say. Sometimes they are right, but I develop patience with my weeds. They occasionally become interesting plants—Chinese lanterns and African daisies. The strip of grass, bearing the shrubs Jimmy deposited there, becomes a breeding ground for Johnny jump-ups, blue bachelor buttons, and a kind of white daisy that makes me want to pluck its petals and count, “He loves me; he loves me not.”
Ours is a packrat’s garden: miniature roses and sea thrift are crammed between a towering hibiscus and the ever-rampant day lily. We have ten varieties of day lily; Their brief flower, vibrant for two weeks, hardly merits the space they usurp. These are the kinds of considerations that serious gardeners, with tiny yards as their palette, bring to their artful gardens. Last summer, I got my first introduction to gardening as high art when I crashed the Old Newbury Historical Society’s annual garden tour. Brian and I had learned through the grapevine that a neighbor would be in the show. On a rainy June day, just days after moving in, we went visiting. At the garden gate, we encountered ticket takers, not the owners of the home. Wallet-less, and frankly, penniless, I blurted out, “but we’re the new neighbors.” That this would be a fund-raiser had never occurred to us. They let us in, out of pity.
Here, I saw a garden that would appear in the kind of magazine that helps readers “see like a designer, visualize like an architect, plan like a landscaper and shop like a decorator.” Here was an idyll. Their lawn furniture—French art deco; their wisteria—espaliered horizontally along the fence; the ajuga—pink, triangular, a perfect complement to its neighboring lavender bush; their blue fescue—festooned with its brown sheaths and swaying gracefully. It was the kind of place that made you think God and not the devil was in the detail. The water feature whispered sweet nothings as the pea stone path crunched beneath our feet. Not a leaf, plant, or flower was out of place. We left full of a wonder, much like Dorothy experienced when she found herself in Oz.
I visit the neighbor’s garden as often as is seemly. And when I return, Brian always says, we’re not building a garden like that. We do agree, however, to a patio of fieldstone, the same material Brian once dragged from a Pennsylvania creek bed. Neighbors provide a steady stream of commentary on our progress, proving that gardening in Newburyport is also a spectator sport. “Those rocks are placed too far apart,” they comment. Or, “what you need is…” and sometimes, “looks good, looks good.”
When we’re finally done, we have so much rock left scattered through the yard that Brian builds a retaining wall around the patio’s edge. He builds rock wall quickly, stacking the broken fieldstone without much thought. It gives the garden a tumbled-down look, which is beautiful.
Without an exact plan in mind, we begin adding plants around the new patio that seem like they should be ours: white mugwart, bugbane, and dragon’s blood. All uncommon plants prized for some unusual characteristic—silver mounds, black-purple leaves, or thick waxy burgundy ones. The day lilies are replaced with cardinal flowers, bee balm, hyssop and betany, and Indian heather—a native wildflower with butterfly-like flowers at the tips of thin, swaying stems that dance in the wind. By mid-summer, the vegetable garden also begins to yield a few radishes and lettuces. The climbing plants wind their way to the top of the trellis. Green globes of tomatoes hang patiently.
Brian picks nasturtiums for me to wear. He picks a flower one day to match my shirt, even though it’s worn and paint stained. He picks flowers for me even though I’m worn, and we’ve known each other for many years. We’ve argued in the garden, in the shadow of the house, about mortgages and money all summer.
In July the question comes up of some purchase that he’s put off. We argue in muted tones. Brian is tall and strong, but as he kneels to pluck cherry tomatoes, all I see is a mop of straw-colored hair and eyes an eggshell blue. And my heart breaks. The strangest things dissolve our fights: the appearance of a hummingbird or the surprise of finding a flower in what we thought was just a weed.
***
By August, the zucchini threatens to take over the yard. The bee balm and dwarf dahlias bloom while the cosmos sashay in the slightest breeze. We leave the garden for ten days and drive to Alabama so we can celebrate my father’s 60th birthday. Brian thinks the drive will be a grand adventure. I’m excited to go home and see my parent’s garden in its summer glory. I’ve made the car trip before and have little good to say about it.
I first drove from Alabama to Boston the summer of 1990 to drop my sister off at summer school. My mother couldn’t bear the thought of letting her 16-year-old daughter attend a strange school in a strange city. It was Harvard College, and it fit the billing. None of us had driven farther north than Knoxville, TN. Boston traffic so terrified my mother that we spent only an hour in Cambridge after a two-day, 24 drive before heading straight home. In Kentucky, she did stop for gas and picked up a ninety-year-old hitchhiker and her two male traveling companions. (I think she was sick of my company.) They were holding their possessions in paper bags, standing by a broken down Volkswagen van. My mother, thinking what if this were Jesus on the side of the road, took them in.
Our traveling companions had been on a retreat in upstate New York to hear a self-proclaimed prophet say that the next John the Baptist would be coming soon. The men, we then learned, had folk danced behind the Iron Curtain in the ‘80s. The woman had been married to a “young, idealistic Hungarian” and they’d live in Romania after WWII. When he died, she returned stateside and married a college sweetheart, the son of the first director of the Tennessee Valley Authority. She asked us to stay the night with her family in western North Carolina. My mother turned down this kindness. Later, she received a thank you note from the lady and a book in its sixth edition that she’d written—a how-to guide to home burials.
Brian has no such memories and therefore no trepidations. He’s excited by the challenge of driving straight through the night. He can’t wait to arrive in Birmingham and eat barbequed ribs. We barrel down an unchanging landscape along interstate 81. He takes the night shift. When I wake at 4:00 am, he’s humming along to obscure ‘80s punk tunes. With Brian, this trip home is a very different journey.
***
We arrive on an August afternoon in Marion Junction, Alabama—a pinprick on the map that sits at railroad crossties that once connected Marion and Selma. A complete inventory of the town includes: a post office, Frankie Roger’s Country Store and Wash House, Dick Roger’s Garage, The Farmer’s Co-Op, an agricultural research station, maybe seventy-five residents, dozens of surrounding farms, a community swimming pool, and four functioning churches—all Protestant. It was once a bustling little town with two hotels before the boll weevil wiped out cotton farming in the South. The big cotton plantations shipped their harvest by its rail depot. A towering dry goods store supplied the region with wares, and its owner with an elegant Greek revival mansion by the railroad tracks. In the 1970s, when I was very young, the book mobile came from Selma once a week and parked in front of that same store, then called Mr. Smith’s. My sister and I would check out the maximum six books allowed per week, then head inside for a glass-bottled Coca-Cola. Our bare feet would be black by the time we exited its old dirt-trodden, wood-floor and headed to the swimming pool. Today, the store is a pile of debris, the plantations more modest farms of soybeans, cotton, beef and dairy cattle.
In 1860, when someone was building my Second-Empire house in Newburyport, my family’s farm was most likely part of the Harrell Plantation. Its owner was a major slaveholder in Dallas County, which at the time had the largest proportion of slaves in the country. In the back corner of our farm, there sits a small cemetery where some of these men and women are buried. Most graves are marked only by the anonymous, shallow depression that forms over time, over an untended grave. One marker is a cement slab crudely lettered by hand. A second marker, for a man born in 1859, is beautifully carved stone, surrounded by a wrought iron fence. The inscription reads, “gone but not forgotten,” and through his grave grows a young pine tree.
The Black Belt holds many such places. Though sociologists use the term to describe the area where the slave-plantation system once thrived, the name comes originally from geology. The polar ice caps, having scrapped across North American, melted here and left a continent’s worth of rich black topsoil across a narrow swath of central Alabama and Mississippi. In the beltway, 30 miles wide and 300 miles long, cotton, the slave trade, and the okra slaves brought with them from Northern Africa, thrived.
In the Black Belt, everything grows with abandon. This is why a pine tree stand can hide a cemetery in the blink of an eye. The farm my parents named Stillmeadow when they bought it as newlyweds in 1970 is anything but. My father carved a space out of thick underbrush for a house. It sits on a limestone hill that overlooks rolling green pastures where cows graze. The view is more pastoral now than it once was: for decades, the cattle trough sat at the bottom of the hill. The combination of water and cow made mud. Ancient, tall trees surround the hill but semi-wild dogs, poisonous snakes, and thick underbrush inhabited the space beneath them. And the driveway, which the neighbors used to refer to as a pig path, was a half-mile long, unmarked, twisting gravel path that looked as if it led nowhere. My parents could see past these blemishes. They saw a beloved and prized possession — land.
Being able to see and walk on assets has an importance in rural areas that makes stocks and bonds look like baseball trading cards. Stock markets are distant, uncontrollable, and insubstantial compared to land. Steven Ambrose describes in his book Lewis and Clark that the Virginia plantation owners during Jefferson’s time were “land rich and cash poor.” The description remains apt for my father. More than an investment, land is patrimony. Once, my father said with quite a straight face that he’d haunt me and my sister to our graves if we ever sold the farm. I can’t say I know anyone who’s been threatened with a haunting over the sale of IBM shares, common or preferred.
When my parents suggested that Brian and I get married at Stillmeadow, they envisioned a setting that my feeble imagination could not. (This discrepancy made for a trying engagement.) Being Baptist, they refused to spend a dime on alcohol for the wedding, but they were lavish with their garden. They carved out an English-style garden from the side of a hill. From the porch, they built a path of broken fieldstone that wound between Japanese maples and terraced beds full of azaleas and boxwood, hostas and ferns, and colorful caladiums. It ended at a stone and grass patio that’s only purpose was to stage a wedding.
When Brian and I arrive at the house, it’s the first time in two years we’ve seen the garden at its summer peak. My father has been cutting back drooping tree limbs that were blocking the driveway. A beat-up farm truck can handle these obstacles: but seventy friends and family members are coming for a birthday party. The driveway has to be fixed. For that matter, lots of things need fixing.
My mother’s list of pre-party chores is long. Our arrival interrupts the work, but only for a second. She’s always had the energetic air of someone more accustomed to the company of children than adults. Tired and sweaty in her tiny overalls and long sleeved shirt, she is still laughing and smiling at something even though she’s pulling at something poisonous and it’s over 90 degrees.
My father had already decided that this is his event, not my mother’s and he sold cattle at the stockyard to pay for a caterer and a Dixieland jazz band. He’s looking forward to his first birthday party since his childhood; but he’s really looking forward to resting, not working under her supervision. While conversing quietly in the kitchen with Brian, he runs through the list of things he said he would do and he’s done. Clearly, he’s just about done in when my mother reappears: “They’re tired. Leave them alone,” she quips. He disappears to tend to other concerns, a side benefit of owning 1500 acres of land.
My mother, who picks up elderly hitchhikers because it’s her Christian duty, can’t bear to hurt a single living creature, including a weed. Her garden is as vigorous as she is. Everything has grown so big, so quickly, it looks like a little jungle. She’s allowed an interloping elephant ear to take over much of it. They tower over all of us with their deeply veined and emerald leaves. She’s also let a skunk cabbage flourish because, she says, it’s erect and beautiful. This garden is green and lush: it has none of the sublime juxtapositions I’ve seen in Newburyport. There’s no consideration of leaf texture; there’s no winter interest; there aren’t even many flowering plants. Her garden blends into the verdant landscape of the Black Belt, threatening to go wild. And if it does, my mother will love it then, just the same.
Days after the birthday party, which was a fine success, Brian and I are ready to leave. In the garden, Brian poses for a picture by the elephant ears, as if they are a sideshow at a carnival. He asks my father if these are typical. Hand on chin, he appraises the behemoths and comments on my mother’s gardening. Brian hears him mutter, “She waters them too damn much.” But overall, I think he’s pleased with her results.
As we leave, my parents stand at the top of the garden as we descend down the path, to the patio where we married, through the gated arbor covered in confederate jasmine, to the pasture, and to the car. It will carry us back to our precious Newburyport garden with its knee-high weeds and a state-fair sized zucchini. As we leave Stillmeadow, my parents ask the same question: when are you coming home again? They both mean: when are you going to stay?
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