Seeds of Friendship

Garden-writing is always either grimly concerned with the nuts and bolts of gardening’s practicalities or with its latest and flashiest fashions. The first kind is written by mere doers, the second by mere puffers, therefore neither is of any interest as writing. Gardening, and by extension writing about gardening, is something done better in Britain than anywhere else, certainly better than anywhere else in the English-speaking world. Wrong, wrong, and wrong again, dear reader. A single slim volume, Gardening for Love by Elizabeth Lawrence, delicately but devastatingly disposes of all those fallacies.

Miss Lawrence was born in 1904 in North Carolina and lived there all her life, except when she spent four years as a student at Barnard in New York. (She majored in English and was later the first woman in North Carolina to qualify as a landscape architect.) She was a contemporary and long-time friend of the Mississippi novelist Eudora Welty: and it shows. They shared a world, which they saw in a very similar way, and at its best Miss Lawrence’s writing has much of Miss Welty’s unshowy perceptiveness and slightly melancholy grace. It was Miss Welty who in the 1940s gave her friend the idea for this book, which occupied her intermittently for the next thirty years. It deals with the market bulletins issued by the agricultural departments of most southern states, in which country people advertised jobs wanted or available, and wares of all kinds for sale or exchange. Both women saw these advertisements as voices from, as Miss Lawrence put it, times and customs that are long gone, or that are rapidly passing. I have an idea that if someone sat down and read all of the market bulletins since 1928, he would have a rich sense of the social history of the rural Deep South, through the years of the Great Depression to more recent times: the history of people whose names are now recorded only in family bibles, in the records of county courthouses, on tombstones in country cemeteries – and in the yellowed pages of the market bulletins where they sold their mules and their cordwood, their bales of sweet-smelling alfalfa, their old-fashioned daffodils and their yard plants with their poetic country names. Miss Lawrence duly explores with both passion and scholarship the origins of those local plant-names, and uncovers the often strange and circuitous ways by which the plants came to be treasured in lonely country gardens in the Deep South:

Plants that traveled from London to Williamsburg, and from Williamsburg to London and then to other parts of the world, still appear on the market bulletin lists, and still go on from garden to garden: fringe tree, cucumber tree, sweet gum, and sassafras; sweet-smelling melons and grapes; chinquapins and ‘ ivy’, as kalmia is still called by some in the southern mountains.

Fascinated though she is by the plants, she is even more fascinated by the society in which they are treasured. That post-Depression and ‘dirt-poor but proud’ society (which now seems so distant but which in isolated parts of the Deep South survived at least until the 1970s) is revealed in all its stark simplicity by Miss Lawrence’s selection from the bulletins’ advertisements.  Someone wants to swap ‘watermelonred crepe myrtle for pink crepe myrtle . . . I don’t have money.’ Someone else says, ‘Will give a large pink oleander to anyone who will haul it away and provide several buckets of good dirt to fill the hole.’ The same tone is found in the employment advertisements. A farmer offers a comfortable home to a small family of cotton pickers, but ‘People who live here must be happy.’ A man wants ‘to retire like they used to before the war’. He says he is easy to get along with, and he’s looking for a home with someone needing help. A young man wants a job on a farm taking care of an elderly couple and doing chores. He likes people, likes to hunt and fish, is single, and does not run around much or get into mischief. Just as there are many Southerners like that young man, so there are many advertisements for animals, particularly horses and dogs. Many half-re veal the sad stories of the no-longer-young. ‘Must sell my favorite using horses, as my ranch has been sold.’ A sorrel saddle horse is offered in exchange for ‘a horse or mule that an aged man can plow – no jumper or saddle fighter’. And Sally Perry wants to sell her black mare: ‘has no one to handle her’. There are advertisements for dogs, curs and hounds of all known kinds and some kinds known only to their advertisers. There are blueticks, black-and-tans and redbones, the latter advertised as ‘wide, fast, delux strike dogs’. Two puppies are deliciously described as ‘fat and healthy and starting to run; their ears lap around their noses’. Not all of the dogs, though, are for sale. Some are wanted: ‘If you have a bird dog puppy that is killing chickens or is gun shy, and you are going to get rid of him, please do not kill him, I want him.’ Miss Lawrence’s characteristic quiet comment on that last advertisement is: ‘In the pages of the market bulletin, many strange and wonderful things turn up, including human mercy and tenderness towards one another and towards beasts.’ As that comment suggests, she is concerned above all with the individuals behind the adve rtisements. She didn’t just read and record what the advertisers wrote, then buy seeds and plants from them. She wrote letters to them, they wrote letters to her, often for years, even decades. Many became friends. Some she visited, some visited her. And this book is a patchwork of long quotations from their letters, punctuated by her own quiet, unpatronizing commentary. The polyphony of her correspondents’ many heartfelt – and wonderfully eloquent – voices is one of its great charms. Bulletin advertisers were often not ‘well-schooled’ but they were raised on the Bible and their language has a biblical energy, despite the fact that many were elderly, in poor health, living alone, in deep rural isolation. Mrs U.B. Evans, for instance, lived on a plantation near Ferriday, Louisiana: ‘I live a long way in the country, about twenty miles from Natchez, and nine miles from the highway and the nearest telephone.’ Mrs Grady Stamps of Bogue Chitto described a hard life in which she’d lived in Texas during the Second World War where ‘My husband worked in the shipyard and we saved our money. We came home in 1945 and bought ten acres of land. We had the timber sawed off for lumber to help out on our house. Got it so we could move in. Had more done all along. Then I started to grow flowers . . .’ A later letter confided, ‘I am by myself now. I lost my husband the sixteenth of December. He was carried to the hospital the morning before Thanksgiving, and never got to come home.’ When Miss Voleene Murton of Shinnon, Mississippi, sent seeds Miss Lawrence had ordered, she included both a note saying, ‘I thank you, Miss Liz’, and copies of The Herald of Truth and Gospel Minutes, with the postscript, ‘I hope you are interested in the Gospel too.’ Mrs Rosa Violet Hicks lived in the mountains fourteen miles from Banner Elk on the Tennessee/North Carolina border. When Miss Lawrence and a friend drove out, and up, to visit her, ‘Beside the mailbox we found Mr Ray Hicks . . . and his two sons. I had written to say we were coming but hadn’t said when, and I don’t know how long he had been standing there . . . waiting so patiently on the hot and dusty roadside by the mailbox . . . watching for us to pull up in the car.’ Elizabeth Lawrence never got round to finishing this book. After she died in 1985 it was edited for publication by Allen Lacy. It is as though she couldn’t bring herself to finish it: as though finishing it would mean that the world it described had finished too. When she writes that ‘I suppose I could have survived over the years without the Mississippi Market Bulletin,’ she hardly sounds convinced. Certainly not as convinced as when she adds, ‘But my own life would have been a bit poorer’ and ‘The poorly printed, cheap pulp pages of these market bulletins pulse with the very stuff of life.’ So does her book about them, which the poet Stanley Kunitz accurately described as ‘an enchanting work, unlike any other gardening book in existence’. Miss Lawrence herself once replied to a magazine editor’s questions, ‘For the record: I design gardens but cannot bear to be called a Landscape Architect; lecture and write about gardening, but cannot bear to be called an expert. Cannot bear to be called an amateur, but like to be taken seriously as a gardener and a writer.’ Take her seriously, as both. She earned the right.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 3 © Tim Longville 2004