Mrs. Whaley and Her Charleston Garden

This is a sweet read for those who like to garden or who like to read about gardening, who love the South, who like salty old ladies, and who like talking to salty old ladies about their remembrances of the past.
Mrs. Whaley is surprisingly salty for an 85 year old lady of the old South (her father-in-law was a Civil War veteran, she says).

Her gardening advice is pretty specific for the Charleston area (no peonies or rhododendrons, which she says is a sad deprivation). Her gardening design tips would work for anybody. She points out that gardening is simply doing pictures with plants. Her discussions about life, living, marriage, and her growing up are delicious. The gardening section is in the first half of the book and mostly what it did for me is make me ache with envy and longing. She has a beautifully proportioned garden, drawn for by a famous garden designer back in the pre-WW2 days. She has a hired man to do the heavy work and daily drudge. She has brick paths and ponds and flowers that won't bloom where I live and a longer growing season. And I have a sinful lack of contentment.

I won't be quoting from the section on gardening.

Her lady mother, a delightful woman by all accounts, who grew up on a plantation in a fairly well to do family. She married a doctor in an era and area where doctors did not make much money. They had some lovely blue chintz curtains that faded as they got older, so she brought the children together one day, gave them crayons and told them to darken the curtains two or three shades of blue. So the children colored the curtains until they were a satisfactory shade, and their mother hung them back up.

Mrs. Whaley says her mother's house was lovely because it was full of things that meant something to them. Mrs. Whaley herself had somebody help sketch out the original plan for her garden, but she never hired a decorator for the house. She says the kind of decorating she does and her mother did is simply "the result of a lot of use and happiness going on."

She talks of growing up in a place with a real sense of community. Two of her aunts or cousins never married but "were the backbone of the Women's Auxiliary and wonderful to the children in the neighborhood. Their summerhouse was always open to children. All the houses were. You would get the simplest of suppers and then play word games on the back porch. It was all such fun."

She says schooling is a disaster for many children, and that what instructors need to get through to children is that what they are doing is teaching self-control, control of the mind. She says she didn't understand that when she was in school, but she does now. She still learns new pieces to play on the piano (in her eighties!) because she wants the exercise.

Mrs. Whaley didn't do well in school. She struggled mightily with the academics, but she did play the piano and sew well. She says she was a 5'9" rail full of doubts and plagued by shyness. She was finally able to earn a music teaching certificate, and then she filled in and blossomed out, developing, she says, "into a viable human being. But let me say right here, the journey from birth to eighteen is no joke!"

Another story I love, similar to the curtain story, is how she found a dress pattern she loved 20 years ago. She has used that pattern and made the dress for winter, summer, cooking, gardening, tea partying, and dancing, varying material according to season or occupation (that's pretty near a complete quote, excepting a few words I omitted without the proper ellipses for time's sake).
She says it saved her oodles of money which she spent in the garden.

She grew up in Pinopolis, and she says that everybody owned a coat, not a party coat, dress coat, work coat, red coat, black coat, school coat, winter coat, next year's coat and last year's coat. You bought a coat and kept it for years. The first new coat she had, she says, was a present when she got married at 23. Her previous coat was a hand-me-down she'd gotten when she was 12.

She tells of the terrible time they had getting her mother to buy a new dress (something she never did) for her first grand-daughter's wedding. She finally did, and then she wore it to every wedding she went to for the rest of her life.

Her husband pretty much gave her free hand in the garden, and doesn't seem to have played the heavy in the financial area either. She writes,

"Now, what can you do for your 'pearl of great price' to make up to him for allowing you all of this freewheeling in your garden? For me it evolved that, amongst other things, he had the privilege of casting my vote, making it two votes for him on a regular basis... he also had his own refrigerator which was his alone. In it there was always custard, made by the best custard maker in town.. ME. I never felt it was an unfair exchange.
This was all back in the forties, fifties, sixties, and seventies, however. I have an idea it wouldn't fly so well today. No self-respecting woman, however, uninformed she may be would dream of giving up her personal vote. And, in addition today there is such a flap about eggs and cholesterol that you would be suspected of trying surreptitiously to finish off a husband if you constantly provided custard.

So you will probably have to find a different sort of exchange, one that will be acceptable to both parties in the nineties. But don't get discouraged. there are many ways to share a garden with a mate, to get your interests fitting hand in glove. My parents did it one way. My husband and I did it another."

Her children will probably do it another, and because just as we are all unique personalities, so every marriage has its own unique style and flavor.