A Southern Garden

Elizabeth Lawrence

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781469617053
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Horticulture
• Index: Biological Sciences

When Elizabeth Lawrence's A Southern Garden was first published in 1942, it was the only book to address the needs of gardeners in Zones 7 and 8—an area that ranges from Richmond to San Antonio and on up the West Coast to Seattle. Although many books are now available for this region, gardeners frequently return to A Southern Garden for inspiration. More than eighty years later, Lawrence's information is still fresh, her style of writing still delightful. She not only gives practical advice but manages to convey what it is about gardening that draws so many people to it. This new edition of A Southern Garden will be treasured by all who love gardens and good writing.

Two Months of Winter

Winter, in my garden, takes up December and January in ordinary years. Even in those months there is a breath of spring in good years, though in bad years the cold encroaches upon February. Perhaps it will seem contrary to begin the garden year with winter, but to me it begins with the flowering of the first paper-whites and sweet violets after heavy frost has cut down the last chrysanthemum. We do not have to wait for spring to start the new season. After the slimy stalks of fall flowers have been cleared away, the garden assumes its winter aspect, and winter flowers begin to bloom.

The Garden in Winter

During our open winters we have some of the most delightful weather of the year. There are times when we have the “little snatches of sunshine and fair weather in the most uncomfortable parts of the year” that Addison describes in his essay on The Pleasure of a Garden, and we have frequently days that are as “agreeable as any in the finest months.” During the false spring that almost invariably comes in December or January—sometimes in both—the weather is mild enough to permit finishing up chores that were left undone in the fall, and even pulling a long chair out of the summer house to sit in the sun. If a garden faces the south and is protected from the north by a hedge or wall, it is surprising to find how many days it is pleasant to sit there out-of-doors. Yet we turn our backs on our gardens after Thanksgiving and leave them unvisited until the daffodils appear.

Certainly we should consider the appearance of the garden in winter as well as in summer, particularly in the choice of shrubs. I have often wondered with Addison that “those who are like myself, and love to live in gardens, have never thought of contriving a winter garden, which should consist of such trees only as never cast their leaves.” Addison “so far indulged himself” in the thought of a winter garden as to set aside an acre to be planted in evergreens. Most of us have not room for an acre, but, as Bacon—also a lover of color in the landscape on grey days—suggests, we can have a few “such things as are green all winter: holly; ivy; bays; juniper; cypress trees; eugh; pine-apple trees; fir trees.”

The beauty and variety of the broad-leaved evergreens is most apparent in winter when their foliage—varying from the pale jade of mahonia to the dull purple of yaupon—is contrasted with grey stems; when hollies, cotoneasters, and fire-thorns are scarlet with berries; and when the sweet olive is fragrant with creamy flowers. I like at least one evergreen tree, a magnolia or a holly or a pine, so that there will be something more than bare branches against the sky after the bright leaves have fallen. But too many evergreens become oppressive. The winter effect is gayer if the shrubs that hold their leaves are planted with deciduous trees and shrubs with colored bark. Crape-myrtles are especially lovely in winter, particularly when they are old and their smooth trunks are mottled with a warm grey and tan. The bare trunks and branches of the sycamores are so beautiful that we should be willing to overlook the untidy summer and fall litter of dead leaves and broken twigs.

Further delights of a garden in winter are the grey of lavender, the frosted green of santolina, and the dull olive of rosemary. These aromatic herbs from the Mediterranean are very much at home in sunny, well-drained situations in Southern gardens. This is a fact that we should remember when we abuse our climate, for rosemary, lavender, and santolina are not very hardy in the Northern states. A gnarled rosemary is one of my chief treasures. I treasure it for the charm of its irregular outline, for the pale blue of its flowers in very early spring, and for the refreshing odor of its foliage as I brush against it in passing. These three herbs need a poor light soil and lime. Santolina will stand any amount of drought, but no excess moisture. All must bask in full sun.

Some of the smaller foliage plants are important for winter color. In the crevices of stone walls and steps, and between flagstones, thyme and the evergreen sedums have an all-season charm. Sedum album, S. acre, and S. reflexum take on a warm reddish color in cold weather. They are good sedums for the South for they are able to adapt themselves to our humid summers and our changeable winters.

As companions to sedums the thymes are dark green in winter, and fragrant as soon as the sun warms the stones that they cover. If there is a place in the garden for a sun-catch, where there is warmth and a shelter from the wind, and a paved footing, nothing could be nicer for growing between the paving stones than the pungent, creeping thyme, Thymus Serpyllum, and the citron-scented lemon thyme, T.S. var. vulgaris. In a garden, sun is to be courted in winter as shade is courted in summer, and all sun-loving plants that have any winter advantage in foliage or in fragrance are particularly desirable.

By the end of November when the gradual destruction of frost has finally ended the season for most flowering plants, when the dead stalks have been cleared away, and the garden made tidy for the winter, greys and greens are restful after the final burst of autumn color. The quiet greens of hedges, ivy, and evergreen edging plants, the fresh color of the winter grass, the arching leaves of the lily-turf and red spider-lilies, the decorative rosettes of the yuccas, and the greys of santolina and lavender take on new importance. Winter foliage is almost as pleasing as winter bloom. Particularly if it comes up fresh in the fall, and dies down in the spring, and is not something that you are accustomed to seeing the year around. The newly unfurled leaves of the Italian arum, Arum italicum, held fresh and crisp above the foliage of plants cut down by frost, are broadly arrow-shaped (to eight inches across), dark green, and prettily marbled in a silver grey. All through the winter they furnish the otherwise denuded borders, keeping their freshness even in bitter weather. Another spot of green that I enjoy in this season is the rosette of the Peruvian lily, Scilla peruviana.

I cannot think why the yuccas are so little used. Once in midwinter I went into a little garden that had no claim to distinction in any season, but acquired the charm of simplicity when it was reduced by frost to a pattern of brick-edged walks accented by the stiff rosettes of yuccas and framed by a clipped hedge. The wide-leaved yucca seen in country gardens, and native in the eastern part of this state, has more character than the commonly planted Adams-Needle, Yucca filamentosa, which is the only species to be found in the nurseries. Sometimes you can get the former from farm women in the market. They have many interesting slips and plants and flowers tucked in with eggs and sausage. The western Y. angustifolia (glauca) is a very narrow-leaved species, a variation from our own natives.

Gardens planted for winter green and winter bloom have an air of spring when warm days come and redbirds flash into the open. This year we had our fine weather before Christmas. Roses bloomed into December, and I went out in the snow on Christmas Eve to pick the last frost-bitten buds with a big bunch of paper-whites. But January was unusually bitter, with the ground frozen; the pearly buds of the snowdrops in their green sheaths were waiting for a little warmth to bring them out.

Another year, in January, I came back from south Georgia with a box of greenhouse camellias to find them blooming here in the open. Twenty other flowers were in bloom in my garden or in the neighborhood. There were pansies, sweet alyssum, violets (the variety Governor Herrick—the Prince of Wales had been blooming furiously in Augusta), white Roman hyacinths, winter aconite, two types of polyanthus narcissus, and the Christmas rose. In addition a few buds had opened on the earliest spring shrubs, the Japan quince and the January jasmine, spiraea, forsythia, and Christmas honeysuckle. The mahonia was in bloom too, with spikes of daffodil-colored flowers.

That winter was an unusually mild one. Horticultural magazines were full of reports of winter bloom. At Port Washington, Long Island, January jasmine, Japan quince, and Christmas honeysuckle bloomed in January for the first time in fifty years. A list of plants in bloom in an Irish garden included winter aconite, snowdrops, veronica, aubretia, roses, the Algerian iris, winter heath, wallflowers, primroses, January jasmine, and the Christmas rose. In a Scotch garden jasmine, snowdrops, witch-hazel, primroses, double arabis, and wallflowers were in bloom the first of the month.

Although that winter was milder than most, the list of plants in bloom in my garden is about the same as that for the previous five or six Januaries, with the exception of 1936. The winter of 1935–36 was the only one in my lifetime when there was snow on the ground for two months, and I hope there will never be another.

Flora Hyemalis

Where winters are mild, all sorts of flowering plants burst into bloom in “unseasonable” weather, particularly in warm and sheltered situations. But flowers out of season are the least of January and December bloom. The most intense moments of gardening are those when one finds among dried leaves that drift into the borders the wintry flowers which, as Conrad says, “blossom in the dead of winter, emit a sort of faint perfume of adventure, and die before the spring sets in.” You will find the literary gardeners of England, from Elizabeth’s time to the present day, very much preoccupied with them.

For the latter part of January and February, Bacon thought a garden should have “the mezereon tree, which then blossoms; crocus vernus, both the yellow, and the grey; primroses; anemones; the early tulip; hyacinthus orientalis; chamairis; fritillaria.” Sir Herbert Maxwell in his charming paragraphs on flora hyemalis in Memories of the Months,¹ sixth series—and if you do not know them, let me commend to you for delight to the mind and benefit to the garden the beautiful writing in these volumes—describes his adventures in this season in his garden on the southwest coast of Scotland, where winter weather is at times deceitfully mild. He rejoices in the cold-endurance of the blossoms of the Chinese witch-hazel and laments the severity of a night in January that caused the winter jasmine “to shed its golden veil, and turned the crimson flush of Rhododendron Nobleanum to ill-colored ashes,” adding that the rhododendron “always keeps plenty of flower-buds in reserve, for the return of mild conditions.”

The chance that tender blossoms will escape the rigors of winter is to most gardeners a chance well worth taking. And if the flowers come into perfection only to be whipped to shreds by icy winds, the only harm done is that we must wait for another season and hope for more clement weather. Ever since I first shared Billy Hunt’s enthusiasm for winter bloom, I have been collecting January and December flowering plants for my garden. I still have the buttery list that I made as we talked and lunched, and I pictured myself as living henceforth in a sort of Hesperides of perpetual spring, perfumed with sweet olive and gay with camellias—both Sasanqua and japonica—winter heath, winter-heliotrope, and in particular the white cowslip, Saxifraga ciliata. I have yet to see, except in Mr. A. W. Darnell’s treasury of Winter Blossoms from the Outdoor Garden,² any mention of this saxifrage, but I still tear open every list of rare plants that arrives in the hope of finding its name among them. It has “heads of large pure white blossoms, with their pale green calyxes and brightly colored stems,” and is found “in the Himalayas, on the Mussooree and Suen Ranges.” In cultivation “in warm sheltered localities, it flowers early in the New Year.”

Darnell’s book and the notes of British writers in the winter numbers of Gardening Illustrated are maddening to gardeners in our part of the world. Not only because we cannot get the plants in this country, but because the plants that we can get do not bloom so late or begin so early for us as for them. With envious incredulity we read Darnell’s full and optimistic account of “exotic trees, shrubs and herbaceous plants that flower in the outdoor garden in the British Isles during the months of December, January and February” (with a few that bloom in October, November, March, and April for good measure). Here, and in the notes of other gardeners in the British horticultural papers, we gather that November to March is the normal season for January jasmine which rarely reaches perfection here before February; that Cassia corymbosa, gone here by the end of October, continues through November; and that leadwort, which September sees an end of here, lasts well into the winter. Even our own chrysogonum, with few blossoms in North Carolina after August, is reported as “frequently seen in flower from March to Christmas.” If it were not for the fact that other gardeners less prejudiced in favor of winter bear him out—and often go him one better—I should wonder whether Mr. Darnell’s versions of the extent of the blooming season were not as highly colored as his delightful illustrations.

Even allowing for that, there is much for us to look forward to in our own gardens in winter, especially as we are able to grow so much of the half-hardy material from countries where the warm winters are a foretaste of spring. We have even a few plants for this season that have escaped Mr. Darnell.

The first flower of winter is the paper-white narcissus, Narcissus Tazetta. This season has been an unusually good one for it. The cold came upon us gradually, and the buds were hardened so that there was still bloom in the border in the freezing weather after Christmas. Early in December there were enough of them to perfume the garden and to give it an illusion of spring. We always set out the bulbs of these and the little Roman hyacinths after they have done blooming in a bowl in the house. It takes a season for them to recover, but after that they will bloom normally. The hyacinths bloom in January (some years not until February) with an occasional spicy stalk in December. Both should be planted where their decaying foliage can be hidden in the spring, for a patch of dead leaves among the fresh foliage of the spring-flowering daffodils will spoil the effect. Occasionally there are a few January buds from the Grand Monarque, another of the sweet-scented tazetta group of narcissus. Dr. Carrick, in High Point, has praise for the yellow-flowered Soleil d’Or which has never done much for me in the open. He sent me some bulbs this fall, so it is having another test.

Often in January a few campernelles, N. odorus, come into bloom, and in mild seasons the first of the little early trumpet daffodils. The earliest trumpet is said to be N. pallidus praecox, native to the Pyrenees. I have not found it in the American trade, and it may be no earlier than our own little trumpet.

There is solid satisfaction, as well as delight, in winter flowers that flower in winter. Last year the white hoop-petticoat daffodil, N. Bulbocodium monophyllus, said to bloom in January, bloomed in January—not in some one else’s garden but in my own. This, the real winter daffodil, is a miniature form with flowers like sea-foam, and one or several thread-like leaves. It pushes out of the ground very early in the New Year. Two bulbs produced between them three flowers. The first appeared on the twelfth of January. It was immediately followed by the second, and the two remained fresh and fair until the last of the month. In February the third flower appeared. This year the ground has been covered with sleet since the tips of two pointed buds became visible. They are waiting unmarred under the white sheet for the sun to bring them out. But it is already the end of the month, so they will not bloom in January this season. I have visited them daily, making a little hole in the sleet to be certain that they are still there and still unharmed. The pale flowers with delicately fluted, wide flaring crowns and thread-like segments are similar to the later yellow-flowered forms, but shorter stemmed and fewer leaved. They are not pure white as described, but as the poetic Mr. Bowles observes, “beautifully crystalline” when young, and in age “almost as transparent as finest lawn.” It is unbelievable that anything so fragile could last through cold and rain for two weeks. It is unbelievable that anything can be so lovely.

The common little yellow crocus flowers very early on every lawn, very nearly as soon as the so-called winter-flowering species. Of these I have found only Crocus Sieberi to be satisfactory, permanent, and truly precocious in habit. But all of the species are delightful. They are more delicately colored and more graceful than the over-sized horticultural varieties. C. Imperati, from the mountains near Naples, is said to be very early indeed, but I have never been able to get it above ground at any season. Mr. Darnell considers it superior to C. Sieberi because the lilac flowers open wide even on dull days. C. Tomasinianus bloomed in the middle of January one year, but comes normally a month later. C. etruscus, usually classed as winter-blooming, did not put in an appearance until spring. On two occasions C. Korolkowii bloomed in mid-January in the New York Botanical Garden, although its regular season is in February. With me it blooms, if at all, the very first of February.

Crocus Sieberi, which occurs in the mountains along the Adriatic sea, is a vigorous species, easily established. It increases wonderfully even in one year, and a few bulbs soon make a good splash of color. A patch that Marjorie Lalor planted at Saint Mary’s has been increasing for four years, and blooming profusely from mid-January to March. When the weather is mild, a few flowers open the last of December. They open only on bright days. It is a variable species with pale and deep lilac forms. Those that I have are mauve. The greyish tone merges into the silver of the stems, and is accented by the bright colors of the orange stigma and the yellow stamens and throat. The petals are grey on the reverse, delicately feat...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations
• 1 Two Months of Winter
• 2 Spring Comes in February
• 3 An Introduction to Summer
• 4 The Climax of Fall
• Frost—and the Garden Year Begins Again
• Further Notes, 1967
• Blooming Dates
• Index