Taking Root

The Nature Writing of William and Adam Summer of Pomaria

James Everett Kibler, Jr., James Everett Kibler, Jr.

• Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781611177756
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Horticulture
• Index: Biological Sciences

Collected essays by two of America's earliest environmental authors retain relevance today

William Summer founded the renowned Pomaria Nursery, which thrived from the 1840s to the 1870s in central South Carolina and became the center of a bustling town that today bears its name. The nursery grew into one of the most important American nurseries of the antebellum period, offering wide varieties of fruit trees and ornamentals to gardeners throughout the South. Summer also published catalogs containing well-selected and thoroughly tested varieties of plants and assisted his brother, Adam, in publishing several agricultural journals throughout the 1850s until 1862. In Taking Root, James Everett Kibler, Jr., collects for the first time the nature writing of William and Adam Summer, two of America's earliest environmental authors. Their essays on sustainable farm practices, reforestation, local food production, soil regeneration, and respect for Mother Earth have surprising relevance today.

The Summer brothers owned farms in Newberry and Lexington Counties, where they created veritable experimental stations for plants adapted to the southern climate. At its peak the nursery offered more than one thousand varieties of apples, pears, peaches, plums, figs, apricots, and grapes developed and chosen specifically for the southern climate, as well as offering an equal number of ornamentals, including four hundred varieties of repeat-blooming roses. The brothers experimented with and reported on sustainable farm practices, reforestation, land reclamation, soil regeneration, crop diversity rather than the prevalent cotton monoculture, and animal breeds accustomed to hot climates from Carolina to Central Florida.

Written over a span of two decades, their essays offer an impressive environmental ethic. By 1860 Adam had concluded that a person's treatment of nature is a moral issue. Sustainability and long-term goals, rather than get-rich-quick schemes, were key to this philosophy. The brothers' keen interest in literature is evident in the quality of their writing; their essays and sketches are always readable, sometimes poetic, and occasionally humorous and satiric. A representative sampling of their more-than-six hundred articles appear in this volume.

  The Forest Trees of the South.—No. 1

[ADAM SUMMER]

Southern Agriculturist 1 (July 1853): 193–94.

This essay is proved to be by Adam Summer by internal evidence, by the reference to childhood at St John’s Lutheran Church, Pomaria, and by its position as Adam’s usual lead editorial essay in the issue. Adam’s reference to the “creed-riven Church” described the situation at St. John’s when the Swiss Reformed and German Lutheran members argued over doctrinal issues to such a degree that each sect used the church on alternate Sundays. Adam also treated the St. John’s forest and his nature walks there in “Winter Green” (pp. 38–43). Adam’s celtis is the hackberry, the cercis is the flowering Judas tree, the liquidambar is the sweet gum, and the cornel is the dogwood. The deciduous magnolias of the “upper country” would be Magnolia macrophylla and/or M. tripetala and possibly M. acuminata. The M. tripetala was planted at the Summer family cemetery, likely by Adam around 1859. The editor found it growing on the northern slope of nearby Little Mountain in 1980. Through the work of Pomaria Nursery, the coastal evergreen magnolias did indeed grow in the same landscape with the mountain hemlock. The South Carolina Rail Road Depot was on Pulaski to Lincoln Streets in Columbia. By the “Charlotte Depot,” Summer likely meant the Charlotte Railroad Depot from Barnwell to Winn Streets in Columbia. Both were burned by Sherman in 1865.

Summer’s “timber is heir to” is a playful revision of Shakespeare’s “flesh is heir to” (Hamlet, act III, scene 1). The quotation beginning “This tall tree” was part of a long poem entitled “The Dogwood—An Ode to Hymen” by Dr. Elijah Gates of Newberry District. John A. Chapman called Gates a “man of fine attainments, a genius and a poet” (O’Neall and Chapman 2: 563). Gates never wrote his poems down but recited them to friends. Chapman published this poem, which he said was “Written [down], I think, by William Summer, Esq., of Pomaria, who knew the author well” (565). Adam’s version has variant readings, as might be expected from the recollection of a recitation. Elsewhere, Adam also used Gates’s line describing the oak’s “rugged arms [that] had boxed with Jove” (“Autumn,” 1847, pp. 35–37) and his “No golden goblets graced the board, / Such as are by fools adored” (“The Season,” 1845, pp. 9–12). (Gates’s poem is quoted in full in O’Neall and Chapman 2: 564–66.)

The glorious trees—the towering tenants of the boscage—the evidences of the grandeur and sublimity which once invested the land—are they not texts worthy for the most picture-giving pen to dwell upon? Rich in elements of beauty, noble in their rugged antiquity, inviting from the coolness of their shade—all men should be friends with these monarchs of nature’s kingdom. An old and well preserved wood, with its tall, leaf-capped columnar trunks, is to us more a study, than would be a ramble amongst the ruins of the architectural and artistic perfection of the past. It is a lesson of present greatness, enthroned on its own beauty, and re-producing what is denied to mortality—its rejuvenescence—with each returning spring. We know such a wood—the wood of St. John’s—where we rambled and studied from early childhood to the dawn of active youth; and we have amidst its leafy groves, many gnarled old friends, who still brave the storm, the sunshine, and the wintry wind, sustained by the perennial vigor of uncontaminated nature.

That grove gives to us a religious worshipping more pure than the creed-riven Church, embosomed in its centre, and which was once the pride of our honest German ancestors. Here they built their holy house, and it was a beautiful ordinance, to preserve around it so much of God’s own forest. Upon revisiting our home near by, we often take a moonlight ride through that out-door temple—so grand in its sombre majesty—so beautiful with its carpet of shadows and moonbeams—with so much undisturbed solitude, to invite reflection and spiritual communion.

Trees—as the greatest types of vegetable production, when contemplated as the congregated forest kingdom—are well worthy of the scientific attention bestowed by those great minds who have made them the study of a life time. We speak now of the attractive features which they afford, apart from considerations of general usefulness for practical purposes. Presenting so much variety—rich in picturesque associations—peculiar and distinct in habit and character—this page of nature’s book, with its leaves ever open, never wearies nor tires our senses. Our own South is rich in resources for such studies, and with flower-budding, fruit-bearing, and the varied fantastic livery of autumn, we can live outside of the man-world in happiness and contemplative contentment. Go to the woods, take the humblest tree and study it for an hour. Rest in its shade—pillow your head upon its gnarled, moss-covered roots, and reflect upon the divinity which invested it with such beautiful and wondrous shape. Those spreading roots, over which you recline, are busy, active, teeming with life; and here alone you might stop, and find food for your thoughts, and scope for your investigations, through the longest coming years usually allotted to man. Striking wide and deep, those roots radiate in search of food, and a million of feeding mouths lap up the rich tributes of the primeval mould. What delicate organism—what perfection in nature’s laboratory—what complication of vital machinery is here brought into play to sustain the requirements of that growing tree. How bravely, and yet how curiously, stands the stately trunk, defying the angry storms. As you lazily look upward at the blue sky, scarcely visible through the thick canopy of leaves and branches, consider, that there lies hidden wisdom in all this uninvented handiwork—a use and purpose mightier than the conceptions of man would lead him to imagine. Was its destiny written upon its rough bark, a sigh might escape from your better impulses, to read the desecrating purposes which “timber is heir to,” or a thrill of joy might invest you, to learn that—

“This tall tree a keel shall be,

To some great ship and ride the sea,

Bearing the spirits of the brave,

To send proud tyrants to the grave.”

But in no situation is a tree so captivating and attractive, as when it is singled out—tabooed—to be forever an ornament to the grounds in which we locate our Penates—there to be cherished and protected, and coaxed into flourishing symmetry by the aids of cultivation and pruning. It is in this, that the beautiful in nature becomes an element controllable by skilful management and refined taste. Not left to the wilder caprices of unrestrained natural production—where vegetable life, seeking the light so essential to its wants, puts forth its necessitous forms of growth, in lines and shapes not always beautiful or attractive—but with sunshine on all sides, the free winds of heaven stirring its branches into healthy growth, and its roots, unobstructed, wandering in rich untenanted pasture grounds; ’tis in such situations that the forest tree attains its true form and its most perfect development. It is to bring these necessary adjuncts to ornamental adornment, to the homesteads of our land, that we are induced to thrust these notions upon those of our readers who, having a foretaste of coming improvement, may not be averse to indulge us in our growing fancies.

We have so many resources on all hands in the variety of trees, which nature has so prodigally scattered over the fair face of our Southern land, that whoever plants becomes a beautifier. Variety in landscape grouping is the first element of beauty; and in trees, this element is easily attainable, for each has its distinctive form, color and foliage. The sea coast with its myrtles, its palms, its magnificent heavy-robed live oaks; the middle lands, with their pines, magnolias, cypress, liquidambar, tulip trees and tupelos; the upper country with its oaks, its hickorys, its walnuts, its black-gums, its maples, its deciduous magnolias, its enticing celtis, the gay-flowered cercis, and bride-robed cornels; the mountain region with its firs, its hemlocks, its chesnuts, its kalmias, and rhododendrons—what an endless variety from which to choose? The magnolias are travelling farther inland, as the picturesque finds protecting friends; and the stately spruces, firs and hemlocks, are primly stepping down the mountain slopes to welcome their saltwater evergreen sisters to their new homes. Spring comes—they are all heart spells in the fresh adornment of tender buds and beautiful flowers. Summer approaches in the full robes of her glossy foliage. Autumn follows, and with a prodigal fancy decks herself in all the colors of the rainbow, and flaunts her golden and impurpled coiffure in the face of stern old Winter, who, here, has scarce the courage to despoil nature, and would not, if it were not that he only does it in order that the successive seasons may bring forth new fascinations.

To this various habit of color and foliage, must we look for the true taste which should govern the grouping of ornamental shade and lawn trees. But how often do we see single specimens lending charms to a spot, always attracting our eye? Of such, we may mention the admired celtis in front of the South Carolina Rail Road Depot in Columbia, and the singular oak, which so protectingly leans over a cottage gate, immediately east of the Charlotte Depot, in the same city. We have several favorites of this sort in the fields—far from the admiring walks of the world—which would make the character for beauty to any homestead, could they be brought within the atmosphere of the household Gods.

It will be our aim, in future numbers, to describe faithfully the different species of forest trees, suited to adornment and use, which are found in our Southern country; and, divesting these descriptions of tedious scientific formula, we hope to induce an appreciation for landscape gardening, and make the present a planting, and not a destroying age, so that when we depart we will leave our country beautified, and not deformed in its nakedness.

  Forest Trees of the South. No. 2.—the Live Oak—(Quercus sempervirens)

[ADAM SUMMER]

Southern Agriculturist 1 (September 1853): 258.

Accabee was the site of an early plantation along the Ashley River north of Charleston and near Magnolia Plantation. Magnolia was the home of Pomaria Nursery patron John Grimké Drayton. Adam’s friend William Gilmore Simms made Accabee the setting of his dramatic poem of colonial life, The Cassique of Accabee: A Tale of Ashley River (1849). The “old mansion at Goose Creek” may be “Crowfield” (ca. 1730), which had the earliest and most extensive formal garden in America in colonial times. The ruins of the village of Dorchester (established in 1697), with its St. George’s Anglican Church, is protected today as Colonial Dorchester State Historic Site. It was abandoned about the time of the Revolution, hence for over seventy years by the time Adam visited. The canopy of live oaks stretching along the Ashley River Road by Middleton and Magnolia Plantations into Charleston is now officially designated a national scenic highway. The road, authorized by the Lords Proprietors of the Colony in 1690, began as an Indian trading path and is one of the oldest thoroughfares in the state. Summer was justified in saying that his visit there provided his “first impressions of antiquity.”

Elliott is Stephen Elliott Sr., an early South Carolina botanist. Reuben Flanigan appears in the Newberry Census for 1810 as born before 1765. He had a son born between 1784 and 1794. The Flanigans lived on Enoree River near present-day Whitmire, South Carolina. Pomaria Nursery sold the “Flanagan Plum” in its catalog of 1860 and stated that it was “introduced by the late Dr. Reuben Flanagan” (46). There were no Flanigans (or Flanagans) listed in the 1850 Census, so he may have died, moved away, or been missed by the census taker. Summer’s prediction that the live oak would be acclimated to the foot of the mountains has proved correct. As Summer stated, it is a vigorous, fast grower in Newberry County, as many plantings (including the editor’s) now prove.

When Summer called the oak “king of forest trees” he may have been echoing Edmund Spenser’s “oake, sole king of forrests all” in Faerie Queene, canto I, stanza VIII. In describing the ash, William Summer quoted a line from Spenser’s canto I, stanza IX, in his “Essay on Reforesting the Country” (pp. 180–87).

To-day as we sat under the magnificent live oaks at Accabee, we felt impressed that wherever it flourishes, it is the king of forest trees for ornamental purposes. Elliott gives the following botanical description: “Leaves perennial, coriaceous, oval-lanceolate, entire, with the margins revolute, obtuse at the base, generally acute at the summit. Stellularly pubescent underneath; fruit on peduncles; nut oblong.” So much for the botanical classification; our task is to talk more familiarly of the great shade-giver.

Let us admire this wide spreading tree with its curved and twisted branches, clustering from its short, thick trunk, and, when unobstructed, extending its circumference to a distance far exceeding the height of its topmost branches. The sun light never pierces its evergreen leaves, and with its pendants of long moss (Tillandsia usneoides,) serving as draping garments—the characteristic beauty of this tree—has never been exceeded. How like a temple of nature—this house of long drooping branches—their extremities sweeping the earth in a circle—the thick covert above, and the gnarled hoary limbs, bracket-like, supporting its roof. If we go down to the sea-side, wherever the live oaks have been preserved, we see them in their greatest perfection and most beautiful outlines. There, with the salt tide casting the spray over its roots and amongst its branches, is the true home of the live oak. The humidity of the atmosphere in such situations gives vigor, too, to the parasitical moss which adds so much to its picturesque beauty.

It is a grand tree for avenues; and our first impressions of antiquity were engendered by beholding those stately trees which graced the road leading to the old mansion at Goose Creek, near Charleston. We afterwards made a pilgrimage to Dorchester, to see her old church, and the glorious live oaks with which cultivated taste had planted and beautified that deserted village in the earlier years of the settlement of South Carolina.

The live oak flourishes as far in the interior as Newberry, some beautiful specimens, of which we have heard, are growing on the Enoree, and were planted by the late Dr. Flanigan. At and near Pomaria, there are fine young specimens grown from the acorn, which show what can be done with this tree in a few years. If properly cultivated, it is as vigorous as most of the oaks, and whilst its habit in the interior is more erect than near the sea-coast, it is still a most admirable tree. We have observed that severe winters here injure its foliage to some extent, but not so much as to make it appear naked. We would recommend its culture to the very foot of the mountains, and confidently predict that it will as yet be acclimated, and a common shade tree in all parts of the State, except on the highest mountain peaks.

As a tree of great commercial value, in ship and boat building, the live oak is only rivalled in the world by the celebrated oak wood of the East Indies. It is useful for making cogs for machinery, and its bark is the very best that the tanner can use. As it is easily grown from the acorn, we hope it will be planted wherever beauty has a friend, and nature an admirer in the Southern States.

Forest Trees of the South. [No. 3.] the Willow Oak. Quercus Phellos

[ADAM SUMMER]

Southern Agriculturist 1 (September 1853): 258–59.

Summer shared his love for the willow oak with Thomas Jefferson, whose favorite tree it was. “Broomsedge,” Adam’s “fellow-laborer,” is identified as Colonel Robert James Gage of Union, South Carolina, in a four-page letter from Gage to Thomas Affleck, a Scots nurseryman in Columbus, Mississippi, and dated from “Mossgiel” on 19 June 1854 (MS, Texas A&M University). “Broomsedge” frequently contributed essays to the Farmer and Planter in 1859 and 1860, but never identified himself. This new attribution adds another talented agricultural essayist to the list of the Summer brothers’ friends and “fellow-laborers.” Gage also wrote valuable reminiscences, among them “Idle Moments in an Old Library,” published in the Union (S.C.) Times in the 1870s. In October 1857 Adam served on the executive committee of the South Carolina Agricultural Society with “Col. Gage of Fair Forest, Union County.” Gage had replaced Adam as secretary (Abbeville [S.C.] Banner, 8 October 1857). The various Gage plums offered by Pomaria Nursery in the 1850s, probably originated with Colonel Gage or his family. The name of Gage’s cottage, “Mossgiel” (the name of poet Robert Burns’s seventy-acre farm), is evidence that Gage, like Adam, was a great admirer of Burns’s verse. Mossgiel was in the Fair Forest Creek community south of Union village near the Tyger River and across from Newberry District. Burns, the son of a farmer, was himself a farmer.

Summer’s depiction of Columbia’s beauty is substantiated by a correspondent of the New York H...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• A Note on the Text
• Introduction
• [A Winter Reverie]
• A Wish
• The Jerusalem Artichoke (Helianthus Tuberosus, Linn.)
• The Culture of the Sweet Potatoe
• The Season: Some Thoughts Grouped after Spending a Day in the Country
• Natural Angling, or Riding a Sturgeon
• The Season
• A Day on the Mohawk
• Farm Management; or Practical Hints to a Young Beginner
• The Vegetable Shirt-Tail; or, An Excuse for Backing Out
• Autumn
• Winter Green: A Tale of My School Master
• A Chapter on Live Fences
• Report on Wheat
• The Misletoe
• Address Delivered before the Southern Central Agricultural Society at Macon, Georgia, October 4 [20], 1852
• The Character of the Pomologist
• The Flower Garden [I]
• Plants Adapted to Soiling in the South
• Plant a Tree
• A Plea for the Birds
• Southern Architecture—Location of Homes—Rural Adornment, &c
• Plant Peas
• The Forest Trees of the South.—No. 1
• Forest Trees of the South. No. 2.—the Live Oak—(Quercus sempervirens)
• Forest Trees of the South. [No. 3.] the Willow Oak. Quercus Phellos
• One Hour at the New York Farmer’s Club
• Flowers
• Satisfactory Results from Systematic Farming—True Farmer-Planter
• The Crysanthemum
• Saving Seed
• Roger Sherman’s Plow
• “The Earth Is Wearing Out”
• A Rare Present.—Carolina Oranges
• Agricultural Humbugs and Fowl Fancies
• A Short Chapter on Milk Cows
• A Plea for Broomsedge
• A Visit from April
• We Cultivate Too Much Land
• The Proper Implements for Composting Manures: A Picture in Relief
• An Editorial Drive: What We Saw during One Morning
• What Should Be the Chief Crops of the South?
• Northern Horses in Southern Cities
• Scuppernong Wine
• A Good Native Hedge Plant for the South
• Soap Suds
• The Best Mode of Stopping Ditches and Washes
• Cherries
• Amelanchier: New Southern Fruit
• China Berries
• Barefooted Notes on Southern Agriculture. No I
• Chinese Sugar Cane
• Cows and Butter: A Delightful Theme
• Neglect of Family Cemeteries
• The Destruction of Forests and Its Influence upon Climate & Agriculture
• New and Rare Trees of Mexico
• The United States Patent Office Reports, and Government Impositions
• Barefooted Notes on Southern Agriculture. No III
• The Guardians of the Patent Office
• New and Rare Trees and Plants of Mexico. No 2
• A Transplanted Pleasure
• China Roses and Other Hedge-Plants in the South
• Barefooted Notes on Southern Agriculture. No IV
• Farm Economies
• Hill-Side Ditching
• Landscape Gardening
• New and Cheap Food for Bees
• The Profession of Agriculture
• “Bell Ringing”
• “Spare the Birds”
• Essay on Reforesting the Country
• Spanish Chesnuts, Madeira Nuts, etc.
• The Grape: Culture and Pruning
• Advantages of Trees
• “How to Get Up Hill”
• Barefooted Notes on Southern Agriculture. No VI
• Sheep Husbandry
• Dogs vs. Sheep
• Fences
• Sweets for the People
• Barefooted Notes on Southern Agriculture. No VIII
• Peeps over the Fence [1]
• Beneficial Effects of Flower Culture
• Peeps over the Fence [2]
• Fortune’s Double Cape Jessamine: (Gardenia Fortunii)
• Wood Economy
• Peeps over the Fence [3]
• Home as a “Summer Resort”
• Frankincense a Humbug and Cure for Saddle Galls
• Who Are Our Benefactors?
• Peeps over the Fence [4]
• Mrs. Rion’s Southern Florist
• Dew and Frost
• The Flower Garden [II]
• Farmer Gripe and the Flowers
• Pea Vine Hay
• Our Resources
• Works Cited and Consulted
• Index
• About the Editor