On Sunday Rob and I made tea cakes and gingerbread cookies. It took us basically the whole day. Even so, the gingerbread cookies turned out so funny. They were so crudely shaped and poorly frosted that we were giggling and snickering and rolling our eyes …
On Saturday Rob and I drove to Tifton to attend the Wiregrass Christmas celebration at the Georgia Museum of Agriculture and Historic Village (formerly known as the Agrirama). We met up with Kris, Sophie, and Jake. Kris has always loved the Agrirama and now I …
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| Early morning in the front yard |
Last weekend went so smoothly it seemed sort of enchanted. Rob and I got so much done. And yet somehow, magically, we still found time to baby the cats and savor our homegrown citrus and have lots of dorky domestic fun.
I’ll tell you about our accomplishments first. We finally, finally finished mulching the gigantic bed on the south side of the front yard. We’ve been trying to get this project done for literally a couple of years. In order to kill the grass and weeds, we put down layers of newspaper then covered them with wood mulch. We went through boxes and boxes of newspaper and used up our whole pile of mulch. We got the whole bed done, so now, at last, it’s pretty much ready for planting. I’m planning on filling it with native sumac, palmettos, woodland sunflowers, and rosinweed, and I’m already picturing how it will be someday—wild and shaggy, full of hiding places for birds and lizards and other small creatures.
Here’s another project we completed: We finally found the right spots for all our garden furniture. You see, for years I’ve been collecting pieces of old cast-iron garden furniture, pieces I find at various junk stores. They’re usually quite a mess when I bring them home—rusty, or covered in thick, bumpy, peeling layers of paint. So Rob and I scrape them down with our metal brushes, and we sand them, which is very boring. (As we’re sanding, I might talk about how I’m planning to take my little cat Carl to see The Nutcracker. I might mention that Carl will be wearing a tweed cap and his new saddle shoes to the performance. I try to make sanding extra painful for Rob.) After sanding, we usually apply some Rust-Oleum Rusty Metal Primer, and then we paint. We paint every piece a glossy, tidy, elegant black.
Anyway, on Saturday we finally found a home for some of the latest pieces, two tiny chairs with a pattern of grapes and grape leaves, and a tiny matching table. I don’t know why antique garden furniture is so small, but it is. Rob and I look like giants if we ever actually use it; it’s a much better size for cats and teddy bears. But back to the point: We found a perfect spot for the tiny chairs and tiny table. Well, actually we created it. We made a little “patio” of river pebbles for them to sit on right next to our vegetable garden. First we pulled out a big, messy bed of mint (the soil was luscious black and earthworm-riddled). Then we found some old bricks in the woods (a brick mine!) and we used those to make an edge. Next we rode up to Walmart and bought 20 bags of river pebbles and spread them, and in the end we had a pebble path leading from the back steps to our new pebble patio and on past the vegetable garden to the Meiwa kumquat tree.
We arranged the furniture and tidied up the surrounding beds. Then I picked a bouquet of camellias for the table. The camellias were the crowning touch, I thought–even though I’d run out of proper vases and had to stick them in a weird old pickle jar. The flowers were dark, tempting pink and white and made me think of big scoops of cherry swirl ice cream.
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| The new pebbly place by the vegetable garden |
Now a little bit about the purely fun stuff we did: We picked our first Roble orange and found it to be almost unbelievably delicious. So intense. There’s a passage in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead that I particularly love, and tasting the Roble orange made me think about it again. In it, an elderly preacher is trying to imagine what heaven might be like. He says, “Mainly I just think about the splendors of the world and multiply by two. I’d multiply by 10 or 12 if I had the energy. But two is much more than sufficient for my purposes.” Well, if the grass is two times as green in heaven, and the sky is twice as blue, then the Roble orange is a little taste–a little preview–of what’s to come, because it’s twice as good, twice as flavorful as most ordinary, earthly oranges.
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| A citrus sampler platter: Nagami and Meiwa kumquats, a satsuma, a Roble orange, a Cara Cara orange, a Rangpur lime, and a Meyer lemon |
The cats played a large role in the weekend, I’m glad to say. On Saturday afternoon, for example, we sat on the warm driveway and showered Maggie with catnip and compliments:
“Oh, isn’t Maggie pretty with all her silver stripes?” I said. “Her stripes make her look like a little slice of layer cake.”
“She’s so soft,” Rob said, stroking her.
“She’s got bunny fur.”
“And she keeps it so clean.”
“She’s nice and plump too. Pleasantly plump. I’ve taken to calling her ‘Maggie Ball’ lately.”
“She is rather round,” Rob said.
“It’s because she’s a hog,” I said fondly. “She always steals the whole serving of Fancy Feast and runs away with it. She steals from her very own sons.”
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| I don’t have a picture of Maggie (she’s scared of my camera), but I do have this shot of hammy little Frankie sitting on Rob’s knee. |
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| Just thought I’d show you some of my wacky little “treasures.” |
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| An old stirrup cup. Most of my knickknacks have an animal theme. |
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| Christmas dorkiness |
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| Just a little bit more |
I had a hard time concentrating at work this week—simply because I was feeling too Christmassy. I wanted to string popcorn and listen to “Last Christmas” by Wham, not sit at my computer. So anyway, I was happy when it was finally Saturday and I could do a little Christmas baking.
Sometimes I bake things to help me remember, to transport me to another place in time. This weekend I was thinking about our family’s rare trips to Granny’s house in Winston-Salem when I was little, so I made some old-fashioned Moravian pumpkin muffins …
Fall is here in all its glory. We’ve got camellias and sasanquas blooming like crazy, and our beech trees have turned gold. Bright satsumas and lemons hang like ornaments, like Christmas balls. The ageratum has turned ghostly. In the late afternoons the sun gets so dramatic, slanting through the meadow garden. It lights up all the downy seed heads and makes them shimmer and sparkle.
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| A Shi Shi Gashira sasanqua |
The chilly weather is definitely a bad influence on our cats. They are so lazy. These days most all they do is lie on the heat vents and sleep (while getting blasted with hot air), or sleep in our laps, trapping us (“Well, I guess I’ll be sitting here for a while,” Rob will say, “because I can’t disturb Frankie.”).
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| Becky doing bunny paws in a sunbeam |
This weekend was pretty cozy, full of fall-y activities. We raked leaves and stored them away in the garage so we can use them later in our compost bins. We popped popcorn and made cranberry sauce and picked baskets of satsumas and collards and hot peppers. We even picked our first pummelo—it was melon-sized and so mild and sweet.
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| Some of the satsumas we picked |
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| The great pummelo |
Our Tabasco peppers are really going strong right now. Our two plants look like little candy trees because they’re covered in bright shiny petite peppers that make me think of Mike and Ikes and Hot Tamales. The peppers are green, yellow, orange, and red. This weekend as Rob and I were picking them, we were talking about how cute they are. “I think they should be called gumdrop peppers,” Rob said.
On Saturday night we sat around the kitchen table and cracked pecans from our own trees. It was really fun. We weren’t hurrying. We were taking our time. I was drinking hot lemonade (made with our own Meyer lemons) and wearing my new plaid pajamas (I love new pajamas). The cats were gathered around, of course, and we were having dumb little conversations about them.
“Has Carl told you about his part in the school Christmas pageant?” I asked at one point. I always pretend that Carl goes to school and piano lessons and such even though he’s a cat. In my games he’s a cat, but he’s fully integrated into human society. He’s a cat, but nobody seems to notice. “His class is singing ‘Silent Night,’ and he’s playing the triangle.”
“You must be very proud,” Rob said.
“Oh, I am. I need to go to Dillard’s and get myself a new dress to wear.”
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| Sweet Carl. I pretend he goes to private school. Nothing but the best for Carl. |
Rob had never cracked pecans before, but I’m an old hand. When I was a kid, our family would often crack pecans on cold winter nights. My brother and sisters and I would sit at our kitchen table in our pajamas and pick at the nuts with dental tools. Often the heat didn’t work in our house, so we’d turn on the oven and open the door so the warmth would pour out. The oven was like a little fireplace. We’d tell lots of jokes and eat funny, delicious snacks—maybe Velveeta cheese melted on saltines, or Velveeta melted on popcorn. Whatever it was, Velveeta was generally involved.
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| One of my little displays—vintage chowder bowls and cordial glasses. I just thought I’d show you what I see when I’m cracking pecans. |
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| A pleasant corner of the china cabinet |
As a kid I had kind of a funny, small life. I mostly stayed at home. I’m not complaining; I’m just saying that all I really knew firsthand was my own suburban backyard, with its trampoline and beds of marigolds and roses. I knew the …
A few days ago I visited Maclay Gardens State Park for about the millionth time in my life, and once again I was utterly amazed by its beauty. It didn’t matter that I’d been there before. I walked the old familiar paths and felt just as enchanted as I did when I was young and everything was new.
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| Maclay Gardens has the lushest Spanish moss. |
The gardens were started in 1923 by Alfred B. Maclay, a prominent New York banker, and his wife, Louise, after they bought an old hunting plantation on the north side of Tallahassee to serve as their winter home. The Maclays worked on the gardens for 20 years, gradually expanding them until they covered 23 acres. It was a labor of love. Alfred approached landscape design the way a painter approaches painting. He “painted” with plants. He was always thinking about color, shape, texture, balance, and unity.
The gardens are built along the west side of Lake Hall, under soaring pines and grand, spreading live oaks. A wide, curving brick walk leads from the garden entrance past a woodland area and a lakeside pavilion to the Maclay House, an elegant little cottage painted bright salmon pink. (Apparently Louise chose the color as a sort of tribute to the area’s red-clay soil.) To the west of the walk, there’s a walled garden, a secret garden, a pond, a reflecting pool, and lavish plantings of azaleas, camellias, and Japanese maples and magnolias.
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| The Maclay House |
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| Plaque over the entrance to the walled garden |
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| Detail of an iron bench by the walled garden |
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| The bench again |
I recently read an interesting article in an old issue of the American Camellia Yearbook about the creation of the gardens, which the Maclays called “Killearn Gardens” after Alfred’s ancestral village in Scotland. There was a long description of how Alfred went about collecting his plants. He was an avid lover of camellias and dug hundreds of mature specimens from old gardens in and around Tallahassee. He got camellias from rich friends who lived on nearby plantations, but he also bought them from ordinary country people–flower enthusiasts who gardened for love and grew their camellias, painstakingly, from cuttings. Alfred drove all over Leon, Wakulla, and Jefferson counties, hunting camellias. He even ventured up into Georgia and Alabama and over into Louisiana. He visited nurseries far and wide, sometimes buying out a business’s entire stock in just a few minutes.
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| Pink Perfection |
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| Alba Plena |
Alfred died in 1944. Louise opened the gardens to the public in 1946 and donated them to the state in 1954.
I’m sure I wasn’t even a year old the first time I went to Maclay Gardens. My parents collected camellias, so they liked to visit Maclay quite frequently to get ideas for new varieties they might look for at the nurseries. My father liked to go through the gardens very methodically, admiring each camellia individually. He’d read its name and take a picture of its bloom. As a child, I honestly never thought this was boring. I always liked camellias. And plus, there were other things to do in the gardens while my father was busy with his methodical tour. When I was eight or nine, Kris and I would be doing cartwheels on the lawns or hiding in the secret garden or roller skating down the bumpy brick walk. Of course, we were also taking in the scenery, absorbing it, memorizing the views. I think I got my first idea of beauty at Maclay Gardens, developed my first theories about it there.
I’m so glad that I—an ordinary person—had access to such an extraordinary place. My family could pay a few dollars and pass a whole afternoon strolling the gardens just as if they were our own. It was like spending the day in a world-class museum. Just being in the midst of such beauty and splendor, you felt ennobled, uplifted. Visiting Maclay Gardens is good for the soul.
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| An early trip to Maclay Gardens (I’m the baby); I’m there with Mom and some North Carolina relatives. |
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| Mom in the gardens again, spring 1992 |
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| Sophie and Jake at Maclay, summer 2006 |
