Series Teaser: Woodland Edge Plantings in the South

This blog will probably always be updated more in the spring and the fall, since those are the Southern garden's pretty-and-interesting seasons.  However, all the seeds are finally, finally in the ground (with luck, they'll come in next year even if this year was way too late ... heck, who knows, in a normal year this might have been good timing ... and we still have a fall planting of milkweed and Sweet Joe Pye weed to do in probably early October).

There's a gardening report to come once I finish learning my part as Floride (it's pronounced fleur-REED) Calhoun for our Meet the Pendletonians event (it's $3 a carload tomorrow at Ashtabula! Join us!), and an upcoming series that I think will be of interest to everyone who loves history or works in landscape management.  Here's a teaser.

This is what the woodland edge, where the plantation grounds suddenly stop and yield to a tangle of dappled-shade growth, looks like in late spring in the Upstate:

This, on the other hand, is how a plantation's woodland edge grows in the Low Country, near Charleston:

 

Note the actual presence of palmettos and the rich, goopy, gorgeous, organically-rich black soil.  Does anyone else kinda want to roll around in it, or is that just me?

How it All Began

"Who's in charge of the herb garden?" I idly asked our volunteer director, E.  It was a ridiculously cold day in February, and my partner and I were shivering under fleece hats and winter coats behind the gift shop table.  A few yards down Woodburn's long, sloping lawn, a reenactor was telling Gullah folk tales; to her right, an enthusiastic quilter chatted with customers about her techniques.  Another reenactor's voice boomed inside the historic cabin.  It was the Pendleton Historic Foundation's annual African-American Heritage Day at Woodburn Plantation (which isn't actually a plantation), and it was early enough in the year that I could still look at a 15-by-15 patch of scrub and think there might actually be someone in charge of it.

 But hey, daffodils, you guys!

E explained to me that every couple of years, some master gardener comes to her offering to take it over, at which point she gives them $40 and never sees them again.

Restoring a historical herb garden at a nineteenth-century home was just entirely too much temptation for a girl whose garden consists of a strange collection of South Carolina native plants growing on a second-floor deck with northern exposure.

I went away deep in thought, conferred briefly with my partner, and came back to E:  "I'm not a master gardener, just an enthusiastic amateur, but I work Monday afternoons right across the street, and I drive in with Megan, so I have nothing to do Monday mornings.  Want me to clean that up?"

She showed me which key opened the garden shed.