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?

Rainy Days and Five-Point Stars

I've been desperately wanting to get into the garden and put the rest of the seeds in the ground -- yes, this is belated, but I'm hoping it'll still be okay, since in normal years plants do things like go dormant and die of frost in the beginning of April, not go limp from heat.  We've had a bizarre year where few things ever bothered to go dormant and the spring ephemerals all bloomed around Christmastime, so I'm telling myself the weirdness isn't my fault.  The seeds will come out of stratification and go in the ground when we get back from Charleston next week.

Anyway.  I've been wanting to garden, but yesterday there was a wedding and today it's raining in a steady drumming fall, so it's not happening.  Instead, I designed a new little graphic for the sidebar, which you can see over on the left.

I've never done design for an entire website and I wouldn't dare try (this blog has a free Blogger layout with some tweaking).  If I ever start an independent domain I'll hire a real designer; it makes a massive difference.  However, it's not actually hard to design your own small graphics for a blog or for a frame website like Etsy or Ebay, provided you have some free time, an eye for color, and a free program like GIMP. So I made the graphic with two hours of fiddling around in GIMP from a very nice photograph of an Anemone virginiana bloom with a bee on top, which I found on Wikimedia Commons.

This Anemone species -- tall thimbleweed -- is sort of Woodburn's herb garden mascot, so to speak.  Here's why:

1. It's an upstate native that thrives even in conditions of neglect -- just like the house itself.
2. It attracts native pollinators -- which is an important purpose of the garden.
3. It offers medicinal benefits that were historically important -- while many anemones are poisonous, this one is used in wound poultices and to treat that most Victorian of diseases, tuberculosis (consumption).

There's also a more personal or symbolic reason.  I wanted to include a plant in the landscape that had a clear five-petaled shape.  Five-pointed stars are important in Woodburn's architectural iconography (read more about this here).  The original moldings around the interior doors and windows feature an inverted Federal star at the corners, as you can see in this photo from the drawing room:

 Five-pointed stars or pentacles with the point downward (though they've been adopted as a symbol by Satanists today) are a semi-common good-luck symbol found in the architecture of Charleston-style plantation houses.  They're usually tipped downward, much as lucky horseshoes are placed with the curve down in order to "catch" good fortune.

However, Woodburn also sits at the center of a natural pentacle.  Its original documents describe it as being placed at the apex of five ridges, which are roughly shown in this pretty diagram I just made in MS Paint:

While the eastern ridge has been lost to industrial grading, I suspect the remaining ones may be even more obvious from the air now than they would have been in the 1830s, because untended woodland now fills the gaps between them pretty thoroughly.  I've walked three of the remaining four -- our compost pile is actually about where the "a" in "along" is, there at the top of the diagram -- and this feature of the landscape remains intact.

Superstitious, maybe, but I have a feeling that Woodburn, as a house conscious of its years of neglect, might be rather happy to have someone add this symbol back into its surroundings.  Who knows; maybe the stars will catch some luck for our garden project and the seeds will flourish despite being planted so late.

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.