THE LONELY CAMELLIA

 

I always capture the first camellia to bloom in the back yard; however, three large bees fought me for possession rights today. Here it is December 30, and two blooms have appeared overnight, challenging the massive ginger plant growing beside  the drive of my home in New Iberia, Louisiana. The ginger (almost tree height now) managed to survive several frosts this year and was a daily sight of hope, despite the hovering coronavirus.

My deceased godfather, Markham Peacock, planted the now-towering camellia bush in 1995. It persists, despite lack of fertilizer or new soil, watering, covering to avoid freezes, any TLC. The secret ingredient must be a hovering spirit of love of beauty Markham left behind.

I helped him plant the camellia pictured above, along with two more that gave up during the first year of growth. I’ve written about the plant several times because I admire the flower’s endurance — it represents persistence and resistance, clinging to the banks of an unattractive coulee, resisting winters that lately remind me more of icy temps at our other home in Sewanee, Tennessee.

Unlike women gardeners of the 1940s and 1950s who lived here in the South, I’m not too keen on the cultivation of flowers. Still, I admire gardeners and read books about authentic plant growers of flowers such as the enduring and ubiquitous camellia. I respect their impact on their caretakers, e.g., Eudora Welty, notable author and gardener, and her mother Chestina, who had a lovely garden in Jackson, Mississippi, many decades ago. Chestina valued gardening as “a way to gain insight that could be applied to life in a broader sense. A garden is a grand teacher. It teaches patience and careful watchfulness…Above all, it teaches entire trust…”*

Oops! How I’ve ignored that bit of counsel! The Weltys staked their camellias and made little slipcovers to prevent them from freezing. They watered and applied fertilizers, believed that their plants had aesthetic value… And they would’ve cast me out of their paradisaical garden in a heartbeat. I wonder if Lady Clare camellias still grow under Eudora’s bedroom window of her home in Jackson, Mississippi. When I visited her home and garden a few years ago, I felt like a traitor to the caretaking of my lonely camellia.

I console myself by thinking that perhaps because I’ve written so many poems about this courageous flower, it does receive some form of nourishment via literature. Or the spirit of Markham’s love of aesthetic creations persists…

 

* One Writer’s Garden by Susan Haltom and Jane Roy Brown.

Photograph of camellia from my backyard by Victoria I. Sullivan

 

 

 

 

 

RECOVERING

One of the first things I noticed when I could walk around again and really see things going on in my house, after living through a fight with some unknown virus that has felled even the healthiest of those living in bayou country (and further afield), was a large patch of black mildew or mold by the back door. To a compulsive cleaner, it appeared to be the accumulation of all that had been sickness and disorder, was germ-laden and anxiety-producing — this ugly, be-speckled black thing. To those who’ve never been besieged with this malady of compulsive cleaning, it was nothing but a discoloration due to moisture and would or would not disappear with a little mopping.

Then I looked out the window and saw the mound of leaves on the patio that I normally sweep away every day and which hadn’t been swept in a week. I glimpsed the bedraggled tendrils of ginger plants throughout the yard, noting that the cold spells had even killed the precious aloe plants that had lived through six or seven winters. Indoors and outdoors,  disorder was overtaking my habitat! 

Picture, if you will, a cartoon featuring Aladdin and his magic rug flying through the sky and alongside him, a woman on a similar rug vacuuming the rug as they move along on magic carpets. The man is saying to her, “Can’t you just relax a little?” Aside from the fact that the woman has long hair that still has color and she looks as though she’s enjoying herself, she could be me indulging in obsessive cleaning activity while soaring through the heavens.

So, January has passed but not the chance to take spiritual inventory again — looking at unfortunate habits like obsessive cleaning, self-interested worry, fuss, fuss (as I often described my Grandmother Nell), considering what Evelyn Underhill calls “the delightful luxury of spiritual grousing…those meditations on our own unworthiness and unfortunate temperaments (like obsessive cleaning dysfunction) and so on which we sometimes mistake for humility…” In so many words, she seemed to be saying: “So what if you don’t like black puddles and spend time scouring? You could drop all that concentration on imperfections in floors, ceilings, walls — actually of character — and give your heart and mind up to delighting in the beauty of God; e.g. the pink flowers of the enduring camellia bush beside the coulee that is blossoming despite any ministrations on your part.” I went outside and cut two blossoms from the intrepid bush, placed them in a vase in the dusty living room, and sat down to contemplate reordering spiritual priorities.

Underhill referred people in this phase of inventorying a life to St. Paul, whom she said had at least as much to put up with as most of us — uncertain health which she considered a “bad drag” on a public career; a physique not strong enough for his energetic soul, “an awkward temperament” (maybe he had a compulsive cleaning habit?)… She said St. Paul had his moments, but he wrote his most joyous epistle in Philippians while in prison, telling his followers that the Fruit of the Spirit is Joy and the rest counts as dung — I reckon like that meaningless black glob at the back door.

Well, that’s what I read this morning after seeing the dark patch at the back door when I tried not to resume my obsessive cleaning self. I went into the kitchen and opened a new bottle of cleaning vinegar, uncapped it, poured a gracious plenty of it on the offensive spot, and walked away, not yielding to the desire to scrub away at my scruples’ behest, and returning to the business of recovery.

SIGNS OF SPRING

Camellia along the coulee

In the middle of the coldest winter I've experienced in New Iberia, Louisiana in many years, I'm heartened at the sight of the lone camellia tree growing in my backyard. My godfather planted the infant shrub at least twenty years ago, and regardless of sleet, snow, hard rains, and benign (?) neglect on my part, this beautiful plant has flourished. At Sewanee, Tennessee in my second home, we know spring is on its way when we see yellow daffodils breaking through the snow, but here in Louisiana the camellias and lovely Japanese magnolia trees announce that we're on the brink of a season of color and light.

While I admire the flowering camellia for its beauty, I discovered only this year that the Camellia sinensis, or tea plant, is important because tea is made from its leaves. Also, in Japan, tea drinkers sip tea made from C. sasanqua leaves, while in southern China people use camellia tea oil for cooking.

Here in south Louisiana, one of the most notable growers of delicate camellias was J. Lyle Bayless, Jr. (now deceased), an entrepreneur from Kentucky who, as a child staying at a plantation home in Natchez, Mississippi, saw a red camellia growing in the yard of the old home and became enchanted with the flower. Later, when he accompanied his father on a trip to Avery Island, he watched E.A. McIlhenny (of Tabasco fame) demonstrate the art of grafting camellias. Bayless also became fascinated with the "Jeanerette Pink" camellia growing in the yard of the Joseph Jefferson mansion on Jefferson Island. In the middle of a winter similar to the one we're experiencing, he saw the pink blossom of this tree die, then return to life two weeks later. This "resurrection" convinced him that he should plant a garden filled with camellias.

Bayless owned the site now known as Rip Van Winkle Gardens and in 1952 cleared the land around the old Jefferson House and planted a garden with numerous camellia plants. In 1965, many of his prize camellias, along with azaleas and other plantings, were killed due to salt dust from the mines on the island stirred up by a hurricane. In 1966, Bayless employed Geoffrey Wakefield, an English horticulturist, to design Rip Van Winkle Gardens and for three years, Wakefield put in large numbers of camellia plants.

Clusters of camellia flowers

During Bayless's lifetime, he exhibited his camellias and won more than 1,000 prize ribbons at shows held in the southern states. He also hybridized many camellias, one of which he named "Elizabeth" after a relative. Although the Lake Peigneur salt mine disaster destroyed much of Bayless's gardens in 1980, horticulturist Mike Richard (and now owner of Rip Van Winkle Gardens) orchestrated the replanting of the gardens. Today, magnolias, azaleas, and Bayless's beloved camellias can be found along garden trails in Rip Van Winkle Gardens.

Avery Island, another one of the five islands near New Iberia, also has a plethora of camellias in its Jungle Gardens, and numerous yards throughout New Iberia are filled with the flowers of these early blooming trees. I enjoy filling bowls with the pink blossoms that my struggling tree (whose variety name I don't know) produces, and I've named it "Spring Festival" after x williamsii, cuspidata, a hybrid that gained the Royal Horticultural Society's Award of Garden Merit. Although this isn't the plant's real name, it should be because it has survived the neglect of its owner and continues to remind us that the festival of spring is just around the corner.

Photographs by Victoria Sullivan

FEBRUARY FLOWERS

Every February in south Louisiana, we're inspired to anticipate Spring when we see the camellias blooming everywhere. Camellias must be hardy plants because the lone bush in our backyard continues to thrive, despite the fact that we neglect to fertilize or spray it for leaf blight. It has been creating pink blooms for nigh on 25 years. My godfather, Markham Peacock, who lived in the apartment beside my home in New Iberia for a brief time, planted this triumphant bush. The day that he put his plant in the ground, I followed behind, planting two more small bushes near the coulee, and they died not long after his demise at age 99 1/2. He did not pass on his green thumb to me.

Each year I think about the planting and the harvest we make because of Markham's green thumb. I reach the conclusion that the camellia bush is godfather's way of telling us that he's still around, sharing his stories about growing up in the Delta of Mississippi and his Polaroid photographs of his travels as far afield as Africa and India. An Elizabethan scholar, he also shared his literary expertise and entertained us with a fount of jokes that sometimes bordered on the risqué but always amused us. An old-school gentleman, he believed in dressing for dinner and often appeared at my table in a three-piece suit, a white shirt and tie. We didn't respond in kind, but he took no notice of our jeans and sweat shirts, and if he appeared only in shirtsleeves, he'd put a scarf around his neck and tuck it into his shirt as if he were English royalty wearing an ascot.

Markham lived beside us for six months of the year, approximately thirteen years, before he decided to reside the full year in Virginia where he had spent most of his life teaching English at Virginia Polytechnic Institute. In an assisted living home, he became known as the "flower man," as his job was to deliver flowers to each resident on their birthdays, and he also invited people to dine with him at the Home's cafeteria table as if he were playing host in the grand style in which he had entertained while his wife, Dora, was alive.

When a VIP who represented Hollins College visited us one year, Markham used our living room to entertain her and referred to the apartment we had built for him as a "lean-to." The 600 square ft. apartment is actually a brick dwelling that I designed, and I cringed every time he referred to it as a "lean-to." I refrained from labeling him an equally disparaging name even though he often hung his aging, holey underwear on a line strung at the entrance to my carport for all the world to see!

In February, when the camellias bloom profusely, I especially miss Markham. However, I feel better after I've walked down to the coulee and stolen a few camellia blossoms from the bumblebees. Settled in a small vase, the blossoms bring forth his presence at my dinner table, sans the three-piece suit. Here's one of several poems I've written about Markham and the camellias. It's this year's salute to him:

WHY MARKHAM PLANTED CAMELLIAS AT AGE 94

They turn brown within a day

'though we think we're cutting them free,

removing them from crowded clusters.

But their tarnish reminds us

they belong on the bush,

can only make a short visit.

The pink camellias bloom despite their age,

their longing for nurture and water,

the large faces still showy after February frost,

bees in the nose cones,

leaves pocked with blight,

dark spots marking green boundaries

but leaving us showers of pink,

the way his age suddenly fell away

as he turned the soil of a better disposition...

those last days.

Pink camellias at the edge of the coulee

now confront us each day,

showing us something

we had not realized while he lived,

a story he could not tell:

he planted them deep

before he returned to the stiffening earth

so they could flower in wavering light,

so their beauty could prepare us

for the thing he could not name.

Photographs by Victoria I. Sullivan