THE CONSOLATION OF GARDENS

Border Press announces the July publication of The Consolation of Gardens by Diane Marquart Moore, a poet living in New Iberia, Louisiana and Sewanee, Tennessee, with photography by Dr. Victoria Sullivan. The duet of poet and plant photographer, Moore and Sullivan, has produced another book featuring their pursuits of plant life scattered throughout the southeastern United States and as far afield as the Mideast.

Poet Diane Marquart Moore observes humanistic elements in the diversity of plant forms, from mayapples to the everlasting rose; and Sullivan’s trained eye records the color and structure of typical and atypical forms of leaf and flower.

A special page in Consolation of Gardens, derived from drawings delineated by the poet’s mother, Dorothy Greenlaw Marquart, in 1926, lends interest to this volume.

Poems about those living forms that provide beauty as the principal adornments in garden and field provide botanical bounty for plant collectors, explorers, and lovers of gardens.

The cover of this volume is a photograph of a beautiful glass piece, Spring Annunciation, rendered by Karen Bourque, glass artist in Church Point, Louisiana and designed by Martin Romero, Vice-President of Landscape Design for Mullin Landscape Associates, St. Rose, Louisiana.

Available by July 15, 2019 from amazon.com or order from Border Press Books, P. O. Box 3124, Sewanee, TN 37375

ALL SAINTS

Dorothy Greenlaw Marquart

Today is All Saints Day, and, in honor of those who’ve inspired our faith we recognize both ancient and recent family saints. I could probably drum up a list of women who have led me, intentionally and otherwise, into religious inquiry and active church work, but the most notable ones were two who were included in my second book entitled Their Adventurous Will: Profiles of Memorable Louisiana Women. Those profiles deserve a revisit today.

The first woman was, of course, my mother, Dorothy Greenlaw Marquart, and in Their Adventurous Will, I wrote: “One of her greatest legacies to me was a love of the Anglican Church to which she was deeply devoted after her conversion as a teenager. She single-handedly attempted to establish a mission church in my hometown of Franklinton, Louisiana with its predominantly Baptist population. The Episcopal church was never built, although a sign advertising the mission stood for a long time on a vacant lot which she had coerced an old family Franklintonite to donate. She didn’t convert enough Baptists, Methodists, or Roman Catholics to build the church and congregation but she did accomplish some consciousness raising about Anglicanism. While she was working on the project, the Episcopal Bishop of the Diocese of Louisiana introduced her to someone as that ‘woman with the red hot poker who gets people moving.’

“When I went home for her funeral, some of her friends and family members said to me: ‘She was too good.’ She probably wouldn’t have liked that remark; she didn’t think of her life as role playing or as some kind of martyr’s legend. She simply believed in St. John the Divine’s words: ‘Absolute self giving is the only path from the human to the divine.’ Friends and family also told me: ‘She was proud of you.’ I know she was. I am proud of her. She gave me the ability to perceive ‘tongues in trees,’ the sight to see ‘books in the running brooks, sermons in stone and good in everything.’ She also gave me a love of nature, music, humor, and imagination…”

Dora Runnels Greenlaw

“My great-grandmother, Dora Runnels Greenlaw, who died the night I was born and executed a literary and religious transfer to me (according to family members), was also a visionary who felt her life purpose to be that of a missionary and who spread the Gospel from a horse-drawn buggy of the kind used to transport country doctors to their house calls. Like the American poetess, Emily Dickinson, Dora Runnels was semi-reclusive, spending days writing verse in a back room of the old Greenlaw home in Franklinton and mysteriously appearing in the afternoons to venture forth on her missionary calls. The record of her talents can be found in a few pamphlets of verse which her son Edward published on a small printing press he owned and in a booklet which I discovered in the Louisiana Room of the Louisiana State Library entitled Memoirs of the Baptist Women’s Missionary Union of Washington Parish Association, published in the early 1900’s. 

“Like many of the subjects in Their Adventurous Will, Dora met with considerable opposition when she attempted to make her contribution to society…One day in 1908 she set out in her buggy drawn by faithful Nell. A female companion accompanied her and ‘kindly piloted her over the six miles from Franklinton to Spring Hill, over mud holes and through the beautiful pine forests.’… En route, the zealous women passed a Baptist minister who was traveling to Franklinton. The minister had been informed about the two women’s mission, and Dora expected a show of cordiality as he passed. She slowed her horse but the stone-faced pastor merely tipped his hat as the two buggies passed one another. Dora was hurt, puzzled, but suppressed her feelings and drove on toward Spring Hill. Finally, she turned to her companion, who knew the pastor well, and asked for an explanation of the minister’s behavior. ‘He does not believe in the organization of women. None of our pastors nor laymen do. They are sincere in their belief that women must keep silent and leave the work to men.’ At that time, Dora did not express her disapproval of the pastor’s attitude, but she later wrote in Memoirs of the Baptist Missionary Union: ‘The opposition of pastors was the mountain to be removed. The enormity of it strengthened my purposes.’ Following this incident she accelerated her missionary efforts and spearheaded the formation of missions in sixteen communities, serving as the superintendent of the Women’s Missionary Union in Washington Parish from 1908-1920. Her summation of the missionary effort was: ‘God had prepared the way and bidden his people to Go Forward.’”

In Their Adventurous Will, I attempted to portray “saints,” Louisiana women who took great leaps of faith and, in all cases, made something so that had been envisioned as impossible, moving their ideas from conception to being with extraordinary fervor and faith. The epigram in this book was taken from Sonnet 67 by Edna St. Vincent Millay and is deserving of space here: 

Upon this marble bust that is not I

Lay the round, formal wreath that is not fame;

But in the forum of my silenced cry

Root ye the living tree whose sap is flame,

I, that was proud and valiant, am no more;

Save as a dream that wanders wide and late,

Save as a wind that rattles the stout door,

Troubling the ashes in the sheltered grate.

The stone will perish; I shall be twice dust.

Only my standard on a taken hill

Can cheat the mildew and the red brown rust

And make immortal my adventurous will.

Even now the silk is tugging at the staff:

Take up the song;

forget the epitaph.

LOOKING BACK ON MOTHER’S DAY

Dorothy Greenlaw Marquart and son Paul

Tomorrow is Mother’s Day, and I plan to include a few excerpts about my mother from the introduction to Their Adventurous Will, Profiles of Memorable Louisiana Women, a book I wrote in 1984, in a sermon I’ll preach. Since the introduction is on my screen this morning, I felt that a redo of it would be appropriate to include in “A Words Worth” to celebrate this auspicious occasion:

“A few years ago, in the silence of too much winter, my mother passed away. Her death shocked and grieved me, and in attempting to transcend the offense of her death, I wrote a tribute to her in my column, “Cherchez la femme,” which was featured in the Daily Iberian, New Iberia, Louisiana. In writing about Mother, some of the qualities which marked her as an outstanding woman became more apparent to me and that recognition of her uniqueness moved me toward writing this book. She isn’t among the women highlighted in the following essays, but I feel that a small cameo of her life belongs in the introductory notes to this volume.

A friend and I were once discussing our mothers, and I asked her if she remembered the scene in Peter Pan in which Tinker Bell is dying and Peter asks for those in the world who believe in fairies to clap their hands.

“Well,” I told my friend, “my mother would have been the first to clap her hands.”

She was fantasy itself; she saw sprites dancing in open fires, drew pictures of gnomes painting the woodlands and created pastels of quaint cliff dwellings where other-world spirits lived.

My mother loved words and books. When I was three years old, she would seat me, cross-legged in the middle of a small kitchen, and open for me giant editions of Mother Goose, A Child’s Garden of Verse, and Marigold Garden, laughing at friends who often dropped in to proclaim that I was backward because I didn’t talk and only sat quietly, absorbing the book characters she knew I’d remember for a lifetime.


She read aloud the entire series of Uncle Wiggly in the Cabbage Patch, The Little Colonel, Raggedy Ann and Andy, Greek Legends, Black Beauty and Grimm’s Fairy Tales, even after all of the children in our family had learned to read.

Every month for years, Mother would take one of the three children in our family to Claitor’s Bookstore in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, to choose two books for our nightly reading session. She was the first family member to open the books, touching the pictures with credulous delight. My mother began to fly in the heavens long before Mary Poppins opened her first umbrella to make her wonderful flights! For her, I wrote my first story at age six. I remember only that the tale concerned a small child who opened a door in a tree and found herself in a fantasy world similar to Alice’s Wonderland.

My mother was one of the first Golden Eaglet Girl Scouts in the United States, an honor bestowed on her in the early 1920’s when Girl Scouting was in its infancy. She loved woodlands, flowers, and even garter snakes, one of which became her favorite pet when she camped-out, primitive style, in the Dismals of Alabama after winning a trip to Juliette Low Girl Scout Camp.

One of her greatest legacies to me was a love of the Episcopal Church to which she was deeply devoted after her conversion as a teenager. She single-handedly attempted to establish a mission in my hometown of Franklinton, Louisiana, with its predominantly Baptist and small Roman Catholic population. 

The church was never built, although a sign advertising the mission church still stands on a vacant lot which she had coerced an old-family Franklintonite to donate. She didn’t convert enough Baptists or Roman Catholics to build the church and congregation but she did accomplish some “consciousness-raising” about Anglicanism. While she was working on the project, the Episcopal Bishop of the Diocese of Louisiana introduced her to someone as “that woman with the red-hot poker who gets people moving.”

When Mother was a teenager, she exemplified the phrase which accompanied my graduation picture in my high school annual: “Large, divine and comfortable words.” She loved the syllables and accents of words and would roll them out at inappropriate times as she did following a Baptist Church service when she filed out the door and shook the minister’s hand.

“Dr. Gayer, that was really an excruciating sermon,” she remarked, thinking she had expressed a highly complimentary description of his delivery.

“Well, yes, Miss Greenlaw,” he answered, “come to think of it, it probably was.”

My mother was the only Protestant Jewish mother I knew. When one of her five children became ill, she prepared chicken soup, grape juice ice (grape juice poured into an ice tray and frozen, then sliced), milk toast and caramel pie. In the manner of a traditional Jewish mother (which she wasn’t), taking care of the family was probably her singular life goal. Even after my brothers had grown up and married, they came home to her when they were ill and upset. She died while still looking after two of them.

She was one of the most sensitive persons I’ve ever known; yet she was tough in the tenacious, weather-beaten way of those trees she loved so well.

When I went home for her funeral, some of her friends and family members said to me: “She was too good.” She probably wouldn’t have liked that remark; she didn’t think of her life as role-playing or as some kind of martyr’s legend — she simply believed in St. John the Divine’s words: “Absolute self-giving is the only path from the human to the divine.”
Friends and family also told me: “She was proud of you.” I know she was. I’m proud of her. She gave me the ability to perceive “tongues in trees,” the sight to see “books in the running brooks, sermons in stone and good in everything.” She also gave me a love of nature, music, humor, and imagination.

Mother was buried in a dress with bright red buttons because she not only loved red, she lived red. Vivacious, garrulous, she was a woman who talked back to life situations which would have felled me years ago.

Back in the mid-1960’s, I wrote a poem about my father which was published in American Weave, a literary journal, and my mother showed the tiniest bit of jealousy that I hadn’t published something about and for her. I told her then that I would write a poem about her. I never did. But Their Adventurous Will is for her. Somehow, I think she’ll be able to read it, even without her glasses.”

Happy Mother's Day!