THE YEAR IS TURNING PINK

In the comic strip, Peanuts Treasury, Lucy, Charlie Brown’s nemesis, laments the dawn of the new year, saying, “I hate this year. Everyone said things would be better but they’re not!” In the next frame, she tells Charlie that she doesn’t think this is a new year at all. “I think we’ve been stuck with a used year!” she exclaims. She goes home and tells Linus that there was a day back in 1935 (the year of my birth!) when a “used year” occurred. Not content with upsetting Charlie Brown and Linus, she moves to the outdoors where she finds Snoopy dancing happily and yells at him:”Don’t you worry about all the things that can happen?” and when his ears begin to droop and he sniffles, she declares: “That’s better…live in dread and fear…be sensible.” However, Snoopy suddenly turns his back on her and dances away, saying, “He he he he he he he.”

As always, Charles Schulz redeems situations that Lucy sets up to cause gloom and cynicism among her family and friends. Not to mention her readers! I sorta’ felt that kind of redemption this morning after the long siege of gray days and rain here in south Louisiana ended, and I stepped outdoors to find my backyard “in the pink.” A lone camellia bush in the backyard was covered with elegant variegated pink faces, just daring naysayers like Lucy to cast her spell of dread and fear over them. 

Variegated Camellia flower

This camellia bush has undergone at least 15 years of benign neglect — no fertilization, no watering during drouths, no bug killing compounds — and has survived. It was planted by my godfather Markham Peacock on the banks of a coulee bordering my backyard, and if I were to pay attention to the one-quarter Scots blood in my background, I’d say his spirit has reincarnated or at least kept the beautiful plant alive.

Pink isn’t my favorite color but that color challenges me to denigrate the radiance of a pink camellia. The camellia flower is my Alabama friends’ state flower, and here in Acadiana, gardeners favor it because it ignores gloomy winter days and blossoms despite gray skies and heavy rainfall. 

J. Lyle Bayless, Jr., who once owned and developed Live Oak Gardens of Jefferson Island, just a few miles away from New Iberia, was enchanted with the Jeanerette Pink Camellia growing in front of the Joseph Jefferson mansion on the Island when he bought the property. He observed the death of the beautiful pink blossoms of this camellia one bitter winter and its return to life only two weeks later and began to cultivate so many varieties that he had to house the 1,000 awards he won in camellia competitions in “The Camellia Room” of the Joseph Jefferson Mansion. Mike Richard, who now owns Live Oak Gardens, has continued to cultivate the legacy of Bayless.

Although the wind blows out of the north, and temps dipped to the 40s, we’re still “in the pink,” with our hardy camellia, and Lucy can’t cast her dark spell over the many colorful vistas throughout New Iberia, Louisiana this morning. As Snoopy says, “He he he he he he he.” 

Photograph of Camellia flower by Victoria Sullivan

WHEN IN ROME

As I walked across a bridge spanning the river in Rome, Georgia recently, I looked down at waters not unlike the Bayou Teche in my hometown of New Iberia, Louisiana — they looked a bit muddy. However, I shouldn’t have been surprised because the silt from not one, but three rivers, flows through the area I crossed. The Oostanaula, Etowah, and Coosa Rivers meet in the area of downtown Rome, once center of a thriving cotton industry.

In its early formation, this town was visited by Hernando DeSoto and was occupied by Cherokee Indians who called it “Enchanted Land.” Early settlers named the city Rome after the Italian city with seven hills on the Tiber River, as the site in Georgia also boasts seven prominent hills above the city.

We had been attracted to this city while searching for a Little Theater production within a few hours’ drive of Sewanee, Tennessee, and had discovered a matinee performance of Alice in Wonderland at the DeSoto Theater on Broad Street, Rome’s main thoroughfare. The play, based on Lewis Carroll’s book, was an adaptation that featured an all-youth cast. The youngest actors and actresses were fifth graders, the oldest actress was a dual-enrolled college student, and among them were talented home schoolers.

Lindsey Chambers, director of the production, instructed this group in a master’s class that featured vocal work, diction, volume, character development, and intense script analysis, and the students rehearsed three months for their parts. Rylee Barfield as the Mad Hatter, became my favorite. Prior to the performance, I had read an article about the references to drugs in Alice in Wonderland, purporting that Lewis Carroll had been an opium addict, but I suppose highly imaginative authors who create fantastical characters in other-world settings frequently get bad press. Readers of Carroll’s world who allude to him as a drug user probably wouldn’t have liked the cover of the Rome performance: “We Are All Mad Here.”

Rome’s largest contribution to American education, from the 18th century to present-day, remains Berry College, an institution made famous by Martha Berry, a wealthy planter’s daughter who began to teach indigent children in her playhouse cabin near her home, and whose efforts resulted in a Boys Industrial School and the Martha Berry School for Girls. Later, with contributions from Andrew Carnegie and Henry Ford, the Berry Junior College was established and expanded into a four year institution. Today, Berry College is the largest landmass college in the world with over 28,000 acres and 2,000 undergraduate and graduate students.

I was amused at a story in a Rome visitor’s guide about the Captoline Wolf, a bronze statue of a wolf reputed to have been a gift to the City of Rome from Italian Dictator Benito Mussolini, which has been correctly identified as a gift from Francesco Boncompagni Ludovisi, the governor of Rome, Italy. Copies of the original, located in Rome, Italy are also found in Rome, New York; Cincinnati, Ohio; Brasilia, Brazil; and other sites around the world.

We photographed a statue of Woodrow Wilson’s wife, Ellen, who spent her childhood in Rome, Georgia and set up a scholarship at Berry College for underprivileged mountain children. During her years as First Lady, Ellen laid out the famous Rose Garden at the White House and wrote a bill to better the living conditions for slum areas around Washington DC. She is buried at Myrtle Hill Cemetery in Rome.

A list of notables who lived in Rome includes a literary find for me: Calder Willingham, Jr. I was browsing in Dogwood Books and Antiques on Broad Street and discovered a display of this author who lived in Rome and whose father owned a hotel on Broad Street. Willingham was once dubbed the father of contemporary dark comedy and was well-known among postwar novelists such as Norman Mailer, James Jones, Truman Capote who were important in the literary scene of Greenwich Village.

I had never read any of Willingham's work, but I picked up a copy of The Girl in Dogwood Cabin and began to read it. Last night I watched “Rambling Rose,” the movie script Willingham wrote for one of his novels. He was widely recognized for his work on the script for “The Graduate” also, and his novel, Eternal Fire, set in his native Rome, Georgia, established him as a major writer. Shelby Foote hailed him as “the only living American writer qualified to hold Doestoevsky’s coat in a street fight.”  Sadly, Willingham is now regarded as an under-sung American novelist and screen writer whose works are mostly found in rare and second-hand bookstores. 

Rome has also become a mecca for national industries such as Mohawk, Sara Lee, Kellogg, Suzuki and other commercial businesses. It’s another one of Georgia’s small cities that has preserved its heritage, particularly the buildings on Broad Street that are painted the colors of buildings in the French Quarter of New Orleans, Louisiana: bright yellow, green, pink, lavender colors that accentuate the beautiful 19th century architecture.

P.S. It’s an ideal sized city with a population that equals my hometown of New Iberia, Louisiana.

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

MORE OF KAREN BOURQUE'S ARTISTRY

On Wednesday, we not only brought home good memories of hanging out in Arnaudville, Louisiana, with Darrell and Karen Bourque, we acquired another glass art piece by Karen, whose work hangs in our Sewanee, Tennessee and New Iberia, Louisiana homes. The latest acquisition is a rendition of the Pickerel Weed, an aquatic plant with brilliant blue flowers, densely clustered on a long spike with heart-shaped leaves, that attracts bees and butterflies.

Karen was inspired to create the stained glass piece using blue dog-toothed amethyst after reading Why Water Plants Don't Drown by Victoria Sullivan and discovering the lovely illustration for the Pickerel Weed rendered by Susan Elliott, artist and co-editor of Pinyon Publishing.

In the text accompanying the glass work, Karen explains that no blue stone felt right for the flowers, so she chose the dog-toothed amethyst to represent them. She attributes qualities of spirituality and contentment to the amethyst and relates that it has calming, protective powers of healing, divine love, and inspiration and that it enhances psychic and creative abilities. We have hung this art that represents "the peace of the perfect peace which was present prior to birth" in the sunroom and can look out and see it each morning at breakfast time.

I always enjoy the texts that accompany Karen's work as they are small inspirational pieces she chooses to use in her interpretations of objects in nature and the personalities who commission the work, as well as to foster creativity in those who acquire the glass work. She is married to the poet Darrell Bourque, and they're well suited to each other because she matches his gift for writing poetry with her visual poems in glass.

Karen has done glass pieces for many homes throughout Acadiana, for the Louisiana Book Festival, for the Ernest Gaines Center at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and other art centers. Much of her work focuses on the natural world and spirituality—on those images that give meaning and harmony to human experience.

We now have five of Karen's glass pieces, three of which are at Sewanee. One of the more recent pieces is a rendition of a porch that was photographed and appeared on the cover of Porch Posts, a collection of essays and stories that I co-authored with Janet Faulk this year. I will be autographing this book at A&E Gallery in New Iberia Saturday, Dec. 13, 1 - 3 p.m., along with Vickie Sullivan who is debuting her sequel to the speculative novel Adoption entitled Rogue Genes.

Porch Posts' cover is Karen's interpretation of a painting done by the late Elmore Morgan, Jr. which shows the bare outlines of a porch open to the air that might have been a place to sit and watch the sunset and fireflies winking on a summer night.

Karen handles commissions for glass work created in her studio in Church Point, Louisiana, and if you're interested in her work, she can be reached at 337-684-3542 or 337-351-2219.

Photograph of the Pickerel Weed by Victoria I. Sullivan, author of Why Water Plants Don't Drown, Adoption, and Rogue Genes.