Divide and conquer

Southern Living, Oct 1999 by Horton, Orene Stroud

Nancy Goodwin shows us her foolproof method for dividing many perennials. Those with crowns that can be pulled apart are featured.

Knowing the cost of perennials, thrifty gardeners are always looking for ways to multiply their favorites without having to subtract money from their checking accounts. It's simple to divide the perennials you already have. (See photos for step-by-step instructions.) After you have divided your plants, you may have enough to start another bed or to swap with a neighbor who is dividing other perennials. Either way, it stretches your plant budget, as the only cost is your own labor.

Nancy Goodwin of Montrose Garden in Hillsborough, North Carolina, demonstrates her method for dividing perennials in the fall. The plant illustrated is a primrose, but many other clump-forming perennials can be divided this way. A partial list would include stokes' aster (Stokesia laevis), black-eyed Susan, purple coneflower, bleeding heart (Dicentra sp.), lamb'sears, and liriope. As a general rule, you should divide springblooming perennials in the fall and fall-blooming perennials in the spring. Orene Stroud Horton

Brunswick, Georgia

It's nearly sunset. Captain Vernon Reynolds' outboard motor sputters us away from the dock at Spanky's Restaurant and glides us into a poem.

Around us stretch the Marshes of Glynn, lauded by Georgia poet Sidney Lanier in 1878. This "league and a league of marsh-grass" obviously made a vivid impression, for Lanier wrote the poem in Baltimore. Today, its presence remains just as powerful, both in its picture-postcard blues and browns and its role in the coastal ecosystem. This watery prairie of smooth cordgrass (Spartina alternifolia) provides food and shelter for myriad aquatic life. Without such coastal nurseries, Georgia's seafood industry would crash.

Highway 82 begins in Brunswick and runs westnorthwest through southern Georgia for more than 200 miles. Watching the state pass by one morning, I get the singular impression that it's dangerous to be a pine around here. The roadsides from Brunswick to Albany consist almost entirely of yellow pine plantations. Gary calls these trees "future telephone poles of America."

Fortunately, there's a lot more to Georgia than multitudinous rows of doomed conifers. For example, there's a fellow up ahead who just happens to be the country's foremost bullfrog farmer.

Alapaha, Georgia

Now you can't talk loud in here," cautions Ken Holyoak, as he guides us into the dimly lit, Quonset-hut style building. "Bullfrogs are afraid of strangers."

Oxygenators gurgle, as more than 90,000 bullfrogs in all stages of development cower silently in their water-filled trays. "It's only me," I whisper. "Your average, well-mannered, non-frog-eating person."

A highly respected hybridizer of game fish, Ken also reigns as the undisputed Baron of Bullfrogs, ever since he discovered how to raise them in captivity. His secret? Training them to eat processed food pellets instead of the bugs, worms, and other bullfrogs they normally prefer. "Training" means those that decide to eat the pellets survive to pass on their learned genes. Those that don't, well, croak.

An efficient beast, the bullfrog converts 1 1/2 pounds of food into a pound of meat"good eatin' size"-in only 18 months. But Ken doesn't sell directly to restaurants. Instead, he views his primary mission as reversing the precipitous decline in the number of bullfrogs in the wild due to pollution and acid rain. If Southern ponds aren't restocked, he warns, they may soon fall silent forever.

Gary and I leave frog-topia as quietly as we entered. "You never want to stress the frogs," explains Ken, "because if they get upset, they'll kill themselves."

Tifton, Georgia

As we enter Tifton, our home for the night, tornadoes bounce all around us. A severe thunderstorm turns the street outside our hotel into a lake that already engulfs one stalled-out car. Its driver refuses to pay 40 bucks for a tow. So a pair of tow trucks, emergency lights flashing, hover at the water's edge, eagerly waiting to rescue anybody else who thinks air bags work like pontoons.

To date, all I know about Tifton is that it's a hotbed of Georgia agriculture. But as Gary and I drive the main drag the next morning, we spy the unexpected. Gleaming red paint. Really cool cars. Gotta stop.

There in the showroom, beside a 1965 Chevy Corvette too gorgeous for words, we meet Bob Kennon, owner of Auto Quest Investment Cars. Bob uses his Web site on the Internet (www.auto-quest.com) to buy and sell restored and exotic cars of all kinds.

Looking for a 1988 Lamborghini Countach 5000 with only 6,000 miles? It can be yours for only $82,500. How about a 1937 Rolls Royce Sedaca De Ville? A bargain at $65,000. But maybe your family budget is squeezed at the moment. You can still own a 1965 Mustang-always a classic-for a mere $4,500.

The Internet puts Auto Quest and Tifton within arm's reach of the world. "In the last 30 days, we've sent cars to Norway, Spain, Germany, Belgium, Italy, and Chechnya, as well as across the U.S.," says Bob. He maintains a 4,000-car database and pays finder's fees for special cars.