Doctor Dirt

Southern Living, Sep 2001 by Bender, Steve

Leon Goldsberry came home to the Delta, and it captured him heart and soil.

Leon Goldsberry doesn't mind if you call him "dirt." Just be polite and put "Doctor" in front of it.

"Doctor Dirt" is the self-appointed title of this Pied Piper of flowers in the Mississippi Delta. His garden, located in the little town of Edwards, near Vicksburg, is as unpretentious as the man. Don't expect to see teak-- handled shovels or copper weather vanes here. Look instead for scarlet cockscombs, outstretched banana trees, lemon yellow sunflowers, perfumed four o'clocks, and spiny hardy orange-all time-tested plants of Leon's childhood. Virtually exploding with flowers, his yard preaches a special gospel-- that husbanding plants is the best way to connect with our past, participate in our present, and proclaim to the world who we are.

Doctor Dirt (a name he took from one of the many radio gardening shows he religiously listens to every Saturday morning) wakes these days in the same house in which he grew up, built by his great-grandfather in 1895. Yet he spent most of his adult life outside the South. After studying sociology at Rust College in Holly Springs, Mississippi, he moved to Toronto and became a childcare worker. His Canadian sojourn lasted 30 years, until 1995, when he returned to care for his mother, Millie. "I always promised that when she got older, I'd come home and spend time with her," he recalls. "I planted a lot of these flowers for her." After Millie passed away in 1998 at age 79, Leon named his yard, "Millie's Gardens."

His is a classic swept-yard cottage garden emblematic of parts of the rural South. No lawn, no mulch, no regimentation. Paths and patches of bare earth separate garden beds teeming with raucous assemblies of annuals, perennials, bulbs, shrubs, fruit, and even agronomic crops, such as cotton.

Some folks dismiss his garden as a jungle, but Doctor Dirt takes such criticism in stride. "I don't want everybody's yard looking like my yard, because I don't look like everybody else. No two paintings are alike, and gardens shouldn't be either," he declares. "Suburbia is so artificial-- everything's in rows. But I like to be an individual. Society ladies will say, 'Ooh, you can't mix those colors.' And I'll say, `Says who?"'

Making your way through this garden is like turning the pages of a family album. "Every plant in my yard reminds me of my past," he says. "The flowering quince is 93 years old. My great-- grandparents put that in. My purple dahlia is from Mom's time. So is 'Paul's Scarlet Climber' rose given to us by a garden club between 1929 and 1932. Even the native stuff, like devil's walking stick, I remember getting from the woods with my uncle, stepdad, and granddad."

One native plant, swamp sunflower (Helianthus angustifolius), forms a cathedral of yellow blooms in fall. In the region's rich soil, it grows 14 feet tall. "I remember the sunflowers from when I was 6 or 7 years old," he says. "The rain would bend them over, and I'd try to jump up to touch them. I used to take them as bouquets to my teacher."

A central tenet of Doctor Dirt's philosophy is that gardens should start out by the street and say welcome. "The garden is how I meet people," he explains. "It starts a conversation." Voice any interest, and you are invited in to wander the paths and inspect dozens upon dozens of old Southern pass-along plants, including reseeding orange cosmos, candlestick plant (Cassia alata), turk's turban (Malvaviscus arboreus drummondii), and a gorgeous purple-- and-white angel's trumpet (Datura metel 'Cornucopaea').

Seedlings abound. Should you want any to take home, Doctor Dirt has a novel packaging technique. He squeezes a ball of Delta mud around the plant's roots. The mud dries on the outside, but stays moist on the inside. When you plant your prize in its new home, it never suspects it's been moved.

Leon now works as a landscape gardener, supervising various plantings around town. Money is tight, but that hasn't curbed his artistic expression. Millie's old punch glasses sparkle like Christmas lights on the branches of the hardy orange (Poncirus trifoliata). His decorations prove that when it comes to creativity, imagination is the most valuable currency.

Doctor Dirt's influence is literally growing. Seeds and plants shared from his garden are popping up all over town. Folks in Edwards are rediscovering the joys of a garden, which, to Leon's way of thinking, is a journey home.

"In the beginning, God put us in a garden," he observes. "That is where we all come from."