Labor of love

Southern Living, Feb 2003 by Bender, Steve

The flowers that fill this South Carolina garden reflect the enduring care of three generations of family and friends.

When Southerners set plants in the ground, they bury more than just roots. Memories, wisdom, laughter, love, gossip, and advice also go into the hole, to reappear another day and a galaxy of days thereafter.

So it is at a garden in Ridge Spring, South Carolina, dotingly cared for by Emily Lide Wheeler and her mother, Eulee. On this cool, clear February morning, they admire Lenten roses, a gift from their friend Peggy Garvin. As the season goes on, they'll witness the blossoming of Hattie Watson's magic lilies, Becky Beck's ginger lilies, Winkie Hartley's spider lilies, and Ron Porter's grandmother's purple phlox. "The garden is a collection of our friends," says Emily, "and I see each and every one of them in everything blooming out there."

Emily represents the third generation of Wheeler women to work in this garden. The first, Emily Noterman Wheeler, arrived here with her family in 1930. The damming of the Saluda River to create Lake Murray, northwest of Columbia, had flooded their farm, forcing them to relocate. Fortunately, the waters spared the old house and its immediate surroundings, enabling "Mrs. Wheeler" (as the younger Emily called her) to move many of her treasured plants to the new house in Ridge Spring. "Now I can look out and see the very same crepe myrtles, magnolias, nandinas, and spireas she had at her place," says Emily. "It means a lot to know they were part of her original stock."

By the 1950s, Eulee Wheeler, the younger Emily's mother, had taken the reins of the garden. Eulee, now well into her eighties, truly has a way with plants, but a bigger garden didn't come easily. For one thing, money was tight. "I remember as a child going with Mother up to Miss Mitchell's in Johnston to buy an iris for 50 cents. That was big money," recalls Emily. For another, there weren't big nurseries and home centers selling plants like there are today. Eulee relied on mail-order catalogs, "wish books," and shared plants from neighbors to obtain the many camellias, althaeas, bearded iris, and daylilies that put on a glorious show even to this day. Each spring, Eulee dug clumps of jonquils growing wild along the roadside and brought them home to multiply.

A Winning Combination

The gardening bug bit the younger Emily during the mid-1980s, and she's been tending the garden ever since. She and Eulee won the very first daylily competition they ever entered and then proceeded to take blue ribbons for bearded iris all over the state. "It got so that the other contestants hated to see us walk through the doors," Emily states matter-of-factly. Now the bug has also bitten her niece Anne Wheeler Jordan.

Emily added azaleas, rhododendrons, viburnums, and other plants to the garden, all with the goal of having something pretty to look at in every month of the year. And she continued Eulee's tradition of transplanting homeless jonquils to a garden that needed them. Lafonde Lindler's cow pasture, about 10 miles up the road, proved to be a gold mine. He had razed an old home site to create more pasture and, in doing so, scattered its Campernelle jonquils (Narcissus odorus) all over the field. The cows would not eat the bulbs, but they happily fertilized them, resulting in a sea of thriving jonquils Lafonde didn't want. "He said to me, `Honey, you come and get every one of 'em,"' recalls Emily. "Well, I've been digging them for seven years, and I know I'll never get them all."

There's a trick to successfully moving jonquils in bloom, claims Emily. Use a long trenching shovel to trench around the clump. Then dig deep enough beneath the clump so that it all comes up in one piece without any damage to the bulbs and roots. "My brother and I once dug a clump so big we couldn't even lift it together," she says. "We had to roll it to the car."

As the Wheelers' garden acquires shared plants, it continues to dispense them. "Everybody who comes here usually walks out with a sackful of this or that," remarks Emily cheerfully. "Iris is a real favorite." Some folks even help themselves. Emily once discovered a note that read, "I came. I saw. I coveted. And I swiped one of your plants." Emily didn't miss it. To her, it was simply placed in the care of another.

The Garden's Lesson

This is what gardens like Emily's teach. More than just dressing up the countryside, they connect mother and daughter, friend and stranger, people we've forgotten and people we can't forget. These points hit home as I listened to Emily describe her friendship with Orene Stroud Horton. About six years ago, Orene came to write for Southern Living. Shortly after she arrived, she was diagnosed with cancer. Throughout her long, trying battle, Orene remained purposeful, inquisitive, and upbeat, always looking for the next great garden. Last June, she passed away. This story I'm writing was to have been her next great garden.

Emily told me that not long before Orene's death, the two of them had competed at a camellia show; Orene's stunning sasanqua had taken first prize. Afterward, Orene did something so characteristic of her-something any other gardener would have done. She pressed to the ground a lower branch of that sasanqua to root a piece of it for Emily's garden.