REFLECTING ON 76

 

TODAY I AM 76

Perhaps this should be a day of reflection. My husband and many of my friends have already passed away.  I know I am blessed. I had a wonderful mother and father. I am close to my sister and brother. God blessed Joe and me with three children and five grandchildren all of whom I am extremely proud. 

My youngest daughter has decided I am (OCD) because I obsess over things. She lists:

1. PHONICS-- I must admit that was a serious focus of my life--to get Systematic, Direct, and Early (SIDE) phonics back in our schools. I ran for chairman of school board twice. I lost once to a doctor who "had a heart for education" (and the backing of the school system which had "too much invested" in the current methodology to change). And once to the president of the university in Dothan who hired the professors who trained our teaches in what they had based their careers upon--Whole Language. Not much hope for change there. One principal told me "they would laugh the teachers off the playground if taught not to say "aint." (And that relates to reading how?)

2.  Somehow reading proficiency became political. I was shocked and amazed at how the powerful political onslaught, a massive offensive appeared and, we discovered, had spread throughout the country. That got me involved in politics and I joined the Republican Women. 

3. FRENCH HANDSEWING--I did manage to create two Christening gowns and several smocked outfits (Mary Strickland and Elizabeth Wheelock were excellent instructors). 

Lily Butterworth on balcony at Wakefield and in Christening gown.

Megan and Molly Evans in Christening gowns I made. 

 My children, Cecily and Drew stand  with Lucy Lee and others whose parents names I remember, but I cannot remember theirs. As I said, I am 76 with an atrophying brain. I am told that is normal. 

Planning for the Fashion Show of Heirloom Clothing.

 

Susan Livingston, Tommy Weatherford and Sharman Ramsey 

Elizabeth Wheelock, Debbie Wilson, Lynn Isler, Margaret Watson, and Sharman Ramsey 

There were many of us handsewing at that time. So, as chairman of the Girls Club Board, I decided that a good fundraiser would be a fashion show of heirloom garments. It was beautiful and quite successful. And it was the beginning of a series of fashion shows that became a bit of a tradition for awhile. 

4. QUILTING--Great hobby for when one is recuperating from hip or knee surgery.

5. GENEALOGY--So, now my sister and I are members of the the Shawnee Heritage, Magna Charta Dames, Jamestown Society, Mayflower Society, Colonial Dames, the Daughters of the American Revolution, Daughters of the Confederacy, and if there were such an organization, children of WWI and WWII patriots. Though I have tried to get a historical society started, most of those interested have passed away. I was able to access a lot of genealogy books when I went with my attorney husband to take depositions around the South. He would park me in a library where I would happily while away the time until he picked me up to go eat dinner or supper.

6. WRITING HISTORICAL FICTION (Creek Indian family saga), COSY MYSTERIES (MINT JULEP SERIES), CONTEMPORARY WOMEN'S FICTION  (CHOICES AND SECRETS), WAKEFIELD PLANTATION: HISTORY AND COOKBOOK, AND MAGAZINE ARTICLES mainly for lifestyle magazines. Oh yes, my website (southern-style.com) and this blog. 

Historical Fiction  THE CREEK FAMILY SAGA

Cozy Mystery

CONTEMPORARY WOMEN'S FICTION

6. YOU TUBE--I admit to being obsessed with the Nancy Guthrie Case. I want to know the "rest of the story." For a while I was obsessed with the Karen Read trials. REVENGE WITH MAYA got me hooked, but the  names just got shuffled and the plots shifted from one occupation to another (really just podcasts, but fun to listen to). And now I am watching the DUNCOMBE HOUSE DIARIES (really a fun show in a beautiful part of England). When I need  to just chill, I watch the competition baking shows my granddaughter Molly and I enjoy. 

7. GARDENING-- And now, in my declining years, I am obsessed with gardening. 

I am an avid watcher of GARDEN ANSWER (Laura and Aaron in Eastern Oregon, the mother of all gardening shows),  DIG, PLANT, WATER,  REPEAT (9B IN CALIFORNIA (Janie and Jason). We are 9A in Dothan. GARDENING WITH CREEKSIDE (Jenny and Jerry in North Carolina) grow good Southern plants and work along side Southern Living Plants and Proven Winners. I order a lot of plants from Gardening with Creekside. They are a grower and retail operation close enough to my zone that I feel relatively safe buying from there. 

I also love everything Allen Titmarch does. He has a new house and is now designing his backyard in England (GARDENING WITH ALLEN TITMARCH). HAPPINESS GARDEN is a fantastic place to find curatives to a lot of plant ailments. 

I am growing Amaryllis from seed (they take two to three years to develop bulbs). Yesterday, I started a new flower bed in the back yard by dividing one amaryllis. My shaded, patchy grass is dwindling. 

Look at the Vitex blooms next to the Japanese Magnolia.  So pretty!

My granddaughters love to go to Dothan Nurseries and the Botanical Garden. When my oldest, Lily, comes again, we are going to take a field trip to Ozark to the Neighborhood Daylily Farm. My mother (Jean Gillis Burson) and my grandmother (Eunice Jernigan Gillis) were both gardeners. My mother could do anything but always felt inadequate because she did not go to college. She went to nursing school and won a battle ribbon for her service at the Battle of the Bulge. Then she joined mail order book clubs and read about anything and everything. She was self-educated with intellectual things as well as gifted with creative endeavors. Mother started a children's garden club for me and my friends--the Daffy Dillies. We met in my playhouse a former air conditioner container. She took me with her on her yearly visits to the daylily farm in Headland. I guess that jumpstarted my love of plants. 

I am trying to attract hummingbirds and butterflies. Currently, I have only seen a very chubby squirrel, a redbird and his wife.

Do you think the signage with the metal butterfly and caterpillar is enough of an invitation. Maybe the lantana and butterfly weed.

6. One of my favorite Magazines must be SOUTHERN LIVING. Their recent one, April 2026, I guess, is my favorite. It presents Southern food so well! ENGLISH HOME and ENGLISH GARDEN follow a close second.  Now inspired I think I will start cooking these old favorites in my 

my newly painted Blue Kitchen.

 

I love Peter Rabbit! Williams Sonoma

My new blue kitchen

Bird Watching Chair and recipe book collection

Redesigned and painted Pantry/Utility 

Gardening does not end with the back door. 

Oh, I forgot to mention Bridge and Mahjong. The square table reminded me. 

The window above the epergne was Joe's mother's.  She saved it from her mother's home on S. St. Andrews. She and her boys enjoyed watching the Peanut Festival gather on the street in front of that house. 

  I have been in the hospital twice since the beginning of the year (2026) and have just been too tired, and honestly apathetic,  to think of anything worth writing about. But, now, I am inspired by the garden shows I watch and the beauty of God's world which is truly a balm for body and soul. 

7.  SINGING My favorite hymns are those I once sang in church: How Great Thou Art, The King is Coming, The Via Dolorosa, I Come to the Garden Alone, The Prayer, and a new favorite is I Can Only Imagine. I enjoyed leading First Baptist Music classes for preschool children and participating in the Adult Choir for many years before I could not climb the steps any longer.  

8. GOD. Where does God fit into this? I hope I managed to instill the trust in and love of God that I myself know. I depend upon him every day and begin every day with a Bible study on You Tube since my mobility is now limited and I cannot make it to church. He has forgiven me much. 

Oh, yes, I  also led the Brownies and Cub Scouts when my children were young. I started a Legal Auxiliary but one of our presidents let it fizzle. I belong to a garden club founded in 1938. I belong to a luncheon/study club founded around the same time. This was what women of my generation do. 

9. Panama City became a serious obsession when Joe and I bought our townhouse, condo, and little blue house down there and joined the Yacht Club. I started a luncheon group we named BOOBS (BUNCH OF OLD BROADS). 

I served as president of the St. Andrew Bay Yacht Club Auxiliary. I joined the Panama City Women's Club, served on the Bay County Library Foundation Board and Books Alive. Panama City was a wonderful place for Joe and me and brought us many treasured friends. Then came Hurricane Michael, my two hip replacements and one knee replacement and Joe's Normal Pressure Hydrocephalus and Alzheimers that brought us back to our Dothan family. 

He passed away at home on November 20, 2020, the same date and age his own father died. He had predicted it.

Now, at 76, having fought the good fight, I am tired. Dealing with peripheral neuropathy and balance issues it has brought, my dogs and I find my recliner to be a very good refuge. 

This has many been written mainly for my children. Born in 1950, I experienced half of the 20th century and now, more than a quarter of the 21st. My children and grandchildren live in a totally different world than that I was born into. Don't stop learning and participating, my precious ones. 

Indeed, I think I will continue to write and work on genealogy. But, we'll see in 2027 what the God has in store.  I guess He isn't through with me yet. 

The Plan for the Southern Monet Garden

 

The Plan for the Southern Monet Garden      1999       The Monet Garden in my former yard has a story. Dothan Nurseries, JoAnn McFarland, Christie Thomley and I collaborated in planting a Southern Monet Garden. One must first one must understand Monet’s theories of gardening from an artist’s perspective and then one must choose those plants from Monet’s design which will prosper in a Southern garden. I used Vivian Russell’s Monet’s Garden, Charles Prost’s The Garden of Monet, and Derek Fell’s Monet’s Garden as resource materials.  I began to understand the garden as a palette upon which Monet practiced his color theories, combining red-green-silver, blue-pink-white, yellow-violet, and orange-blue. He preferred single flowers (flowers with a single row of petals) because of their translucence when backlit and their reflective properties when front lit. The play of light upon the garden determined where a plant was planted. Cool colors appeared where the sun rose and hot colors appeared in the sunset borders.  According to Derek Fell, "The most common wayside plants in his garden were white oxeye daisies, crimson corn poppies, yellow flat iris, and wispy oat grasses. He called these plants, ‘the soul of the garden.’ The Oxeye daisies and oat grasses added to the shimmer, and the appearance of diminutive corn poppies and wavy yellow flat irises were like fluttering butterflies."Poppies and Bachelor’s Buttons Suddenly my garden took on an aesthetic dimension far beyond my original understanding of gardening. I had always responded to Impressionist art, but yet had failed to recognize the potential sensory opportunities in garden design. Monet teased the senses visually lifting the garden from the earth with arches of roses along a main pathway. Color, movement, sound, and smell all became elements to optimize the enjoyment of the little piece of the world with which God had given me to nurture. The design plan expanded. Christie, my friend, fellow Master Gardener and mentor, sighed. She knew the immensity of our endeavor. Marcel Proust wrote: "If one day I can see Claude Monet's gardens, I feel that I will see, in a garden of nuances and colors, more than flowers, I will see a garden which seems to be less a traditional floral garden and more of a colorists garden, for example some flowers arranged in an ensemble that is not quite like nature, since they have been planted in such a way that those which blossom at the same time have nuances that harmonize in a pink or blue range; and that the artists intention, so powerfully manifested has dematerialized in some way, all that is not color.  Earth flowers and also water flowers, these delicate water lilies that the master has depicted in sublime paintings of which this garden (a true transposition of art, more than a model for paintings, a painting already executed within nature which is illuminated under the eye of a great artist) is like a first and living sketch." (Les Eblouissements by the Countess de Noailles, Figaro, June 15, 1902) Chart of plants and their season in Monet’s Garden  Spring Summer Borders /Autumn Pansies Tulips Wallflowers Daffodils Imperial crowns German irises Peonies Primroses Delphiniums Valerian Roses Daisies White Phlox Perennial geraniums Linaria(toad flax)      Dahlias Asters Nasturtiums Helianthus Sunflowers Delphiniums  Spring  Tea rose Aubrieta Tulips Daffodils Aquiligia Rudgoris Wallflowers Phlox Iris German iris Leopard's- bane Peonies Centaurea Lupines  Summer  Pink and red Pelargonium Pink tulips Blue forget-me nots Pink and Red double daisies Aubrieta Primroses Blue-violet irises Purple irises Snowdrops Heliopsis delphiniums Daisies Verbascam Yellow Marigolds Rudbeckia Gladiolus Peonies Oriental poppies Mountain clematis  Linaria Climbing roses Hollyhocks Poppies Lilies  Summer/Autumn  Japanese anemones Asters Carpathan bellflowers Actinidia Dahlias  Autumn  Japanese anemones Morning glories Dahlias Daisies Mountain clovers Cactus Dahlias Tobacco plant Sweet peas Golden rod The Southern Monet Garden began on September 20, 1999, with bed preparation.   Chris and Bryan arrived with energy, tools and a vision to begin the process of creating our Southern Monet Garden.  We realized that with my sandy soil, the foundation would be critical to success.  Weeding and watering would be crucial to success and enjoyment.  We decided to implement the fallowing method suggested by Ed Givhan, Montgomery, Alabama physician, and his wife, Peggy, in their book, Conversations with a Southern Gardener. They recommends preparing the bed, leaving it to lie fallow for several weeks to see which weeds will pop up. Those weeds are then zapped with Round-up. Only then are we ready to follow through on planting our seeds. Then we just sat back and waited for those weed seed to show themselves. September 21, 1999, was the day we tilled the soil after the beds had been cut in the sod. PLOT 1 FROM WEST TO EAST MIX -Shirley Poppies- Larkspur-Indian Spring Holly                                                                  Hocks PLOT 2 FROM WEST TO EAST Lunaria-Rose Mallow-Corn Poppies-Blue Boy Bachelors Buttons-Hollyhocks (Charters double) PLOT 3 FROM WEST TO EAST Rose Mallow-Lunaria-Johnny Jump-ups-Nigella-Rhode's Shirley-Delphiniums PLOT 4 Dwarf Larkspur-California Poppies-Sweet Peas-Clary Sage-Shepherds Old Fashioned Poppies We divide the seed to fit the plan.   Sweet Peas have been soaked overnight.     September 22, 1999 Mushroom Compost was added to the new beds to enrich the soil Step 4  Then came the fun art…planting already established plants. Bryan at Dothan Nurseries designed the background for the Southern Monet Garden.  With his artist's eye he strategically placed plants using color, size and shape as visual elements while pleasing the other senses with plants with smells that enhance the garden environment Arches were added to the Southern Monet Garden to incorporate the same vertical gardening technique that Monet used so effectively. Climbing New Dawn and Zephrine Drouhin were planted to grow over the arches. At the same time weeds that had sprung up in the fallowed beds were zapped with Round up.  The corners of the house are anchored with pyramidal Carolina Holly. Radican Gardenias soften the edges coming around the corner in front of the Holly. Variegated Pittosporum and Lorapetalum with beautiful burgundy leaves and a spring blooming pink flower provide background against the house. Tea Olive grows higher in the areas between the windows. Lacy pink spirea flank the sod pathway. Pellea fern grows in front of the bay windows. Sage, Basil, and Thyme are planted in front of the Fern. Old fashioned blue pansies grow low in front of the porch.  An arbor covered with coral vine and French hydrangea grow in the shade of the south side of the house.  Antique and David Austen Roses surround the bench on the northern side of the house.  Climbing roses grow over the arches above the brick walk.  Old fashioned purple thrift is the ground cover beneath the roses.  Jewel toned Nasturtiums were planted in font of the house. October 23, 1999  was seed planting time. Hollyhocks take special care.   These seed must be punched into the ground individually (about 2") and covered with soil.  We mixed the seed with builders sand and then shook the mixture over the area of the bed JoAnn had plotted for those seed.       We pat down the soil to ensure seedlings have firm contact.

After labeling the plots so that we will know what to look for in differentiating seedlings from potential weeds,  JoAnn sprayed the seedbed with water.  This helps set the seed and start germination.   December 10, 1999 Germination actually began only two weeks after planting, but the plants were so tiny they were hard to photograph.   Truly one cannot tell the difference in the plants with only two leaves.  They must have at least four for differentiation.    Poppies California Poppies Oxeye Daisy   .Nigella (Looks VERY much like Larkspur and Daisy Queen Anne's Lace)

Lunaria is the first to blossom. These beautiful fragile spires are Lunaria.  The tiny blooms resemble Easter eggs.  As you can see we now have a great stand of "greens."  Gardeners will recognize the poppies of all different types.  (February 28, 2000) As you can see, all of our efforts have produced something beautiful.  All the watering during the drought, the weeding, the shifting around so that plants would have room to grow have come together.  And we've only just begun!!!!     Lunaria Apply PREEN for weed control before the weeds germinate. Use a light coat, EXCEPT IN THE SEED BEDS! (We want the weeds to germinate in the seed bed so we can zap them with Round Up.) Use this once a month ALL YEAR. Use Round Up to zap the weeds in the seed bed. Then spot spray WEEKLY. Hand weeding will still be necessary, but will be much better if taken care of with diligence.  FERTILIZE with Florikan 15-4-9 w/ Nutricote Apply every 3-4 months (all year) ON ALL FLOWERS AND SHRUBS  Mulch with Pine Straw. It is actually easier to place the pine straw in the bed before planting little annuals like Pansies. But not in the seed garden. Seedlings need light to germinate.  WATER, WATER, WATER, preferably in the morning   Sweet Peas on the old scuppernong arbor

Poppies

At this point, I must admit, "the sin of pride was upon me" as Celestine Sibley said of her home in Sweet Apple.  So beautiful  This is what makes gardening worthwhile. Here you see poppies, bachelor’s buttons, Queen Anne's Lace, and violas. Our lunaria continues to bloom. Unfortunately, we have had some very hard rains that have beaten down some of our beautiful flowers. We should have thinned our poppies more drastically so that air could circulate a bit more near the roots. Some that were sown in another bed actually got the dreaded "root rot" and had to be pulled up. This picture reminds one that "a thing of beauty is a joy forever." Some of these exquisite blooms resemble peonies, while others have a single row of translucent petals. Those were Monet's favorites. Monet loved to capture the light reflecting through the petal of a bloom.  The Southern Monet garden has been gorgeous with outstanding poppies. By April 22 they were turning to seed. The garden was then in transition from Spring to Fall. I pulled out many of the poppies and replaced them with cleome, touch-me-nots, and cosmos. Sunflowers will soon be planted as well. One patch of poppies, sown late, was just coming into bloom. This was a good lesson in staggered planning.  Gathering seeds is one of gardening’s greatest pleasures, especially with poppies. I spread my seed upon newspapers on an old screen in the rafters of my greenhouse so that they will dry. I then collect the seeds in paper bags and look forward to repeating the planting process --and sharing my seeds!