Mrs. Whaley and Her Charleston Garden - Softcover

Whaley, Emily

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1616208457 ISBN 13: 9781616208455

Publisher: Algonquin Books, 2017

Synopsis

In conversation with William Baldwin. Emily Whaley's garden on Church Street in Charleston, South Carolina, may be the most visited private garden in the country. And no wonder. It is the life's work of a vibrant, sociable, opinionated, determined, forceful woman who has spent the last eighty-five years cultivating whatever life offered her. Mrs. Whaley and Her Charleston Garden captures and preserves Emily Whaley's distinctive voice and braces us with a clear understanding of how one might cultivate a practical personal philosophy alongside one's garden.

About this title

About the Author:

Emily Whaley was born in 1911 in Pinopolis, South Carolina. The mother of three daughters and grandmother of seven, she divided her time between her houses (and their kitchens) in Charleston, South Carolina, and Flat Rock, North Carolina. She died in June 1998.

From Kirkus Reviews:

A sweet but slight bouquet: a gardening memoir told in a Southern drawl. Whaley, an 85-year-old South Carolina gentlewoman, sits down, as it were, in her Charleston garden to summon up memories of camellias past. Baldwin, a South Carolina architect and novelist (The Fennel Family Papers, 1996, etc.), observes that she ``moves with the imperial bearing of a grand Southern matron. But on the inside she's a knobby-kneed 14-year-old country girl.'' The matron's account of life and gardening can come across as regrettably mild. ``It's an awful lot of fun to live into your eighties,'' she declares. ``It helps to have some money, though.'' Likewise, she remarks, ``People are the greatest--the most fun that life offers.'' But Whaley also delivers some choice comments and vignettes: ``Dad said if everything Nan planted had taken, a rabbit couldn't have run across the yard.'' And she can be folksily tart: ``You have a muscle here between your ears. When you play tennis, when you do exercises, you use muscles. The muscle up top is the same. Unless it's used it is going to be flabby.'' Whaley devotes chapters to her rural childhood, her parents, and her lawyer husband; she also offers her thoughts on her dog, on self-esteem, and on her favorite recipes. Discussions of her Charleston garden, measuring 30 by 110 feet, takes up about a third of the book, and though her description of it is charming, one doesn't walk away with a convincing sense of place. Her gardening advice is pretty basic: ``DO water your plants in the morning so that the leaves are dry by nightfall. You'll have less trouble with fungal diseases.'' And too many of the non-gardening vignettes seem slender, unrevealing. It would have been better to drench those portions with details, which count for as much in life stories as they do in gardens. (illustrations, not seen) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Algonquin Books
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 1616208457
• ISBN 13: 9781616208455
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 248