“The garden looks really swell, don’t you think?” she said, surveying the result of the afternoon’s hard work.
“Well, it ought to,” Verna retorted crisply, stripping off her green cotton gardening gloves. Her brown hair was short and combed straight back from her face in a characteristically no-fluff style. “We’ve poured a lot of time and sweat into this place over the past few months. How many Dahlias were out here this afternoon, slaving in the sunshine? I counted ten. That’s a good turnout.”
Lizzy stretched down and touched her toes, working out the kink in her back that came from kneeling in front of the phlox bed for two hours, pulling weeds. “Ten is right. Voleen Johnson said she had company, and Ophelia’s boy was playing in the baseball tournament at the fairgrounds. Oh, and Myra May had to work the switchboard because Violet is up in Memphis.” She straightened up and stretched her hands over her head. “Her younger sister just had a baby and Violet’s helping out. Myra May said the sister isn’t doing too well.”
Verna stuck her gloves in the pocket of her gardening skirt, wrinkling her nose distastefully. “Have you ever noticed that Voleen always manages to have out-of-town company on one of our work days? If you ask me, I think she invites them on purpose, so she doesn’t have to come over here and risk breaking one of her fingernails, all pretty and polished up.”
“You might be right,” Lizzy said, in a noncommittal tone. She didn’t like to criticize other people because you never knew when they might be criticizing you, and they might not be as nice about it as you were. But it was definitely true that Mrs. George E. Pickett Johnson rarely lent her perfectly manicured hands to the task when it came to the Dahlias’ garden. Or her own beautiful garden, for that matter, since she had a colored man who did all the work for her. The George E. Picketts were among Darling’s hereditary nobility and Mrs. Pickett’s garden was a showplace, with never a leaf or a twig out of place.
“We managed all right without her,” Lizzy added, looking around appreciatively. “The garden hasn’t looked so pretty for quite a while. Mrs. Blackstone couldn’t do much in her last years.”
The small white frame house the garden club had inherited from Mrs. Dahlia Blackstone sat fairly close to Camellia Street. Behind the white picket fence out front, the yard was mostly hydrangeas and azaleas and roses. But behind the house, a large garden swept down toward a tall magnolia tree, a clump of woods, and a small, clear spring smothered in ferns, bog iris, and pitcher plants. This garden had once been so beautiful that it had been written up in newspapers all over the South, and as far away as New Orleans. But as Mrs. Blackstone grew older and less able to care for it, the plants had become disheveled and shaggy, in the ragamuffin way of gardens when there’s nobody to pull weeds or deadhead or prune the roses or dig and separate the perennials or even mow the grass regularly.
Then Mrs. Blackstone had died and left her house and the garden to the garden club she had founded, whose grateful members quickly renamed themselves the Dahlias in her honor. Then they (well, most of them, anyway) pulled on their garden gloves and picked up their rakes and hoes and trowels and clippers and set about restoring the garden to its former glory. They had yanked the smothering weeds-the dog fennel, henbit, ground ivy, and (the biggest garden bully of all!) the Johnson grass-out of the curving perennial borders, so that the phlox, larkspur, iris, asters, and Shasta daisies could take a deep breath. They had dug and divided and replanted Mrs. Blackstone’s much-loved lilies: Easter lilies, spider lilies, oxblood lilies, and her favorite orange ditch lilies. They had untangled the cardinal climber and crossvine and honeysuckle on the fence and repaired the trellises so the mandevilla and confederate jasmine could stretch up and out. They gently disciplined the hibiscus and the dozens of roses, including the climbers, the teas, the ramblers, the shrubs, and a charming yellow Lady Banks. Yet to be done: the cleanup of the woodland and spring at the foot of the garden, where Miss Rogers thought they ought to put the bog garden. And every time a Dahlia set foot on the place, she saw something else that needed to be done, such as painting the shed, or repairing another trellis, or planting a ground cover over a bare spot. Gardens, of course, are a labor of love, and love-and its labor-is never-ending.
“It is gorgeous, Lizzy,” Verna agreed. Even she (by nature a wary, critical person who always saw the flaws in a thing while everybody else was still admiring it) had to admit that the Dahlias were well on the way to restoring Mrs. Blackstone’s garden to its former glory. And the only money they had spent on the project was the fifty cents they gave Old Zeke to cut the grass and trim along the flower beds every other week.
Which had been a very good thing (as Verna, the club’s treasurer, knew very well), because when the Dahlias inherited the house, they were nearly broke. Mrs. Blackstone had left them enough to pay the property taxes for several years, relieving some of Verna’s worry. But there was barely enough in the club kitty to keep the lights on, let alone fix the leaks in the roof and replace the plumbing in the bathroom.
And then, glory be and hallelujah! When they dug the holes to plant their Darling Dahlias sign in front of their new clubhouse, the Dahlias had struck silver. That is, they had uncovered the chest of sterling flatware that Mrs. Blackstone’s mother (a Cartwright) had buried to keep it from falling into the greedy hands of pillaging Yankees as they stormed through Alabama near the end of the War Between the States. When the Dahlias began to look through the chest, they found, in addition to the sterling, a bracelet set with an old-fashioned square-cut emerald, a pair of pearl teardrop earrings, a diamond ring, and a velvet bag containing ten gold coins: twenty-dollar double eagles, still as perfect as the day they were new-minted.
But the discovery of this buried treasure had resulted in a hot debate about what to do with it. Some wanted to keep everything. After all, the silver, the coins, and the jewelry were heirlooms, and all of it was very beautiful. But Earlynne Biddle had pointed out that these were Cartwright heirlooms and every last Cartwright was dead and gone from this earth and in no position to care about heirlooms. Aunt Hetty Little had pointed out that if the Dahlias kept the silver, the Dahlias would have to polish it, since they couldn’t afford a maid to do it for them. And Verna had added that the whole kit and caboodle must be worth a small fortune, and the club needed cash money a whole lot more than it needed heirlooms.
So the Dahlias voted (Mrs. Johnson being the lone dissenter) to sell. Verna and Lizzy took the silver, the gold, and the jewelry to Ettlinger’s Jewelry store in Mobile, where it brought enough to fix the leaky roof and repair the plumbing, with some left over. The Dahlias could now face the autumn rains without fear of flooding, they could flush without fear of overflowing, and their savings account in the Darling Savings and Trust was, if not fat, nicely plump. They called it the “Treasure Fund.”
“It’s hard to believe we’ve accomplished so much in just five months,” Lizzy replied, fanning herself with her hat as they walked around the house toward the front. She felt a justifiable sense of pride. After all, she was president of the club and she’d worked hard to organize the garden project.
“Hot months, too,” Verna said. The Dahlias had held the first meeting in their new clubhouse in May, and the summer months in Alabama are not exactly the most comfortable months for outdoor work. But the Dahlias were not delicate Southern belles-most of them, anyway. When it came to gardening, they didn’t wilt.
Lizzy pushed her brown hair out of her eyes, put her hat back on, and paused, looking at the large empty lot beside the house. The area had once been Mrs. Blackstone’s vegetable garden, with a border of strawberries, two peach trees, and a fig tree in the back. Old Zeke had mowed the weeds for them, but the place still looked straggly and forlorn.