Caleb Melchior
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​THE CURIOUS GARDENER: WEB JOURNAL

Landscape Heritage, Southern Heritage

4/20/2018

6 Comments

 
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I spent most of last weekend trundling through the backroads of three states in a white pickup truck. Usual every-hour stops to hop out and look at wildflowers. Baptisia nutalliana and Rudbeckia maxima in Texas. Phlox drummondii and Rhododendron austrinum in Louisiana. Chionanthus and Narcissus in Arkansas. One of of those stops, no less whistle-stop than the others, I was lucky enough to get to hear Thomas Rainer speak to the Horticulture club at Stephen F Austin University in Nacogdoches. Most of the lecture focused on the plant community design techniques that Thomas (along with Claudia West) wrote about in Planting in a Post-Wild World. But one idea, buried at the center of the lecture, has been running through my mind all week.
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Thomas showed a slide of images of statues of confederate soldiers. Cast iron figures of men who didn’t want to admit they could have been wrong, erected eighty years after their deaths to intimidate new generations.
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He showed images of several iconic southern landscapes. A misty panorama of the Blue Ridge Mountains. A leafy forest understory near Birmingham. Then he flipped over to photos of cloverleaf highways and strip mall complexes. You see these in every southern city.  
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Hysterical editorials and radio talk show hosts followed the confederate statue removals. Even I, the most anti-combative person on the continent, almost got in a complete shouting row with a mothballed and mustachioed Uber driver who brought up the statues. But nobody’s even moderately worked up about the destruction of irreplaceable, irreparable ecosystems.
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As I’ve often said before, I grew up in a small town on the Mississippi River in southeast Missouri. It’s a weird spot. At various points, the area now considered the Mississippi River Hills was inhabited by the Illini Confederation, who were then displaced by Spanish explorers, French settlers, and German Lutherans. Anybody who grew up in the real Midwest considers it part of the South. Those who grew up in the Deep South consider it part of the North. It’s a messy hybrid region, with no clear and consistent cultural narrative.
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Over the time I lived there - and as I hear stories of the town since, I’ve heard the cultural narrative change. When I was little, the predominant stories were of World War II vets, people who grew up without electricity, speaking German at home, people who had benefited greatly from post WWII prosperity. Today, after twenty years of constant cable network vitriol (thanks, Fox News and NRA propaganda), the stories have changed.
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Hillbilly Elegy was mostly nonsense.  But one thing that it got right was that rural populations, especially low-income white populations, have bought into a narrative that offers them little hope for a better life. These communities need a new story. I need a new story.
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But how would we go about bringing southern landscapes to the center of the of the conversation about heritage?
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In every place, landscape is deeply entangled with the human dramas that have occured within its all-enveloping embrace. The dramas that have played out across the United States make this particularly tricky. Any narrative about southern history founded in landscape must start from a position of acknowledging the privilege of the people who live there now.
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Most of the people who live in these areas now have no ancestral right, no natural heritage, tying them to the place they live now. Even in New Orleans and St. Augustine, those oldest of European settlements in North America, Europeans have only a 400-year history. First Nations people were weakened by disease, killed, and forcibly removed from their lands. Throughout much of the south, there’s the additional complication of enslavement and sharecropping. So any talk of heritage must acknowledge the messy, often uncomfortable, history of these places.
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I don’t have a clear idea of what a narrative that adequately represents landscape as a component of southern heritage might look like. Reading, for me, is always the start. For now, I’d start with the the written historical record. Not just the big celebrated southern gardeners. Look to Eudora Welty, who learned to garden from her mother. Read Elizabeth Lawrence. Eudora signed her up for the Market Bulletins, where people traded slips of one heritage plant for another. Read Zora Neale Hurston’s writing about landscape and agriculture in the Caribbean and the south. Read Marjorie Kinnans Rawling on rural life in early 20th century Florida. Maybe a first is just that, to build a primer on the southern landscape.
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Beyond reading, I don’t know. I’ll let you know as soon as I come up with a next step...
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6 Comments
James Golden link
4/21/2018 06:45:36 am

An intriguing (and disturbing) meditation, Caleb. You touch on some issues that grab me deep inside. Being from the south myself, and having established a vast cultural distance, I see the south as a place of delusion and horror. But perhaps no more than the rest of our American culture. I find some hope in your suggestion we might start with some of the southern writers like Eudora Welty. We do make up our culture and history, and we aren't doing very well at the present time. But maybe there's a way to change that.

Reply
Caleb Melchior link
4/21/2018 11:07:49 am

Thanks, James. The idea "southern heritage as natural heritage" sounds really nice on the surface. But, in my understanding, the idea of "heritage" includes the idea of some sort of ownership of the narrative. There's so much more to ponder through here...

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Pam/Digging link
4/22/2018 08:56:55 am

I'm a lifelong Southerner who always felt like an outsider because I was not born here. My family moved to GA and then SC when I was 2, and although I grew up in the Deep South I was not seen as a native. In fact schoolmates teasingly called me a Yankee. (I was born in OK, which like MO is not acknowledged as part of the South by those in the Deep South.) So I read your blog post with interest. I believe a reverence for the natural world is a key value for Southerners, which likely comes from the region's rural roots. And therefore the preservation of natural spaces and the greening of our "built world" should be a value that crosses political lines -- but perhaps only in less war-like times than ours. Anyway, I enjoyed your musings. Wish I could have heard Thomas's talk too.

Reply
Caleb Melchior
4/24/2018 05:15:04 pm

Thanks, Pam - I find it really intriguing that the southern states were some of the first to enact conservation legislation setting aside public land for nature reserves. I agree that it's more of a core value than many people from outside the region would expect. I'm sure you'll have a chance to hear Thomas or Claudia soon. They're doing such interesting and important work - it's great that they're getting such a wide audience.

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Patterson Webster link
4/24/2018 09:37:13 am

Fascinating to read your thoughts, Caleb, and to read the comments from James and Pam. Like them, I grew up in the south but was born just north of the Mason-Dixon line, in Baltimore. That gave my older sister license to label me a Yankee which enraged me as a child and which gives me some satisfaction now.

Both she and I left the south when we were in our 20s. I still struggle to understand how the south influenced me and my relationship with the past.

Your post sparked a new set of reflections. I'm working on a big landscape project at my garden Glen Villa. Essentially it is a trail that moves through the woods and fields, with different kinds of interventions along the way. Some are art installations, others are horticultural. All are meant to relate in one way or another to the connections between art and architecture, time and movement. Your post made me realize that I haven't dealt with a significant cultural issue distinct to my part of Quebec, the relationship between French and English settlements and how they left different marks on the land. I'll be scratching my head for some time now, thanks to your post.

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Caleb D Melchior
4/24/2018 05:20:47 pm

Thanks, Patterson, for your thoughts. I always appreciate your posts on how things are developing at Glen Villa! The dimension of time - respecting the other people and beings who have inhabited a site - is so interesting to me. I hope your head-scratching leads to new revelations about your garden.

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    Caleb
    Melchior

    Plant Geek | Observer
    Writer | Designer
    Landscape Poet

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