Relearning
How to Garden
Trumpet Vine
T
by Emily Ellison, Executive Director, St. Simons Land Trust
his is a confessional. An apologia
the shelves of gardening books, the tools and
from a repentant and (mostly)
equipment, the muddied boots and the soil
reformed gardener.
under my fingernails to prove that I spent lots of time outdoors digging around. But I lived in
Nearly every spring and summer when in
Georgia, after all, not on a grand estate in Great
Atlanta and the north Georgia mountains, I
Britain where long vistas and groves, walled
spent more money than I would like to admit
and boxed gardens, and topiaries were the
purchasing 15 and 30-gallon containers of
norm. Mine wasn’t even a cottage garden with
shrubs, trees, and perennial flowering plants.
rosemary and thyme planted among a riot of
There were the countless flats of annuals, the
foxglove, iris, and blooming and trailing vines.
pre-emergent herbicides and fertilizers we put
It was a yard with way too much grass, too
on the lawn, the Round-Up that we sprayed
orderly and kempt and manicured.
on the terrace and walks to rid ourselves of
Beautyberry
what were considered unsightly weeds. The
The baptism by herbicide came first. It was a
milkweed and volunteer plants that popped
sad, embarrassing recognition to learn what
up near the creek were mowed down or weed
those chemicals we had been spraying on
wacked, and a special tool was used to plunk
the grass every year were doing not only to
out clumps of yellow-blooming dandelion. Then
the pollinators in our yard but to the greater
it all happened again the next year, and the next:
environment. Although I was more than thirty
the buying and planting and eradicating.
years late reading Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, I did finally devour it and felt like I had
During those decades when I wasn’t digging
sinned against nature.
in the earth, I was reading books on landscape
Red Maple
38
ELEGANT ISLAND LIVING
design by Gertrude Jekyll, Penelope
Michael Pollan’s writings made me realize
Hobhouse, and Capability Brown. I learned
that we easily could have let some of the fallen
what a ha-ha was and a trill. I envisioned
pine trees at the back of the property stay
outdoor “rooms” with different themes and
leaning and thus provided habitat for birds and
character, always making sure that there
mammals. He and other authors taught me that
was an esthetic combination of textures and
all those years when I was studiously reading
heights in the perennial borders and that the
instructions for how and when to plant and
different herbs had the appropriate amount
figuring out what species were best for our
of sun, the right pH, and sufficient moisture.
planting zone, I should have spent time learning
As my parents had always done, I composted
what was native to our region. If I had, I would
religiously, making the “black gold” described
have learned that not all plants that thrive in a
in Crockett’s Victory Garden.
region were actually meant for that region.
But I was, as the author Sara Stein wrote in
Not long after moving to St. Simons Island
Noah’s Garden: Restoring the Ecology of Our
permanently in 2015, I heard Susan Shipman,
Own Back Yards, an “illiterate gardener.” I had
the chair of the Land Trust’s board of directors
