The Garden

PL

Ginger Lily

BY DOLORES MULLER

Many flowering plants have a fragrance but none more than ginger lily. During the late summer and into fall, a garden with even one ginger lily surrounds you with a heady sweet fragrance.

Ginger lily or Hedychium coronarium isn’t a true lily, but a rhizomatous member of the ginger family. The name Hedychium means “sweet snow” and some folks know this white variety as butterfly ginger, because when its pure white blooms open fully, the spreading petals remind you of a butterfly’s wings.

It is listed to grow in zones 8 to 11, but they do very well in our area and right now they are starting to bloom, filling the air with their intoxicating scent. My Hedychium coronarium is in full bloom now and it is fabulous! Hedychium coronarium is not the only species of ginger lily, but it might be the most popular. I have two varieties in my garden, the white and a peachcolor one called Kin Ogi. Both are intensely fragrant.

Ginger lilies range in size from 2 feet to 8 or 9 feet depending on the variety, and lend a tropical look to the garden. Plants are evergreen in the tropical South but deciduous here in the Sandhills. You can use them in borders or grow them in containers as long as you provide a very large container. Nurseries offer dozens of species in colors ranging from white and cream, pink to red and a host of yellow, orange, and salmon shades. They need moist, well-drained soil that contains lots of organic matter, and they thrive in partial shade. But like all flowering plants, they do need some sun to encourage good flowering habits. They love our acid soil and require plenty of nutrition. Soil should be wellamended with compost and organic source nutrients but you can always supplement with fertilizers as needed.

I fertilize mine with a 10-10-10 fertilizer with micro nutrients in the spring and again in late July or early August. The roots are rhizomes that grow quite large and form an expanding clump. So, over time you will have lots of ginger lilies to share the perfect pass-along plant. In the fall let the stalks and leaves wither and brown, but wait to remove them in the spring. This practice will help protect the rhizomes from the winter frost and freeze.

The roots of ginger lily are edible but not particularly flavorful. Culinary ginger is a different genus and species, Zingiber officinale within the ginger family. Nurseries have a variety of ginger lilies available. Tony Avent of Plant Delights Nursery in Raleigh has 11 species and 56 hybrids, so there are many to choose from. It is native to India and tropical Asia and the flowers are considered to be a symbol of health and good fortune, something we all need in life and in our garden.PL

Paul Green: A Life in Brightness

Story by Ray Owen Images courtesy of Moore County Historical Association

In 1929, The Pilot conducted a survey to determine the 10 most interesting North Carolinians. Paul Green was near the top of the list. A playwright and novelist, he was a leader in our state’s literary, political and educational life. His best friend was novelist James Boyd, and he was a frequent guest at Boyd’s estate. In addition to being a writer, Boyd was an aristocrat of vast wealth, a coal and railroad heir. Boyd’s home, called Weymouth Woods, was a gathering place for the literati in the 1920s and 30s, hosting nationally prominent authors such as Sherwood Anderson, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Galsworthy and Thomas Wolfe.

Green’s background couldn’t have been more different from Boyd’s. Born on St. Patrick’s Day, March 17, 1894, he was raised on a farm in Harnett County and grew up picking cotton, shucking corn and cutting wood alongside sharecroppers. From his youth, Green demonstrated great compassion for the poor and downtrodden in his rural Sandhills community. Naturally curious, Green read books as he followed a mule-drawn plow. In his youth he dreamed of going to college, and taught school and played semi-professional baseball to earn enough the money for admission.

Of his upbringing, Green later said: “The rural life in eastern North Carolina when I was a boy was very much like the life and times of, say, the Revolution or pre-Civil War. The roads were just sand beds and often in riding along in a wagon, you would have to dodge the limbs that hung over the road from the trees on either side. There was no paving. Poverty was just natural to me. There were a lot of old soldiers around and I would hear their stories, the shadow of that great foolish tragedy.”

At age 22, he entered in the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Recognized for his writing ability, Green taught English as a freshman. In 1917, World War I interrupted his college career. He volunteered and rose to the rank of Second Lieutenant. Green experienced the brutality of battle, surviving several months of heavy combat in the trenches—something he almost never talked about. After the war, he returned to Chapel Hill and began writing in earnest. He was the first white playwright to write about Black people, his earliest dramas featuring white actors in blackface performing parts written for people of color since they were banned from theaters. Green persevered and several of his subsequent plays featured all-Black casts, giving many of the actors their first starring roles. A number of his dramas were based on childhood experiences in Harnett County depicting rural conflict—hatred, passion, fear of ruin, greed.

In 1925, his one-act play The No ’Count Boy, produced by the New York Theatre Club, garnered national attention. This was followed by his first full-length Broadway play, In Abraham’s Bosom, which received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1927.

This play was remarkable for its sensitive portrayal of African Americans in the South, its hero being a mixedrace man who opens a school for children of color in opposition to his white half-brother, with the mix-race man ultimately killed. More than a story of racism, the play showed how we help to defeat ourselves.

With his star rising, Green went to Hollywood in the 1930s to write film scripts for the likes of Clark Gable, Greer Garson, Will Rogers and many others. He penned the screenplay for the 1932 film The Cabin in the Cotton, writing actress Bette Davis’s favorite line: “I’d like to kiss you, but I just washed my hair.” Although well paid for his work, he became disenchanted with Hollywood and returned to North Carolina, still writing an occasional movie script, such as Black Like Me in 1963.

At the height of the Great Depression, Green purchased a log cabin and moved onto his property where he would write, saying the old logs were “full of age and meaning.” In this period, his plays took on a stronger note of social protest. Among his 1936 works are Hymn to the Rising Sun, about a chain gang, and the Broadway play Johnny Johnson, an episodic antiwar play with music by Kurt Weill. Experimenting with genre, he wrote the first act of Johnny Johnson as a comedy, the second act as a tragedy, and the third act as a satire.

The Lost Colony, an outdoor drama by Green, was produced in 1937. It tells the story of Sir Walter Raleigh’s dream of establishing a permanent European settlement in the New World during the late 16th century. Green called this large-scale musical spectacle a “symphonic drama,” the work featuring dance and poetry and a cast of more than 150 performers. The play is still performed every summer at the Fort Raleigh National Historic Site near Manteo, North Carolina, and is now the nation’s second-longest-running historical outdoor drama.

Green’s literary output included dramas of various types, six Broadway plays, essays, books of folklore, several novels, and a number of movie scripts. Always active in cultural affairs, he was a founder of the North Carolina Symphony and he helped establish Weymouth as a literary center. In addition to his

Far left, actors performing Green’s play The Lost Colony. Above, historical marker in Chapel Hill.

early Pulitzer Prize, his awards included two Guggenheim Fellowships, the National Theatre Conference Award, and nine honorary degrees.

Green’s historical significance comes not only from his cultural and creative work, but also from his influence on social values at a time when he was often a lone voice for equality of the races, believing as he did in the perfectibility of every person— even condemned felons. He traveled the world on behalf of UNESCO lecturing on human rights, and he fought relentlessly against the death penalty in North Carolina, standing at vigils and visiting condemned prisoners, some of them 14- or 15-year-old boys awaiting execution for burglary.

In a 1960 interview, Green said: “... I guess I was just lucky. I grew up without any of this ignorant prejudice. When I was a boy, I had a friend, a Negro boy about my age, or maybe a little older. I loved that boy like a brother, and I guess he is largely responsible for my present opinions. He taught me how to pick cotton so fast that I once won a contest for it; he taught me to swim, to run, to chew tobacco, to smoke, and to play all the tricks boys play in their youth.”

Paul Green said that art, like life, should end in brightness. When he left this life on May 4, 1981, it’s said that he entered a guestroom in his Chapel Hill home and rested on the bed, “turned his face to the wall, and slept his way into a new world.” He was posthumously inducted into the Theatre Hall of Fame in New York in 1993 and the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame in 1996. PL