Author: Will Balk, Jr.

Fall is well underway and winter approaches with ferocious speed -€“ if nothing else, this means that my gushing celebration of Camellia season is due. I have my little dalliances, my mad schoolboy crushes, even the occasional extended affair (I do still love you, Crinum and Hydrangea!) -€“ but nothing comes close to my everlasting devotion to this magnificent mainstay of the southern garden.

In the weeks since I last wrote an article for this wonderful publication, we have witnessed our streets, yards and homes flooded with water; trees and power lines blown to the ground in another hurricane; complete devastation to huge islands in the Caribbean; vast destruction to property and the environment and great loss of human life in California fires.

For a couple of weeks now, even though we’€™ve had the usual scalding days that are inevitable in August, there have been delightful periods with lovely clear skies and moderate temperatures. Your neighbors and people at the grocery store smile broadly on those perfect days, and usually someone mentions the arrival of fall.

Every now and then, I will brave this stifling heat and wander out past the trash heaps/discard piles of organic refuse cast out from the garden. Trimmed branches, raked leaves and pulled weeds, discarded contents from pots whose former occupants have passed into the afterlife stage of horticultural existence; dug bulbs and rhizomes -€“ along with their tops -€“ which have succumbed to disease or rot; the depleted garden soil from repotted plants.

A couple of years ago in these pages, I wrote of ghosts -€“ both spectral and historical -€“ we have come across in our old farmstead in what was once the Carolina backcountry in the upper coastal plain near Augusta and Orangeburg. The old homeplace has been sitting there for some two hundred years; it is hardly surprising that a couple of centuries of hard-working folks should leave behind evidence of themselves and their lives, and we are often pleased to discover some artifact of the farm’€™s past buried in the soil or even to be visited by the occasional inexplicable apparition.

I really didn’t intend to be so right; that last gardening column I wrote for this space at the end of February, composed after weeks of warmer than usual weather and with predictions of more warm weather to come, that last column warned us all to beware assuming that winter was over.

Maybe it started with the damn pear tree in the front yard. One morning the first week of February I looked out and there it was – 35 feet tall and covered with fragrant white blooms. Sure, it was gorgeous; but that full bloom is ridiculous. We always have a hard freeze in February or early March, and this stupid tree thinks it’s making a thousand pears for September picking.

It was a thoughtful and interesting invitation I had received from my friend: would I assist in guiding visitors around her garden in downtown Savannah? The annual garden tour had asked my friend, who often writes about plants and gardening, among many other subjects, for her regular columns in the Savannah Morning News. 

There’s something predictable about the burst of bloom which appears as the too intense heat and sun of midsummer start to wane. There’s so much yellow, as if the high solstice of June left shards of itself to reappear as rayed flowers to carry on its brilliant intensity into the fall.

Ahhh, the perfect garden shed – the stuff of dreams. Often,we gardeners are relegated to propping the digging fork andthe shovel in a corner of the garage, with the clippers andshears in a drawer in the kitchen, extra pots and plantersstacked against a wall somewhere, and bags of fertilizer,potting soil, plus odds and ends in whatever unused shelf orbox we can find.