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Epilogue: Stories and Memories
- University of South Carolina Press
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Epilogue Stories and Memories MY MOTHER, EMILY WHALEY (1911–1998), liked to say that we have a gardening gene in our family. My spin on our gardening proclivity is that, from generation to generation , the women in our family have loved the land and sought beauty and inspiration by designing and cultivating gardens. Our men tilled the land; we turned the land into gardens. Our families’ earliest remembered gardening tradition started six generations ago. On the banks of the Delaware River, around 1800, Mary Core Griffith created a garden that was pungent with the sweet aroma and perfume of hundreds of oldfashioned roses. On a warm spring day the glorious huge fruitlike blooms fashioned a rainbow of pinks, mauves, crimsons, blood red, velvety rose, tangerine, and yellow. The garden was alive with the song of birds—wrens, thrushes, red birds, and mocking birds. All around were the humming and buzzing of bees. Mary Core Griffith named her plantation Charlie’s Hope, and all her money was spent on this place, where she planted acres of roses in rows, like corn, for her bees. It is said she spent twenty-five thousand dollars on her apiary alone. Mary Core Griffith’s garden was the summer playground of her Philadelphiabred granddaughter, Emily Wharton (1823–1875), my great-great grandmother. In this idyllic landscape, free from the city cares of Philadelphia in the 1830s, Emily learned to love the carefully crafted spaces of her grandmother’s garden. Her love and knowledge of roses grew with each year. Indeed, when she married Charles Sinkler (1818–1894) of South Carolina in September of 1842, legend has it that Emily wore a wreath of her favorite roses, Souvenir de Malmaison, twined through her thick curly dark hair. Emily and Charles moved into the Sinkler family’s ancestral home, Belvidere, in 1848; it was located on the banks of the Santee River in lower South Carolina. Charles gave Emily a gardener and a carpenter, and she set about restoring a garden that still had its shape, or footprint, but had not been planted for almost four decades. Emily wrote home, “It is now nearly 40 years since it was tended but it contains many shrubs yet. I have arranged a small garden on each side of the front steps which is enclosed with an iron fence and is to contain the choicest specimens .” Emily tells of “foraging all through the country for roots and cuttings.” And she talks of her roses: “The Glory of France, Harrisonian de Brunnius, Cloth of Gold, and Souvenir de Malmaison. This last is the most splendid rose you ever saw, as large as a coffee cup and so firm and rich.” 180 Epilogue Emily’s beautiful iris walk with its rose hedges was truly glorious in the spring. Her annual beds of mignonette and heart’s ease were bright with the colors of blue and pink, while the aroma of sweet tea olive suffused the air. The Belvidere garden was designed with a long central avenue. The avenue was covered by an arbor of Lady Bankshire and Cherokee roses, intertwined with panicles of wisteria. On one side were flower beds and paths lined with lilacs and crab apple trees. On the other side was a rich kitchen garden full of asparagus, spring peas, mushrooms, and spinach. The Belvidere garden was inherited by Emily’s daughter-in-law, Anne Wickham Porcher (1860–1919), who married my great-grandfather Charles St. George Sinkler (1853–1934). Anne’s gift to the Belvidere garden was the wonderful rose and wisteria-covered arbors, the secret nooks, and secluded hideaways. Anne’s partner in gardening was Daddy Lewis. When Anne died at the young age of fifty-four, Daddy Lewis grieved terribly, until one afternoon she appeared to him in a vision, saying, “Daddy Lewis, while you grieve so, my soul can find no rest. You must cease.” And Daddy Lewis did. Caroline “Carrie” Sydney Sinkler (1860–1949) went north after the Civil War to live at her place, the Highlands, in Ambler, Pennsylvania, outside of Philadelphia . There Carrie created a garden with broad lawns, sweeping vistas, wonderful arbors, and carefully designed beds of peonies, perennial phlox, and roses. Her Belvidere Plantation House, the home of the Charles Sinkler family, near Eutawville, South Carolina [3.88.16.192] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 11:51 GMT) Stories and Memories 181 garden was in many ways an echo of her mother Emily’s Belvidere garden. The...